The Sermon on the Pylon, delivered on BBC Radio 4’s “Thought for Today” slot this morning by a female Anglican vicar who rejoices in the National Grid’s plans to build a new power transmission network, made me suspect that the Church of England is seeking commercial sponsorship.
I’d much rather have heard the Archbishop of Canterbury on the subject of Sobornost, or spiritual connectivity.
The opening of Paul Devereux’s “The New Ley Hunter”, now out of print but the first chapter from which the following quote is taken is available on Gothic Image’s website, has a special resonance for me:
“Most inhabitants of modern society cannot help but view the world in terms of urban perspectives, for that is the nature of the present culture. Great cities sprawl into the countryside, forming conurbations that breed their own consciousness: automobiles hurtle along motorways that are merely urban arms stretching across the landscape between towns; passengers sleep, read or eat as the countryside flashes past their train windows at 100 mph – a countryside which is viewed culturally as an inner-city zone where farming for urban needs is carried out under the dictate of an international, urban economy.
Even those who live and work in the countryside have their rural sensibility subtly eroded by radio, television and other media which usually engender urban goals and concerns. There are no mental city limits.
Beneath this complex of urban consciousness the landscape still broods, the elemental cycles of the planet still function. The difficulty encountered by people in becoming aware of this primordial backdrop, against which the actions of the modern world take place, characterizes the cultural isolationism of our times. It is an isolationism which leads inevitably to ecological insensitivity, and a complementary decay in understanding the subtle needs and realities relating to the mind and spirit…..”
There are few places which better summon up Paul Devereux’s “brooding landscape” and “primordial backdrop” than Bredon Hill, an outlier of the Cotswolds on the border between Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, shown above from the Vale of Evesham. Desirous of a re-connection with something of those “elemental cycles of the planet”, on the 6th August I took a solitary walk up the hill, encountering no other persons until my arrival at the summit where a group of ramblers had gathered.
Later that day, as it happened, rioting broke out in an “inner-city zone” of North London, near my Gloucester Road home of twenty-six years earlier, itself a stone’s throw from the modernist Broadwater Farm housing estate where a riot had also occurred in the late Summer of 1985. This came after a spate of rioting across England’s inner cities in the early 1980s, and extreme unrest of a similar, but also different, kind followed the outbreak of street violence, arson, and looting in Tottenham earlier this month.
“There are no mental city limits” – much less so now than when “The New Ley Hunter” was published in 1979 – and few in rural as well as urban England will not have registered the violent social unrest which spread like heath fires through London and other cities, including Gloucester, last week. The government and politicians of all parties should reflect deeply on the causes, and also bear in mind that whilst modernity may have eroded our consciousness of the countryside this may still exert a force upon those wishing to conserve it from the ever-growing threat of sprawling development.
The Witch of Worcester 