Council member David Meara welcomes a recent book on the spiritual significance of familiar sites in Wiltshire.
ENGLISH GROUNDS: A PASTORAL JOURNAL, ANDREW RUMSEY
“…draw close to something rooted” is a line from one of the author’s poems that opens this book. Andrew Rumsey is a singer-songwriter, poet, and lover of landscape, who is also the present Bishop of Ramsbury in the Diocese of Salisbury. He wrote this collection of pastoral reflections during the Covid pandemic, when he was experiencing a time of personal transition, moving from London to Wiltshire. He began to explore his surroundings, the countryside and places within his cure of souls, and to set down his thoughts about places, faith, and the English pastoral scene. The result is a book that encompasses history, nature, church architecture, culture and identity, and in spite of this diversity hangs together as a coherent narrative.
The title “English Grounds” is the name of a small section of road in Southwark between London Bridge Station and the River Thames, in the area where he grew up and began his own Anglican ministry. As he explains in the introduction it stands for his sense of identity, his experiences of growing up in a vicarage, his happy holidays in Devon, and his enduring fascination with British topography. Rumsey explains that the book grew from “a conviction that the Church I served had a foundational stake in this nation’s story, for better and worse, ….and a desire that we should attend far more than formerly to what “of England “might now mean.”
Amongst the sixty-one reflections, each no more than a couple of pages long, he explores places as diverse as the River Kennet, Overton Hill, an alabaster tomb in St Nicholas Bromham, Avebury with its stone circle, the abandoned village of Imber within Ministry of Defence territory on Salisbury Plain, the model village at Godshill on the Isle of Wight, the oldest non-conformist chapel in Britain at Horningsham, Liddington Hill, and the lost village of Snap. Running through all the entries is a sense that the ancient parish unit can still have meaning and resonance, speaking to our need for rootedness and belonging, and a reaffirmation of the ongoing significance of our church buildings and a celebration of those who care for them.
The text is enlivened with atmospheric photographs in black and white, and the pieces are arranged chronologically, beginning and ending with Epiphanytide. These gentle reflections, replete with Rumsey’s gently offered opinions and undergirded with his Christian faith, leave the reader soothed, uplifted, and provoked. Those who know and love Wiltshire, and the wider area covered by the Diocese of Salisbury, will find much to enchant them. But these short reflections speak to us all, and challenge us to think afresh about our sense of English identity and the Church’s role as a renewer and enabler of communal memory and faith.
Published by SCM Press, December 2021 ISBN: 9780334061144, £19.99