Orton in old English means ridge top settlement, and a glance at the OS map’s contour lines confirm that Northamptonshire’s Orton does indeed straddle a ridge top. Land falls away steeply to the North down to the Slade Brook, and much more shallowly to the South, towards an unnamed brook. All this geography was academic at the time I cycled along the wet and puddled lane to Orton from Foxhall. There were no views to enjoy due to the misty conditions and general gloom. The general atmosphere drew my consciousness in to things up close. The sound of tyres on wet tarmac and gravel, the squelching through mud, the splashing through the temporary fords, the bare may hedges, uniformly straight and level after hedge clipping, and the colourless sky, so low that it put a muffling lid on sound.

As I entered Orton on this cold midwinter’s day, my thoughts turned to the bone numbing cold of the recluse hamlets and farms a few generations ago, when winter sleet tore through the miry clay valleys and the remote ridge tops. How bleak and hazardous life was when crops from the fields of ridge and furrow, the common fields scraped out of the forest brambles and clay, had to be eked out through the iron months of frost.

Today under the thatch are fridge and freezer. Supermarket delivery vans scurry about the little wet lanes, whilst handymen in white vans, piled high with ladders, maintain ancient cottages that have never looked better, whilst villagers take holidays.

At a nearby school which began life as a grammar school for boys, endowed by the local lord of the manor, mothers turn up in four by fours to collect their kids, who turn out aglow, running and laughing.

We can look with thankfulness upon the less arduous life in the countryside.What was once a place to flee for a wage, slate roof and coal fire in the city, has become a haven of escape in which to retire. Online cottage dwellers scrape from the internet images from around the world whilst cosy warm in front of their blazing woodburners. What they see and hear gnaws at the illusion of escape at every moment. How long before the tsunami of globalisation hits? The isolation of the recluse hamlets has in all senses gone. You can run (or cycle), but you can’t hide.

© John Dunn.

You may also like to see my YouTube Channel, called Highways and Byways.

https://www.youtube.com/@drjohndunn2898