10:10am Thursday 18th March 2010
Parishioners welcome the long-awaited transformation of the churchyard at St Mary’s and discover that berries provide birds with almost as many calories as chocolate.
THE Coxhoe Chronicle, a splendid little community newspaper, of which more shortly, has quite a bit about anti-social behaviour, acceptable behaviour agreements and the like. Perhaps it was ever thus.
In the 1860s, when St Mary’s parish church was built, a fund-raising leaflet noted: “The spiritual destitution of the township of Coxhoe has long been known and recognised as a reproach to the Christianity of our bishopric.”
At the church’s consecration, in 1868, the Bishop of Durham had also expressed the hope that there might be many more new churches – “so that we might retain a beneficial influence among the lower classes in these northern parts.”
Further it was observed that the North Eastern Railway had – “as usual” – failed to subscribe to either the church or adjoining cemetery, “although the cemetery is for the benefit of all denominations”.
So it remains. Last Thursday, the good folk of Coxhoe gathered in church and churchyard for a service to mark the cemetery’s rebirth as what’s being called a “living sanctuary.”
Not least with Easter approaching, it seemed both relevant and reverent to suppose it back from the dead.
Coxhoe’s a biggish village a few miles south-east of Durham. In 1831, says one of the information panels now placed around the cemetery, the population was 154. Ten years later it was 3,904. The Industrial Revolution had come around.
Though the industry has gone, the population remains much the same, sustained (as the Eating Owt column observed on Tuesday) by four cafes, at least five take-aways and by a renewed sense of community.
The churchyard, officially termed “neglected”, has been transformed by around £100,000 in grants, not least from the County Durham Environmental Trust and the National Lottery.
Now it’s planted with theories about ecosystems and biodiversity, but also with a war memorial area, a butterfly area and a wild berry corner where there’s a Q&A, too.
Did you know – probably not – that ivy berries provide birds with almost as many calories as a chocolate bar?
Or that juniper seeds will grow better after passing through a bird’s gut?
There are plants and shrubs of many types – “a living churchyard that respects Christian burial, enhances nature and provides a refuge for wildlife.”
Last October they’d planted bulbs, too, confident that they’d bloom in time for the dedication. The ground remains barely broken; part of the service to be outdoors only if weather permits.
Graciously and gloriously, weather permits. Though we’re assured that the sun always shines upon Coxhoe, spring may be here at last.
THE transformation was first mooted in 2004 – “sometimes a tortuous process,” says Carole Lloyd, the priest-in-charge. Among those principally responsible for driving it has been John Hepplewhite, a retired headmaster, who with his wife Barbara also produces the Coxhoe Chronicle.
Barbara’s a Coxhoe lass, John’s been there 40 years. “I’m probably no longer a Johnny-come-lately,” he says.
The Chronicle’s new issue reproduces a Durham Advertiser report from 1923 of a then-as-now meeting to discuss healthy eating – “bread and butter, or jam, is a poor diet for children” – which was also told that many deaths among young mothers could be avoided.
“Some consoled themselves that it was God’s will, but it was nothing of the sort. God did not want them to die, it was due to their own neglect.
“An expectant mother should be careful what she ate. They could not expect very good babies on fish and chips and cakes and jam. An expectant mother wanted good plain food, with porridge as the first and last meal each day.”
John Hepplewhite looks to the present generation. “I don’t like to talk about anti-social behaviour. There are some great youngsters here, our ambassadors, the future of the village.
Since we began work on the churchyard, nothing’s been vandalised at all.”
THE service is led by the Rt Reverend Mark Bryant, the Bishop of Jarrow, and shared with children from Coxhoe primary school, marking its centenary.
Since there’s no known song about a graveyard – a certain invitation to be proved haplessly wrong – the organist plays English Country Garden instead.
The pupils are brilliant, though one’s a bit premature reading her piece. “It’s excitement,” says one of the attendant police community support officers. “Schools don’t teach excitement- keeping-in like they used to do.”
The polliss, it should be added, aren’t there because they’re expecting anti-social behaviour, or for reasons of crowd control, but because it’s where community officers should be.
Bishop Mark, reckoned a raconteur, launches into a story about a frog that drank all the water in the world. There’s a platypus in it, too, and an ecological message.
“The lovely thing about all this is that it gives a real chance to look at the natural world around us,” he says. “It helps ensure that we don’t take things for granted.”
The bairns also sing that song about wishing they were a little wriggly worm, in which “worm” rhymes with “squirm”. Carole’s leaping about, but they’ve got to the kangaroo bit by then. There appears to be no mention of frogs.
There are prayers at the grave of Canon David Fleming, aged 91 when he died in 1920 after 53 years as Coxhoe’s vicar but just four as a canon of Durham Cathedral. Wider horizons, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Afterwards the bairns have crisps and pop, the adults enjoy tea and a five-thousand feed. John Wearmouth of the Environmental Trust talks of the heritage which they’ve helped to capture. “In a way, we really have brought the cemetery back to life.”
IN the purple panoply of long journalistic juxtaposition, no evening may have offered greater contrasts than last Friday.
It started in the throne room of Auckland Castle, a two-hour concert of Brahms as in lullaby and in German.
It ended at the Ash Tree in Spennymoor, music by Hazard (as in occupational).
There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with the Ash Tree. It’s just not the throne room at Auckland Castle.
Nor would we wish to be discordant about Hazard, save for our proximity to the biggest speaker since Goliath of Gath – who, it will be recalled, measured six cubits and a span – cried unto the armies of Israel.
They’re just not the Durham Singers.
The Singers are a choir of about 40 voices whose musical director is Julian Wright, eldest son of the Bishop of Durham. They sang Brahms’ Requiem and his Abendständchen and one or two other things.
Hazard is a group of three, unless more were hiding behind the amplifiers.
They sang everything from Oliver’s Army to Dirty Old Town, which on no account should be supposed a reference to Spennymoor.
The pub’s at the end of the Greenways estate, the occasion its re-opening under the ownership of Vince Carmedy and management of Chris Hill.
Vince, an offshore electrician, looked into the pub one night, found that he and his were the only customers and decided that things could be wired otherwise.
“My solicitor told me I was crackers and my accountant told me I was crackers, but I’m half good at figures and it added up,” he insisted.
Rather differently, both events were wholly enjoyable – and, of course, help turn these inexorable mills. Brahms and grist.
DR Tom Wright, the bishop, was leading a “Signs of hope”
weekend in Sedgefield deanery and thus missed most of the Brahms, though he crept in in time to be wowed by Claire Weston’s solo.
Two days later we caught up with him again, Sunday lunch at the street corner Surtees Arms in Ferryhill Station.
The Surtees has been licensed to sell since 1872. The Yard of Ale brewery, out the back since 2008, has even produced a beer called Bishop’s Yard, though it’s principally for the Auckland Food festival, to be held at the castle.
The brewery burgeons. “We’re having deliberately to keep a lid on things,” said Alan Hogg, the Surtees’ landlord.
The bishop enjoyed his pint, slipped from memory into an admirable rendition of Scott Dobson’s Geordie dialect account of the great exodus, an almost forgotten party piece.
Thereafter we all traipsed off to Dean and Chapter rec, or leisure park as it may now be called, where Ferryhill Town Council has £1m plans for a football academy and adventurous play areas.
Dr Wright cut the first sod, the shiny new spade borrowed from Aycliffe council. “It saved us £20,” said Jamie Corrigan, the executive officer, prudently. Like the bishop, he’s a rugby man at heart.
BEFORE Tuesday evening, invited to add a bar to Masham’s Lenten penitentiary, the last time I’d been in the brewing town’s sports club was June 1997, Durham v Bradford in the Church Times Cricket Cup.
The heavens favoured Durham diocese, especially after one particularly unfortunate Bradford dismissal.
“It was what theologians call a seminal moment,” the Backtrack column observed, “the instant when you know there’s not only a God after all but that he probably took his PhD at St Cuthbert’s.”
Tuesday was what the good folk of Masham call a “Food For Thought”
night, supper beforehand in order to make the speaker more digestible.
David Cleeves, the vicar, had asked for 45 minutes on how the media view the Church, or possibly viceversa.
There was a good turnout, such the hair-shirted occasion. Pictures on the club walls revealed that Masham’s first team had last season won the Buchanan Cup and the seconds division six of the Nidderdale League.
Division six? Grass roots cricket may nowhere be so verdant.
Since the churches are to communication what King Herod was to child care, the theme was easy. The Lenten temptation was to begin with the text about lights and bushels, resisted in favour of the account of the man sick of the palsy.
Mark 2:4. “They could not come nigh unto Jesus for the press.”
...and finally, last week’s note on fabled weather forecaster Bill Foggitt – who died, aged 91, in 2004 – sent John Calvert in Hutton Rudby dipping back into Bill’s biography.
Bill was a Thirsk lad, of course, the book written by former Fleet Street journalist Mike Cresswell who contentedly became the Darlington and Stockton Times man in the market town.
Most assumed the sage to be a bachelor. It wasn’t so. Though separated from his wife for 50 years – a period in which he claimed to have seen her but once – they never divorced.
Bill was persuaded, however, to attend her funeral in nearby Kirby Knowle, where her father had been vicar. “I didn’t really know what I was doing there,” he told his biographer.
“I had no feelings. I grieved more for my little dog Polly, who died at the same time.”
The book – An Unworldly Weather Man, the Highs and Lows of Bill Foggitt – is still available from the White Rose Bookshop in Thirsk.
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