Kimbolton, Cambridgeshire

On Sunday afternoon we found ourselves driving through the village of Kimbolton in the very west of Cambridgeshire (in what was once Huntingdonshire before shire re-organization). It is a pleasant little place which we used to pass through regularly on our way to Northampton. Now the A14 exists we hardly ever go that way.

The road through is slightly odd. It comes from the west into the village and has to do a sharp right turn to avoid the churchyard straight ahead. Once past the churchyard it turns west again, opening out into a wide street which was once the marketplace. This is around 300 metres long with handsome houses and shops. At the western end is the gatehouse of Kimbolton Castle, once the seat of the Dukes of Manchester and now a public school. The road turns left at this point, continues 50m between houses and the castle wall, and then turns right to resume its journey eastwards, having traversed this kink which is Kimbolton High Street.

We did walk around the town but it was the church we stopped for mainly. The association with the Montagus (family name of the Dukes and Earls of Manchester) is shown in the numerous funeral hatchments on the walls and in various monuments. The most striking is the Tiffany window, installed in 1902, a memorial to the twin daughters of the 8th Duke who both died young. Louis Comfort Tiffany was a leading maker of stained glass in the USA, and a leading exponent of the Art Nouveau movement. His work is not much seen outside the USA and he did not like making windows with a religious theme, so this window is particularly unusual. The fact that the Dowager Duchess, Consuelo, who commissioned the work, was an American (of Cuban extraction) may have influenced Tiffany's decision to take the job on.

The Tiffany window is in a side chapel with a medieval screen (perhaps a cut down medieval chancel screen repositioned).







I am afraid my picture of it from the back is the best you will see as the original paintings in the panels on the nave side of the church are covered with plastic protective panes which reflect the light straight back into the camera.



Outside the churchyard is pleasantly empty of gravestones and on the south side makes a nice lawn for a few very lucky houses. They look across to the entrance to the Montagu family crypt with its elaborate doorway.




The main cemetery of the village is a hundred yards or so from the church across the stream (the River Kim) and is typically and splendidly mid-Victorian (1858). It boasts a grand walk up to a huge Cedar of Lebanon, gatehouse and perimeter wall.

Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress

I had no idea till a few weeks ago that Stravinsky or anyone else had written an opera based on William Hogarth's picture cycle which lives in the John Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. When I first came back to England in 1973 I worked for the Ministry of National Insurance in an office in High Holborn a couple of minutes away, and the Soane Museum was a favourite lunchtime haunt. The paintings of A Rake's Progress are housed on hinged panels on the wall of one of the museum's rooms so you can never see them all at once - as you open one panel to see the painting behind the painting on the front of it is hidden.

Well, we had a notification of a performance of Stravinsky's opera to take place for one night only at a grand estate just outside Cambridge. I am not that keen on the composer but the lure of seeing a Jacobean house and gardens that are not usually open to the public are what tempted me.

The rain on Saturday afternoon cleared enough for us to walk round the lovely gardens before the performance, though the picnickers had had to forgo sitting on the grass and eat at tables inside a Victorian barn which must be 100 yards long if it's an inch. That barn was made of wood; the one the opera took place in was a modern tin one.

The music of the opera is delightful, and the libretto may be too. It was written by W H Auden and his boyfriend at the time, one Chester Kallman. Unfortunately for us the acoustic in the barn was such that much of the time the singers' words were drowned out. I thought that this was perhaps that Stravinsky didn't know how to write for opera, but Rosalind pointed out that in a conventional operal house the orchestra would be in a pit and the sound therefor somewhat muffled, whereas here they were sitting next to the stage in a tin barn.

Anyway, it was good and I would happily see the opera again and any other production by Opera East. Unfortunately though I forgot the camera at the last moment so didn't get any pictures of the house, the barns, the Jacobean chapel or the gardens.

Another Anglo-Saxon Church - Barnack

Barnack is in the farthest north west corner of Cambridgeshire, just off the A1 north of Peterborough. Last Sunday the Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust had this month's visit to the church there and to two other nearby churches.

Barnack Rag, a kind of limestone, was extensively used locally for large and important buildings in the middle ages. Ely and Peterborough cathedrals are both largely built with it. In the village there is a little nature reserve called Hills and Holes which is all that is left of the quarries which provided the livelihood of the villagers for several hundred years. It is as bumpy as the much earlier Grimes Graves in Suffolk, a field of indentations which are the remains of Stone Age flint quarrying.

The village and the church are built in the local stone, which makes for a very picturesque settlement. The tower is one of the best Saxon ones in the country. It dates from around 1000AD. In the pictures the two sections which are that old are the bottom level and that above containing the clock. Above that there are a belfry and spire dating from around 1200. The rest of the church is from around 1200 to 1300 with a few occasional additions.

Inside there's a chapel with a sculpture of the Annunciation from the early 1500s. Quite surprising it survived the Reformation. The angel Gabriel does not appear. Instead rays shine from the three figures of the Trinity into the breast of the Virgin. It reminds me of the Bernini statue of St Teresa of Avila in St Peter's, Rome.

Unfortunately the niche on the right of the window in that chapel has lost its original sculpture and now houses a ghastly modern (1930s) Virgin and Child. To add to the insult the perpetrators hacked out part of the original canopy to fit the monstrosity.

Around the time the Virgin and Child was added excavation of the north aisle floor revealed a relief carving of Christ giving a blessing. It is a metre tall and quite striking and has been fixed to the wall of the aisle it was found in. In style it appears to about the same date as the tower.


The font is also from the 12oos, on an unusual base.



The churchyard has a lot of broken stone coffins lying around. As well as producing building stone the locals produced, as early as Roman times, such coffins and these were presumably unused or seconds. We know that when Queen Etheldreda, Abbess of Ely, died she was buried in one of these Roman coffins found in Cambridge and taken to be re-used. However, the oddest sight in the churchyard is the grave of a Sandhurst officer cadet whose place of rest is covered by the carved form of a fallen palm tree.