Thursday the 20th of August - to Mansfield -HALF-WAY

After a great breakfast, I was taken to Chesterfield for a treat: I was to get a personal tour of the twisted spire, lasting 45 minutes. Anne took me though the town, which I thought would be industrial, but has the feel of a typical country, market town. Inside, I met Paul, who told me all the history of the church. It's the largest church in Derbyshire, and is the 3rd on the site; there had been a Norman one, and before that a Saxon one ( Like St Peter's and St Paul's) there. Of the Saxon church, nothing has ever been found except for its font, which was dug up by a vicar in the grounds during the 1800s, and used by him as a plant pot...A big one, as you can see:

The font is covered in carvings very similar to the ones found at Wearmouth and Jarrow. Here's a close-up:

..now compare them to this photo, which is of the cormorant carvings on the from porch of St Peter's, Wearmouth:

...and you can see they look like each other.

Paul took me through a narrow door in the wall, and up into the tower's interior. Inside therre were 151 narrow, curving steps like this:
...before you enter a chamber, built inside the tower wall, where the bells are rung:

. From here you can see down into the church:

We continued, up into other rooms like this one, where the bells are:
to the back of one of the four clock faces:

until we came on top of the tower, directly under the spire:

. The word on the Chesterfield street is that it became twisted when it bent over to look at a particularly good-looking virgin who was getting married below, and that it'll only straighten up again on the day another virgin is married in the church...(It's been crooked a long time)

In truth, it became twisted because water got in during the 1400s, and in panic, they covered it with lead, which weighed and bent the rotting wood even more. It's the only twisted and leaning spire in the world, and oh, it's not attached to the tower; only held there by its own weight, and it would take a wind of over 150mph to carry it away. We climbed up an ancient ladder, outside onto the tower's parapet, to get this view:

...and looking up, this one:

Yip, I was terrified up there, but I leant out, and over to take this photo of the oldest grafitti on the spire, which says 'F.E. 1657':



As a final photo in this architectural excursion, the main beam in the spire is this:

...which doesn't look much in this photo, but it's part of an 80ft-long bean of oak, which would have been straight when it was felled, but which has bent since. The mind boggles at what the tree this beam came from would have looked like, and the dendrochronologist who dated it reckoned that it was felled in the 1300s, but that it had grown from a seed that first fell to the ground in the 9th Century!

John had given me an old, high detailed ordnance survey map of the area between Chesterfield and Nottingham, and I used it to make today the most attractive walk so far. I set off down the long road towards Temple Normanton, and using John's detailed map, found myself on country roads. In time I was skirting the side of the M1 on a quiet little road, before going under it:

and climbing up a bank, while the wind started getting bad. In the distance I could see Hardwick Hall:

and I passed the entrance, and up the hill towards a hamlet called Ault Hucknall, through lovely place called Rowthorne. I turned right down a track, which had a chimney from a mine far in the distance, and looked great:

Suddenly, though, I went down this sunken lane:



..and everything changed. This was a very 'magical' place - it had walls of stone cliffs around it, which were cracked by water, and the growth of trees from them. It had a real atmosphere, and it felt like I was the only person around for miles. At the bottom were the remains of two former rail lines to Pleasley Colliery:

and I pressed on to a four-way cross roads, just after which I took this shot of me looking bedraggled (I look even worse now..)in one of those convex sharp-turn mirrors:

Then I was in Pleasely, which has kept its mine buildings as a tourist centre (heritage being regenerated not knocked down):

Apparently that meant I had crossed into Nottinghamshire. I called my contact, and John Everitt turned up with his wife Yvonne, who whisked my bag away, while John continued the pretty tone of the day by leading me to his house by the VERY scenic route. We walked though cornfields:

and up this hill (that's John leading the way):

...into the outskirts of Mansfield, past a swimming pool built on the site of the old Sherwood Pit, and to his house past allotments, one of which housed a goat called Clive - (I think: he wasn't there), and another which had...er..this written on the side:

The house was a lovely bungalow set down a secluded street, and I was taken on the very short walk into town. Like Chesterfield, Mansfield was much more 'county market town' than I had thought, and its main feature is this wonderful viaduct:

This splits the town in two, and as Mansfield was my halfway point, this marked the end of the walk's first half, and start of the second.

We ate in Wetherspoons, which quickly became full with some of the thinnest, most healthy-looking spawn of the god of young things (male and female) I'd yet seen on this journey, so we left. The night ended with wine and Southern Comfort in the living room, where John -as a joke - put on a DVD of a band his son likes. I'd never heard of them, but they were a German thrash/goth/industrial band called 'Rammstein' and they were absolutely bluddy awful.. and hilarious. I didn't photo the tv, but I've found this one on the internet, so you get the picture: