Pilgrimage

While planning my route home from a retreat this weekend, I noticed a route could be planned via Pinvin - setting of Penda's Fen, though not the shooting location (though that is very close by, maintaining that specific sense of place). I don't like driving, or coming home from a holiday, so all week this was my treat to look forward to.

About an hour before I arrived, I was suddenly and shockingly aware of the landscape - fields in the foreground, but with that line of purple in the distance. I hadn't realised the landscape in the film was distinctive - it just read to me as England; but I knew that it was a particular part and supposed to be read as such. I tried to concentrate on the road and not be overtaken into mythic time just yet, and then I got stuck in the Worcester traffic and fell slightly in love with an aging biker who was behind and ahead of my car.

Eventually I passed the sign for the village - abruptly - and looking for somewhere to park, followed Town Center signs to the church. The signs said no parking except for churchgoers but I judged it was quiet enough.

So firstly, I must announce my regret at not running the kind of cult which scams money out of people, because not one but several of the large houses around Pinvin church are for sale, and it struck me as quite the place we ought to be. Here is one of the houses. If I lived in a place like this, I would die of delight, you would never hear the end of it, I'd be striding affably about like Lord Summerisle and shaking hands.

Secondly: the position of St Nicholas church - the only one in the village - is extremely striking. It is on a foot-crossroad, and in the quarters around it are fields of wheat. I have never seen anything like it. It's not unusual for a church to be on a green, but within a wheatfield is extremely uncanny and dare I say, symbolic.

Pinvin is a road, more or less. Alongside the church, there are two schools (didn't go to see or photograph, for obvious reasons), and an inn. Walk too far in any direction and you fall off, back into fields. All the houses look expensive, and many of them are new-ish. In the 70s I imagine the village felt quite frighteningly exposed among the big empty fields and the face of the sky bearing down. It's present in the film, but I'm only now fully aware of it, that Pinvin is exactly like the little village of the Fencraft journey - a small town, with fields for wandering around it, but in the distance - mountains. These are the Malverns, which I drove over on my journey there. Not many trees, and none of them old-feeling - a handful on the green.

I pottered about the churchyard - fairly unremarkable. I am going to visit again to do a service, but the door was closed when I was there. I was taken by the site of the hungry earth within the sepulchre, and what seemed to be a stone circle of old grave-markers

Then it was time to visit the pub, which was just opening at 2pm. I spoke with the baffled innkeeper. There is nothing in Pinvin, and yet here is a newcomer - a weird looking man-woman who smelt of the undergrowth and for some reason, really wants to be here, not at the Anchor in the next village along, even though they will do a meal and tea and the Coach and Horses will not. I had talked to some people at the retreat about my planned trip to Pinvin, and discovered Penda's Fen is a seven-minute infodump at the very least, so I smiled and stayed discreet. The pub is modern, and after a while some regulars came in, all of them looking bemused at my presence. I asked if there was anything to see locally. They recommended the Abbey in Pershore - nearby large village. There clearly wasn't anything else here. It's a place for leaving.