The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [132]
This happened too in the Northamptonshire village of Faxton, a handful of miles to the south-west of Kettering. It was never a major settlement, but Faxton was a parish, with a manor house, two or three good wells, fish ponds, a village green, a few farms, cottages and a row of eighteenth-century almshouses. It really only had one moment in the sun, when King Charles I’s soldiers were quartered there the night before the Battle of Naseby.
At the south-western corner of the green, the plain little church of St Denys, with its odd double belfry instead of a tower, had a Norman doorway and font. In this county of often extravagant churches, its lack of ornamentation – Arthur Mee described it as ‘plain unto nakedness’ in his 1945 County Series book on Northants – was offset only by a florid memorial inside to Sir Augustine Nichols, the Lord of the Manor and Justice of the Peace, who died suddenly on 3 August 1618, the night before he was due to officiate at an Assize Court in Kendal, Westmorland. Rumours that he was poisoned by the lover of one of the men he was due to try – and, given his fierce reputation, probably hang – the following day have persisted since.
Faxton was never an especially blessed place. Exposed on a windy hillside over 400 feet up, the winters were especially punishing. The plague wiped out most of the village inhabitants when the Lord of the Manor fled here from his London abode to escape the disease – unfortunately, bringing with him a servant girl who was already infected. The manor house burned down, after a Faxton farmer’s ill-treatment of a gypsy had brought a curse upon the whole village. In 1841, the Census recorded 108 residents. By 1901, this had dropped to 37. The tide was going out, and it wasn’t coming back.
The little church hosted its final service just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and was demolished completely in 1959. Whispers circulated throughout local villages that, in its deconsecrated two decades, St Denys’s had been used by practitioners of black magic, and this is said to have hastened the decision to raze it to the ground. The perishing winter of 1947 was the final straw for most of the village’s beleaguered inhabitants, for it wasn’t just the roads passing Faxton by, but mains electricity, gas and water too. Nor was there ever a shop, pub or school. In the early 1960s, Mrs May Bamford, Faxton’s last inhabitant, finally succumbed, and left.
On large-scale Victorian Ordnance Surveys, Faxton looks a little too scattered across its blustery slopes, and not at all close-knit or comforting. Footpaths are marked in all directions: west to Lamport, where the mother church to the Faxton chapel-of-ease was found, south to Old, the nearest pub, north to Loddington and east to Broughton. The east–west track was the main one, even appearing as a relatively major road on Thomas Moule’s 1836 map of the county. Follow it today and you’ll notice something a little odd, in the shape of the smooth tarmac road running alongside, and marked as a private drive. This, the road that finally came when it was too late, heads up to the one solitary house that has been teased back from the brink. Up by the gate of the house, a path – the old cobbled main street of the village – cuts across a field towards a clump of trees and all that’s left of the doomed, devil worshippers’ church: a truncated octagonal column that records, on each of its sides ‘ON THIS / SITE STOOD / THE ALTAR / OF THE / CHURCH OF / SAINT DENYS / DEMOLISHED MCMLIX / .’ The cross leered out of the stone, looking like something being brandished at a vampire in some Hammer Horror schlockfest – ‘Take that, infidel!’ It tickled me, but I still didn’t hang around too long.
From the village that died because the roads never came, it’s just a short hop across a couple of fields to the village that was born in the back of a speeding car. Mawsley Village, its name harking back to a medieval