Pillars of the Community

More from Exton. Everyone (including me, as you have seen), gets carried away by Exton church and the monuments. Pevsner rushed through, barking at his assistants about lucarnes and stiff-leaf; Hoskins kept coming back before going over to Tixover churchyard for forty winks. Both missed (or ignored) this little building up at the top end of the village. There's nothing grand about it, just a set of pillars carefully constructed in curved bricks holding up a roof of Collyweston slates with a ball and cross finial on top. Exton was once an important staging post between Leicester and the Great North Road, (the Fox and Hounds pub on the tree-lined green still bears witness to this), and I had thought that this was a market cross. But I am reliably informed that it is in fact the housing for a now extinct village pump. It has immense charm, and I was looking forward to saying that it doesn't take much imagination to make the grass and trees disappear, replacing them with a rough cobbled area filled with wooden crates of vegetables, trestle tables stacked with butter and eggs. Nevertheless, this was still a meeting place for villagers, albeit with buckets rather than baskets, their children playing tag around the brick pillars whilst they gossiped and sheltered from the rain.

Exton Jam

Exton in Rutland is a funny old place. At once both quintessentially English and slightly odd to get to grips with, it is a village full of good things whichever way you look. Amongst the best is the 1686 Grinling Gibbons monument to the Third Viscount Campden in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, but I don't want to spoil the surprise of it by showing the whole towering edifice here. Gibbons pocketed £1,000 for it, and must have heaved a very seventeenth century sigh of relief that it actually did just fit into the north transept. So as a taster I give you this relief panel that sits at the base, a graphic rendering of his third wife and her six children. The next wife is up above, and, like her husband and the rest of his extended family, is depicted in the de rigeur fashion of the times, viz: enrobed in (and in some cases erotically emerging from) full Roman costume. Thoughtfully the church has provided spot lights on a timer that highlight the simply colossal pile of both white and dark grey marble. It comes as almost another kind of relief to find jars of homemade jam with little cotton-print covers for sale on the visitors' book table. I came home with greengage.