I went to Clavering for lunch today. This came about as I was meeting an old university friend who lives in north London, and suggested we could have a break from what had become our normal routine of meeting in the west end during her lunch hour. It turned out that, despite being an entrenched townie, what she would like to do would be to have lunch in an English country pub.
The Systems Administrator and I don't do pub lunches very often. In fact, we only do them when we are on holiday. The rest of the time we are too busy to interupt the flow of the day going out to lunch. Plus, an awful lot of pubs offer food nowadays, and a lot of the time it is considerably less good than we could make at home, for an amount of money that would keep us in ingredients for lunch for the best part of the whole week. We try to avoid pubs that look as though they are doing bad food cheaply, though we have made some wrong calls, or found ourselves in places where that seemed to be the only option. There are also pubs that do bad food for moderate amounts of money, OK food for middling prices, lunches that are OK but frankly expensive, and occasionally good food for quite a lot of money. Rarely is food excellent and moderately priced, and as for good and cheap, it don't exist.
Today's pub was chosen in rather a rush, since my friend had recently returned from holiday visiting family in the States to a mountain of work, and I had staggered home from Day Three in the Plant Centre to find my laptop was doing a monster update and had a Hal-like attitude to my using the internet that evening (I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that). The Cricketers at Clavering featured in my (2006) pub food guide and my friend's more up to date (2010) one, and it looked easy to find starting from either Colchester or London N1. It is also famous for being run by Jamie Oliver's parents, and is where young Jamie started his career. The name above the door is still Trevor Oliver, and the pub merits brown tourist signs from the point where you leave (or in my case cross) the M11. On that basis, although we hadn't booked a table in advance, I took the precaution of booking one in person as soon as I arrived. This turned out to be the correct call, as by the time my friend arrived they were fully booked. That's good going for a Friday in August. The S.A. and I went to a Suffolk pub with a foodie reputation last August (it was our wedding anniversary) and there were only two or three other tables occupied.
The Cricketers at Clavering has a lot of beams, most of which I think are structural, and a cheerful attitude, with large wine glasses set on the tables and purple cushions, that's more posh Essex than rural Herefordshire. The staff were jolly and kindly, if quite keen to rush us through ordering and then clearing the plates, and the food was pretty nice and quite expensive. I ate mackeral salad with beetroot and horseradish, since the S.A. detests mackeral so I might as well eat it when I'm out, and I'm a sucker for beetroot and horseradish (it's my Polish roots). My friend had a large piece of sea bass she said was good. Her daugher and daugher's friend had smoked salmon sandwiches which came with chips on the side, and I had some of those as well, as the girls said we could, and were loads of them. The grownups had cherry pie which was a bit too sweet, and the girls refused pudding (such self control). As half the party were driving and the other half were under-age we were on soft drinks. This is one of the reasons why the S.A. and I tend to only bother with pubs when we are on holiday and not about to get into a car, since one of the real pleasures of a pub visit is cask ale, well kept. Anyway, I hadn't seen my friend for a while, and it was a good lunch, and a perfectly nice pub, though I wouldn't drive fifty miles to get to it unless I were meeting somebody.
The rest of the party headed back to town after lunch. I think they had another visit to make on the way home, and were keen to return to the more respectable parts of London N1 before any Friday evening riots kicked off. I went to have a look at the church, on the basis that I don't visit that side of the county very often, and I wanted to make the most of it. Clavering church doesn't get a mention in Simon Jenkins' book of churches, but sounded worth a look from my preliminary web search, and merits a brief mention in my County Guide to English Churches (Jones and Tricker, 1992, Countryside Books).
The church is tucked down a small side road with absolutely no parking whatsoever. Goodness knows what they do for weddings. I backed up just in time, and parked in a residential street off the main road, but there didn't seem to be a car park anywhere near the church, or even a field you could use. The church backs on to farmland, and feels peaceful and secluded. In these times of theft and vandalism it is rather wonderful that it remains open, since there was nobody else there throughout my visit. There has been a church on the site since Saxon times, but the present structure was built in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the Perpendicular style. I think the Victorians had a bit of a go at it, but it still has the original roof, and doesn't look obviously mucked about with. It is small but charming, the outside mostly flint, with a low tower. The interior is fine, plain, and somehow manages to look bigger than the outside. Having read up on it in advance, and armed with my book, I knew to note the thirteenth century Purbeck marble font (octagonal, very plainly decorated with arches), the Elizabethan pulpit (wooden, carved with flowers) and the fifteenth century screen (rather worm eaten).
Neither the book nor the websites I consulted made any mention of the carved figures along the roof. They have bare heads with shoulder length curly hair, wear tunics that are long at the back and short at the front and what look like leggings, textured to resemble either feathers or chain mail. The light wasn't very good by then and I couldn't honestly see. They seemed to have bare feet. Maybe they are angels. Perhaps they originally had wings, which have been lost or removed for safety purposes? There is some fifteenth century stained glass along the north aisle, fragmentary now, and carefully protected from any yobbish stone throwing by panels mounted outside the windows.
There are some splendid monuments. Margaret, wife of Haynes Barlie by whom he had issue fower sonnes and nyne daughters, six of them dyed in theire infancy the last was still borne, herself died five days after the birth and after nearly sisteen years of marriage, in 1653. Fourteen pregnancies in sixteen years, it's scarcely surprising. Her monument shows a round faced woman with ringlets each side of her head, below which she kneels opposite her husband, their six surviving children kneeling behind them, and behind them seven skulls, five smaller ones with the women and two larger behind the men. All the kneeling figures have one hand clasped to their breast, except for the surviving son who is holding what looks like a large bap. Next to Margaret's monument is one to Mary, second wife of Haynes Barley Esq. by whom he had a very plentiful fortune but no issue. She too has a round face and ringlets, and died in 1658. Haynes Barlee himself seems to have survived until 1696 when he died at the age of 90, having taken a third wife Mary, who produced four more sons, according to a monument erected in 1747.
There is supposed to be the remains of a pre Conquest motte and bailey castle (one of only four in England) by the church, but I must admit I didn't see it. I did like the garden tap and three galvanised watering cans on a little stand by the entrance to the churchyard, for people to tend the flowers on the graves.
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