MY NATIVE PATCH

When Walter Scott wrote: ‘This is my own, my native land’, he was advocating localism. Like G.K. Chesterton he was not alone in cherishing the place of his birth. It was Chesterton who said: ‘Nothing is real until it is local.’

The Church of England has a stake in this view. It is through and through local. The key to understanding the Church of England is the parish. A parish has a vicar and a worship-building. Both are part of the structure of English society. People may have lost the habit of attending their parish church but a place and its identity are none the less meaningful. Local residents may well have their parish church at the back of their minds as a ‘given’. The building has been there a thousand years and it is part of the divine right of Englishmen that it should go on being so. It does not depend on the generosity of the present generation. It is like the weather, ever-present, an inescapable part of the environment.

But this is a fiction. Globalisation is causing local structures to fade. Every day our native patch is compared with native parches around the world. We are not so distinctive as we may have thought. And new technology makes management from the centre easier to accomplish. If something can be done, it will be done. This applies to county and parish councils, to cities and trading estates.

Local loyalty survives none the less. It is made up of a bundle of threads. A parish has its patron, its history, its heritage. It may be similar to a parish next door or it may have a different stamp. It may be the kind of place that people recognise immediately or it may need the kind of nudge I administered when explaining my boyhood allegiance. ‘It’s near Hampton Court,’ I explained. Such is our obsession with the Tudors that not even a Yorkshireman can beat that for a piece of name-dropping. But such hints and traces define us.

Derision is a common reaction to local loyalty. To describe someone’s outlook as parochial, provincial or benighted reminds us that it is a dangerous strategy to stay blinkered. Being an offshore island neighbouring a large land-mass has its dangers. Islanders are tempted to consider themselves as possessing a privileged territory, safe, secure, unchanging, the kind of figment Shakespeare plugs in ‘Richard the Second’ – ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’ All very well but it’s a case of over-egging the pudding. The ending of the speech doesn’t mince matters when it acknowledges the shortcomings of ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea’.

‘My native patch’ may carry the same label, the same place-name as did its Celtic or Bronze age inhabitants. But the entity is ever-changing. And the forces of change are deeper than what goes on in the top-soil. Just a few inches down, evidence of former cultures can often be found – a gold Bible, a coin-hoard, whatever. We come into this world with a history and one way or another it is with us for life. And that history cannot be gainsaid by transplanting or re-labelling.

SCOTTISH CHRISTIAN

Sir Walter Scott was a man of the Borders. He was brought up as a Presbyterian and became an elder in the Church of Scotland. He had an affection for the Book of Common Prayer (which he used in family worship) and worshipped with the Scottish Episcopal Church on occasion. He lived his adult life in Abbotsford, by the Tweed, which he extended. He indulged his passion for planting trees in the estate, which he also enlarged.

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