Oby
Oby is incredibly difficult to find - lying, as it
does, in the flat lands bordering the
River Bure. It isn't
marked on the Ordnance Survey map and there are few sign
posts on the ground. (Turn off the B1152 and head for
Thurne.) It's classified by Alan Davison as a deserted village and
its church was finally abandoned in the late 16th Century.
The nearby village of Ashby was also deserted.
Oby Mill by the River Bure In 1979, the poet George MacBeth (1932-1992) and his
wife Lisa St Aubin de Terán moved
into the The
Old Rectory here. The Broadland landscape provided
inspiration for his 1982 collection: Poems from Oby.
Here is his poem Yuletide in
Norfolk:
|
The long-ships drove up the Bure, and the horned men
were
there to rape and to burn,
Seeding their names, Rollesby and Billockby, Fleggburgh,
Clippesby and Thurne,
Ashby and Oby. Our church roofs came from the rot of
each
oak-warped stern.But the Nazarene grip was strong. The surge of
energy in
the whoring blood
Settled for the purpled moan of the organ, the heifer
chewing her cud,
And the cart with its thwarted axle broken and stuck in
December mud.
I drive to the service at Clippesby, a mile along
sugar-beet-sodden-road.
My lights throw up the parishioners, whipped by the
Christian goad
And the hope of Heaven, their faces pinched by a cold,
unearthly woad
Into shapes of bread and wine. Their archangels gloat
and
wither on spruce,
Bald winter's fuel from Norway. The tied surplice is
shaken loose,
And the paean rises, the bitter semen of prayer squeezed
like a juice.
Nothing can alter the sounded heritage from the
throbbing brine,
The keels lifting above the waves. Let humility
be divine.
All arrogance is human, the black ride of the Vikings
is mine. |
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