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Wednesday 18 October 2023

Ronald Blythe - The Rector of Stiffkey


More info here.

5 comments:

DiscoveredJoys said...

Stayed in Stiffkey for a week a few years ago. There's not much there and the A road through it is small - but the Ronald Blythe legend lives on.

Strange how the weird stuff lingers on. It makes the past seem stranger than it really is.

A K Haart said...

DJ - we've driven through it and walked past via the coastal path but never yet stopped to look round. It might be interesting to take a look at the church one day though.

Sam Vega said...

I really miss RB, and regularly dip into his collections of Church Times articles. He writes about nature and village life and faith in a very engaging way, and Akenfield is absolutely marvellous. He tried his hand at short stories, and although the style is of a very narrow slice of provincial English life at a very definite time in our history, he produced some absolute gems.

Scrobs. said...

For many years, I thought that 'Stiffkey' was a Dickensian character!

A K Haart said...

Sam - it's a lost art which is likely to become more lost as memories fade and the culture which sustained the art is gradually trashed.

Scrobs - maybe he could have been but never made it into one of Dickens' stories. Absalom Stiffkey the crusty old lawyer, senior partner of Stiffkey Stiffkey and Scringe.