Continuing Story of Cressroads

To be sure, to be sure,

Or, mixed with the ecclesiastical, Lady Day’ s religious significance is observed with a token shake of the bristles of a holy water brush by whoever the Roman Catholic Canon of St Peter’s, Winchester, delegates to blessing the Tichborne Dole.

Lady Day in Cressroads – more especially, Tichborne – remains a traditional day on which, if given an Irish spin of the harvest coin, landowners settle their annual debts.

According to the Christian calendar, as well as Tichborne estate’s Roman Catholic chapel dedicated to St Margaret of Scotland, Lady Day March 25 ever falls on the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

But, in Blogsbody’s revised Cressroads missal, Lady Day is as much in beloved memory of a village’s Ma Primmer, late mother of nine, wearing the colourful headscarf she saved for best and remembered as the respected lady of the parish, who visiting Irish comedian Dave Allen - Widow Lillian’s most favourite celebrity of all - once upon a much-photographed Lady Day in Tichborne asked to put his left arm around.

As it was this past Wednesday as carefully measured full and half-gallons of flour for the annual Tichborne dole were measured out to parishioners answering the roll call of Tichborne estate’s land agent Christopher Langford stood atop the front steps of the famed family’s manorial pile.

Each waiting for their name to be called either side of a long line of predominantly children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Ma Primmer, whose not-forsaken pram was once used to wheel home by the pillow case her measured widow’s share of the powdery white Tichborne Dole.

“No,” assures village wag Hugh Smorfitt - his one thumb attempting to seal a tiny hole in his bag for flour - “it’s most certainly not to be mistaken as leaving a trail of powder of a very different variety.”

Headed home with his Cairn terrier Meg: “And much less prone to straying than one’s ex-wife,” he smiles.

Today’s Tichborne (pop.196) finds the Old Post Office, built in the autumn of 1607, offered for sale at one million pounds; Tichborne Estate looking to rent its ancestral family home for more than the equivalent of £200-a-day; many families running two cars; and their offspring attending private schools.

What remains priceless is love and care for one another, exemplified every next day within the four walls and garden of a village pub - its welcoming Tichborne Arms - doubling as a first-aid post, polling station and popular real-ale inn.