“Stu’s Gorgeous.”
My lips, though twitching, are sealed… I say nothing… as he points, grinning, to the inscription.
Except, I am pretty sure it actually says Sanctus Georgius.
However….I dutifully agree and click the shutter to capture the evidence immortalised in stained glass. I have to admit, it does look more like the former, as my companion gazes up at the window with possibly, and in my opinion, the best representation of George and his Dragon that we have seen.

We are back in Bakewell. The church there with its incredible profusion of old stonework and magnificent Tudor tombs is a must for our visitor, a place to share our passion and part of the way we work with our books. Indeed, most of the sites we visited have already claimed their place in Giant’s Dance, Heart of Albion or the new book in progress.

Of course, after the bright and beautiful start to the morning the heavens have opened again and the Sunday service is still in progress in the church, so we wander off in search of coffee and shelter, finding a very creative chocolatier in a small courtyard. The golden stone is darkened by the rain, yet there is, as always, something solid and beautiful about the mellow old buildings, hidden courtyards and the gardens that soften the practical, homely lines of the architecture. I like this town, with its bird laden river, holy wells and proper Bakewell tarts.

Stone steps show the passage of centuries of feet up to cottage doors, history, here, is not some dry recounting in a book, it is alive and evolving. The very stones remind us that nothing is static, everything moves inexorably forward, wearing the marks and passage of the past like a face wrinkled with smiles and shadows. There is beauty in the ageing wherever there is love; only the decay of neglect and rejection… the discarded corners of uncaring or uncared for …show the darker side and in this little town, full of tourists seeking the typical beauty of the Derbyshire Dales, it seems as if every nook and cranny has been tended to show the mellowing of a beloved old age.

It is, for me, a place of reflection as I see written in the stone and the toadflax creeping over the walls, an analogy for our own little lives, where time writes an inevitable history upon us in joy or bitterness… and the deciding factor of how the story is shown seems to be that single factor… love.

We walk back up through the damp churchyard as the service ends, sharing good mornings with the congregation. Our footsteps do not, it seems, distract the bees as they buzz from flower to flower, nor stop the flowers from blooming. Only the invisible wearing of the stone beneath our feet remembers our passing, even the names carved on the headstones no longer tell us who their bearers were… they are simply the labels by which we can explore a past long lost to memory.

It is odd to see our frailty written in the stone of this little town. Our civic pride and dwelling places, our collection of arcane symbols whose meaning a few hundred years have taken from consciousness… even our use of the most permanent materials to mark a landscape with our presence shows the way we cling to life and our need to impose ourselves as if we are afraid that without that marking we might be forgotten. Yet we are forgotten anyway, eventually. Most of us touch only that small circle of lives around us. Only a few change the world in a way history will remember and fewer still pass on into legend. Yet we do change the world… all of us, with every moment of being. We shape it with our interactions, our actions, our emotions and our loves. Though our names may be eroded from our tombstones, who and what we are lives on, long after we are forgotten, echoes in every life and heart we have ever touched, an almost invisible trace of presence shown only with the passing of many feet like the worn stone of the steps.