A vicar sits at a desk. The screen hums. The emails pile up. This is the universal condition of knowledge work in the 21st century, and Simon Lockett — parish vicar of the Golden Valley in Herefordshire — decides to reject it for three days by walking the bridleways, holloways, and footpaths of his own parish, sleeping in his churches at Madley, Tyberton, and Peterchurch. The occasion is the 800th anniversary of Saint Francis of Assisi's death. The real occasion is restlessness. The piece works because Lockett doesn't sentimentalize the walk or the saint. Francis disrobed before a bishop in protest of church corruption — one parishioner calls this "extreme." Thomas, a young farmer, pushes back on Franciscan poverty itself, arguing that wealth used well has its own moral posture. The vicar records these challenges without resolving them, which is the right instinct. A country diary that pretends its author won every roadside debate would be insufferable. The best conversation comes from Bill, a businessman walking his dog on the valley ridge. Bill's complaint is structural, not spiritual: his company once ran on belonging, community, and purpose, and now runs on policies, programmes, and technique. Simplicity gave way to complexity. This is not a new observation — it's the central complaint of every organizational theorist from Weber to David Graeber — but Lockett earns it by letting a non-theologian articulate it in plain English against a landscape. The closing image is precise and earns its keep: buzzards mewing above an oak wood, "a complexity of relationships that had led to simplicity." Ecology as counterexample to organizational bloat. It's a neat inversion — natural systems are deeply complex but present as unified, while human institutions start simple and calcify into procedural mess. Lockett doesn't oversell it. What the piece doesn't do is push hard enough on the tension Thomas raised. The Franciscan critique of wealth is easy to admire and brutally difficult to practice. Lockett walks for three days and sleeps in churches with underfloor heating — this is pilgrimage-lite, and the piece might have been stronger if it acknowledged that more directly. The honesty is selective. Still, as a Country Diary entry — a form with rigid constraints (short, seasonal, place-specific, observational) — this is above average. It smuggles genuine philosophical content into a nature column without losing the landscape. The Golden Valley is present in the holloways and the buzzards. The human encounters carry weight because they're specific people with names and trades. It does what the form asks and a little more.
