Yorkshire country parson

Press, 12 May 1984, Page 20

Yorkshire country parson

Countryman on the Moors. By John C. Atkinson. Edited by J. G. O’Leary. Oxford, 1983. 160 pp. $9.75. It is grossly unfair, I know, to criticise John C. Atkinson for sounding like a Victorian parson — that, after all, is exactly what he was. However, his pompous and convoluted style does interfere with the enjoyment of this rather curious little book. John Atkinson was vicar of Danby, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, from 1850 until his death in 1891, the year in which his book of reminiscences and essays, “Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,” was published. The book is a selection from that work of pieces considered to be of general interest to modern readers. It is fascinating when Atkinson is describing local superstitions and customs regarding witches, hobgoblins, burial, and beekeeping, and speculating on the Scandinavian origins of these traditions.

He seems to have been surprised at the lack of scepticism, but does not condemn it. He was also an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist and pours a great deal of justifiable scorn on the theories current that nearby “Danby Rigg” was a “British village,” without, I gather, being on any firmer ground in his own hypothesis. There is no mistaking his wide ranging interests, his energy and dedication, and his love of that particular part of Yorkshire and its people. But although adept at rendering the Yorkshire dialect, Atkinson lacks a poet’s skill to depict in words what the eye sees so that the descriptive passages are heavy going. Furthermore, he has a disconcerting tendency to start a chapter on one subject only to digress, as it turns out permanently, to another. I wonder what his sermons were like! — Mhairi Erber.