St Catherine's Day 2018 - at Abbotsbury

Thankfully the roads were mainly in my favour yesterday as I made an effort, for the first time, to get to St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury for the feast day of my patron saint, there being no evening service at Swanvale Halt to detain me. The forecast was for dull and overcast weather but instead the autumn sunlight was bathing Chapel Hill as I joined the stream of people and the occasional dog making their way up to the top.

On the way through the village I noticed signs saying that 'candle bags' for the service were on sale from local businesses. These turned out to be paper bags containing a little electric tealight set into sand, which could be decorated however the purchaser wanted: the money was going to support the children's play area in Abbotsbury. The finished bags were handed in and arranged in a 'wheel' on the hillside.

The service in the chapel, which focused quite strongly on the blessed Saint herself, lasted about twenty minutes, led by Revd Margaret Preuss-Higham, priest in charge of Abbotsbury. There were about sixty people there (not counting the dogs). The chapel's famous acoustic was well dampened by the presence of so many people or we would have been deafened!

Afterwards I had a closer look at some of the bags. Like the prayers left in the niches in the chapel itself, most were memorials to the dead. I saw a couple of bags decorated in memory of soldiers who died in WWI, with rubbings from the bronze plaques, issued to the relatives of all fatalities and gruesomely nicknamed 'dead man's pennies'. At least one person, though, chose to illustrate the chapel itself:

The only drawback of the fine weather was that I couldn't see the hill lit up by both the candle bags and the lanterns that line the path to the summit. It was only 3.40, but I had to zoom off to see my mother in Bournemouth.

A final view from the yard of the Ilchester Arms showed plenty of souls still making their way around the chapel. I was so glad to have made it.