Then, on the far east of the county is St Catherine’s Hill. We’ve been there not too long ago, and I wanted to locate the ruined cottage with the bell, which may have been a chapel, ‘hidden in the trees in the southeast corner’. There are plenty of trees there, dense and difficult, clumps of small hazels and birches over the slopes and a mix of older trees about the bottom, between the lanes. I couldn’t find anything, apart from an abandoned tent which had clearly been someone’s home at some time. Scratched and discouraged, I made my way back along the lane – and there was just what I’d been looking for, a ruinous wall with a bell in a tiny gable. It didn’t look like a cottage, and while its Gothic doorway lent it more of a chapel-like appearance, I had my suspicions about it. These were confirmed when I worked out in whose garden it was and the owners told me it was no more than twenty years old, a folly which was just one of the embellishments they’d made to the property over the decades. The bell came from France!
So this was
not a kind of spiritual heir to the lost medieval chapel which once occupied
the hilltop. I tried to work out exactly where that had been, too, but it
turned out to be a far from easy task. There is a square earthwork – possibly Roman
– between the rifle range and the concrete mass of the southern reservoir, and
the chapel was there, possibly the little flat platform pierced by five oaks
and pines, but it’s hard to discern. Far busier than the hill at Abbotsbury,
which has only ever been used for its chapel and livestock, the Christchurch
one maintains a greater mystery and lost-ness beneath its gorse and pines.
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