Transcendent Moments in Clerical Life #983

Swanvale Halt church was refurbished in 2012, as some may recall, as part of which we installed a handsome range of new furniture, benches and chairs made from light American oak. They are light in colour, not in weight; they are substantial bits of kit. When first placed in the church, each had beneath every foot a small plastic roundel holding a felt pad, so that they would move smoothly across the floor when called upon to do so.

Thirteen years have taken their toll and those felt pads that remain are now compacted, but still just about doing their job. But many have disappeared and in some cases even the plastic roundels that held them have also vanished. There is one point in the church, the runnels into which the folding doors that close off the entrance area sit, where if you are not careful they will tear the little fixings off the feet of the chairs and benches, but the latter are moved over them so rarely that it surprises me it's happened at all. 

I love the smooth oak floor of the church building. I remember, when it was newly laid down and before the furniture arrived, Peter the then churchwarden and his wife Paula the pastoral assistant went waltzing across its shiny surface. It is always a moment, then, of horrible distress when I move a bench ready for Toddler Praise or the Pilates class on the second Wednesday in the month only to hear a scratch and realise a tiny fragment of flint caught beneath a leg where a pad should be has just scored a white gouge across the wood.

It takes organisation to move from the pained regret of these moments to actually doing anything about it, as I managed to yesterday, replacing the missing pads with squares of felt cut out of sheets supplied by the local ironmongery. Moving the kneeling-screens and benches back to their places and feeling them slide gently across the floor was more delightful than I know how to tell you.

You think this is banal? Wait until next time when I post about the significance of pickled onions to Church life.

Spring Adventures

It feels as though I've been waiting a long while for this week off that is just coming to an end: the lateness of Easter has removed it far from my last break. I spent a couple of days in Dorset, taking my Mum to West Bay and my sister to Knowlton Rings; zoomed to South Wales to see my friend Rain who has been going through all sorts of trouble, taking them to an antiques emporium (their choice) and Llandaff Cathedral (mine); London yesterday to see two more friends, one for lunch in the amazing surroundings of Mercato Mayfair which used to be the church of St Mark North Audley Street, and the other at Pret London Bridge (probably less worthy of a photo), and two exhibitions, Tim Burton at the Design Museum and Secrets of the Thames at the Museum of Docklands; and a final excursion today to Leigh-on-Sea. Funny place, with one old street along the shoreline full of fishing-themed pubs and a more modern one at the hilltop where the shops are. I spent a good amount of my time in Leigh trying to find somewhere that would serve me a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch rather than fish-and-chips or tapas; I should just have gone to the church where they were offering community lunches!

I was also delighted to be shown a new and unheralded image of St Catherine at the Docklands exhibition - on a gold ring plucked from the Thames. Here she is, just visible, holding a tiny, tiny wheel, the last of a trio with St John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin.

The Churches of David Nye

The Bishop is supposedly keen on the concept of Borough Deans, clergy who will have regular conversations with local authorities and act as a contact between the Church and secular life. I offered to be one, and quickly learned with weary resignation that a role sold to me as involving ‘a couple of meetings a year’ actually implicates me in sundry other things, all of which so far I haven’t been able to attend. The Bishop should have written to me formally to welcome me, but hasn’t. One of these additional things was planning something called a Community Day. I came in partway through the process, wasn’t able to attend any of the meetings, and never received any notes, so I turned up at the event yesterday with no idea what was supposed to happen. It turned out to be a session encouraging churches to think about their community work as opportunities for evangelism. I was amused that the main speaker outlined a vision of encounters developing into church communities linked to the parish like the rim of a wheel to the hub, exactly the theme of my long Missiology essay at St Stephen’s House twenty years ago, while the new resources for adding spiritual content to community events pretty much mirror the things I am developing and thinking through in Swanvale Halt. But I found myself looking at the building we were meeting in, St Peter’s, Guildford, which I had neglected to visit in my great survey of the diocese over recent years. Ah, I thought, it’s another one of these.

David Nye, the architect of St Peter’s, is better known as a cinema designer, but his church work is relatively prolific too. Quite substantial buildings in Purley and Dulwich offer no clue to a personal style, but for Surrey – and a couple of other places, it seems – he developed a model of church based on pyramidal roofs, big windows, and glulam timber arches. The pattern could be scaled up to something like the Good Shepherd, Pyrford, or down, to St Stephen’s Langley Vale in Epsom, and could be adapted to a variety of church traditions; so St Peter’s is a joint Anglican-and-Methodist community, Pyrford is evangelical, while Christ the King, Salfords (which though in Surrey I haven’t seen as it’s in Southwark diocese) is Anglo-Catholic. The family resemblance, though, is very strong.

St Peter's, Guildford

Good Shepherd, Pyrford

St Stephen's, Langley Vale (from the church website)

Christ the King, Salfords (Photo © Stephen Craven (cc-by-sa/2.0))

Holy Spirit, Burpham

Some time ago, realising I would find it hard to get into another David Nye church, St Alban’s Wood Street, I went looking online for photos, and got thoroughly confused by what I found. Here is St Alban’s, from the church website:

And this was also ‘St Alban’s’:

It took me a while to twig that the second wasn't Wood Street at another stage of its development, but an entirely different St Alban’s: a church at West Leigh in Havant (so, the diocese of Portsmouth), but virtually a twin of the Surrey one. It’s not described as one of David Nye’s, but it must surely be. I wonder how many more there are? The list on the website of his practice, now Nye Saunders in Godalming, isn’t very comprehensive.

All Saints' Onslow Village in Guildford is another Nye church, but apart from being modernist stands apart from the above examples. Its roof is virtually flat with windows fitted into an upright section rather than along the walls. Neither does it have the big glulam arches:

Yet another research project for someone ... !

Extra Solemn

The annual task of veiling the church for Passiontide is something I normally look forward to as a sign that Lent is mostly past, even if the taxing time of Holy Week is yet to come. I especially like putting the panels that show the Instruments of the Passion onto the reredos, covering the mosaics that are usually visible; I don't know any other church that has anything quite the same, and ours are homemade, designed to slip beneath the canopies of the arches.

But without someone to assist me and foot the ladder, veiling two large paintings and one wall-mounted mosaic panel presents a disagreeable prospect to someone who gets vertiginous even standing on a chair to change a light bulb. So last Saturday I moved very carefully, shifting the ladder laboriously and sensibly (or what I thought was sensibly) and not overreaching. 

I realised I'd missed a Pollyday and hadn't listened to Let England Shake on its anniversary, February 14th, as I should, so did the veiling to the accompaniment of the maestra on headphones. Shimmering music of war and death, and the terrible destructiveness of human folly, alongside this act of preparation for the symbolic violence of the Passion. Neither alone has ever felt quite the same before. 

Up in the Rafters

The most striking event in the parish this week has been the opening of a new fast-food outlet on the row of businesses which already has two, and the main happening in the life of the church has been an internal glazing area being cleaned for the first time in about twenty years so it no longer presents a canvas of spattered swift guano, but these are fairly pedestrian occurrences. So my mind turns to times past. The alma mater St Stephen's House has just reorganised the Founder's Chapel, the little worship space that crouches beneath the roof of the old building opening off Oxford's Marston Street that was the original home of the Society of St John the Evangelist, and very handsome it is too to judge by this photo on the College's LiberFaciorum page. That's not Comper Pink, but most agreeable nevertheless, a nice contrast with the black.

When I was there it didn't have the little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, nor was it a space where people spent a great deal of time. We students were discouraged from holding any events there at all, allegedly because it would have been a death-trap in the event of a fire, but somehow that didn't appear to prevent Compline happening there once a week. It was dusty, alternately freezing or suffocating hot according to the season, and occasionally worse, as during the several days when it was invaded by the College's resident colony of pigeons who made it part of their festering empire until it was recaptured.

There were people who found the Founder's Chapel spooky. We were once treated to the local diocesan exorcist recounting some of his stories, and he referred to the unseen denizens of the Marston Street building, though he wasn't at the House to talk to us about that at all. He was quite a peculiar character, the most uncanny thing about him being the mysterious way his toupée moved around his head. He and colleagues had, he told us, been called in to clear out the whole place spiritually, but by the time they got to the Founder's Chapel there was one presence they decided to leave alone 'as it had more of a right to be there than anyone living'. We all knew who that meant. 

So there were certain physical challenges to spending time in the Founder's Chapel (not least getting up the steep stairs to the very pointy pinnacle of the building) but I never felt that Fr Benson or anyone else posed any kind of threat to my spiritual wellbeing. Instead the Chapel was my retreat of final resort when I was too distressed or disillusioned to go anywhere else. I wouldn't go to the House Chapel: that was where we repaired morning and evening for the Office and, like all my fellow ordinands, I even had my own allocated seat. The House Chapel was too much official Staggers for it to be anywhere I wanted to go at the worst of times. St John's Iffley Road, the old monastic church we looked after and which was open to the public for services, was a vast, empty space that I never had any sympathy with. Instead I would ascend those steps to the slight dereliction of the Founder's Chapel and try to pray there, if praying was allowed to mean throwing my anger in front of God and asking him to do something with it. If I felt he was there at all. Like my old schools, I don't have any great desire to revisit Staggers itself: I was 'clapped out' at the end of my time there, went out the door, and that was it. But the Founder's Chapel is, perhaps, one place I would be happy to be teleported back to. 

Marcher Land Adventures 5

For this final stage in the journey we stretch the definition of 'Marches' a bit to include the land well into Gloucestershire! But as I made my way home from Rose Cottage I called in at Welsh Newton parish church, to which the term still definitely applies. It has an original stone rood screen dating from about 1320, a most unusual feature for a little village church, and also the grave of St John Kemble, one of the Roman Catholic Forty Martyrs of England & Wales: although he was found to have nothing to do with the Titus Oates conspiracy (not hard to have no connection with something which hadn't happened) he was executed anyway. This is all mentioned in the church. What they don't mention is another grave within a yard or two of St John's which I spotted from a distance. Is that the Jake Thackray, Yorkshire songster and humourist, I thought? He died in Monmouth, and it is. 

I'd visited Gloucester Cathedral, but many years ago, so it was time to return. St Catherine appears in glass twice, once in a medieval treatment, once in a Victorian.

Gloucester's museums carried on the pattern of not being open. The City Museum was - a nice ground floor of palaeontology and archaeology accompanied by medieval music, which becomes a rather fragmented and bitty account of later times on the upper storey - but the Folk Museum, which is the social-history branch, appears to have erratic opening times at the moment and the staff at the City Museum couldn't even confirm when they were despite being part of the same setup.

Two wells to finish with. Nobody seems quite sure how the Crocodile Spring at Compton Abdale came to be, though Historic England says a local builder, 'George Curtis of Hazleton', made it in the mid-1800s. Its crocodile-snout spout was a bit obscured when I saw it, but it was flowing very merrily indeed. I met a woman washing in the water. A little further on is a very important site to the history of well-reverence in the British Isles, the Roman Villa at Chedworth. The octagonal spring-fed pool in its Nymphaeum seems, from nearby finds, to have been converted to Christian use at some point, and then converted back again. Recent excavations have uncovered mosaics that appear to have been laid down in the villa as late as the mid-400s, which rather changes our view of sub-Roman Britain. Unfortunately when the Victorian excavators originally dug the place up they not only stuck a little shooting lodge right in the middle of it, but also preserved the Roman walls with twee little tiled roofs that don't help when you're trying to envisage what the two-storey buildings would have looked like. 

That got me back home, but I still had a week of holiday to go so there are more travels to come!

Marcher Land Adventures 4

Thursday's itinerary wasn't that involved as I was heading to the Valleys in the evening to see Cylene and Deri. It was no surprise to begin with a castle, though, on this occasion White Castle, completing my circuit of the Three Castles. There's nothing all that remarkable about White Castle, nor is it noticeably white. It does have a waterfilled moat, though.

Raglan Castle is a different matter. The seat of the Earl of Worcester, this is one of Wales's grandest ruined castles, occupied until the Civil War, knocked about by Oliver Cromwell, and finally abandoned by the Countess of Worcester who inherited it after the Restoration as it would have been far too expensive to make habitable. Its status as a Tudor palace as well as medieval fortress means that it has, first, something of the air of the kind of castles you see in fantasy manuscripts such as the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, and also the remains of a formal courtyard with a fountain in it.

Abergavenny was the next stop, an agreeable town with lots of small shops and, as far as I could see in the centre, no vacant sites at all. The Priory contains a mass of medieval sculpture, and one incomparable treasure - a mighty 15th-century Jesse, once the base of an entire Jesse Tree and carved from one trunk of oak. There is nothing else like it in Europe. It was completed with a modern Jesse Tree window as late as 2017.

The Museum was - I saw with some sense of inevitability - in the Castle. At first I thought from the scaffolding enclosing the little keep-like building that houses it that the Museum was shut like all the rest I'd tried to visit, but no! There is a mocked-up grocer's shop based on the one round the corner run by Basil Jones until the 1980s, and all the advertising material he left behind. Here he is. It's clear he doesn't actually want you to buy anything. That may explain why the shop isn't there anymore. There's an Anderson shelter retrieved from an Abergavenny back garden and accompanying sound effects - the entire air raid right through to the all-clear, which is a bit of an ordeal.

The road along the head of the valleys between Merthyr and Aberdare is being rebuilt, and will be until 2025. It seems to consist of multiple roundabouts that don't lead anywhere but exist only to make you go on purposeless detours. I got lost going to Aberdare, got lost taking Cylene out for a meal, and lost again twice on the way back.

Marcher Land Adventures 3

Back to the road for Wednesday's expedition, and it was another day of castles. My first stop, in fact, was just up the road from the cottage at Pembridge Castle, low, small, and still a private residence. My first thought was that it was a 19th-century folly, but no, though the building was extended and remodelled then a lot of it is genuinely medieval. 

I intended to call in at Goodrich Castle, but I thought that I could squeeze in a short trip north to Ross-on-Wye, as it turned out a busy small town clambering around a rocky outcrop. The big parish church has a fantastic range of memorials including one from 1530 - about as late for these things as you can get - that incorporates a parade of stone saints including St Catherine herself. The castellations around the 'town walls' only date to a road-reconstruction scheme in the 1800s, but there is a genuine ruin, Wilton Castle, on the outskirts of the town - privately owned, but you can just glimpse it from the riverbank.

Goodrich Castle is a massive structure of red Herefordshire sandstone, except the keep, built before the rest in grey stone from Gloucestershire. It was rendered uninhabitable during the Civil War: in the courtyard you can marvel at Roaring Meg, the massive mortar devised by the Parliamentary forces to destroy one of the towers and bring the siege of the castle to an end. 

Zooming through the Forest of Dean, I tried and failed to find Loquiers Well near Mitcheldean, marked on the map right by the main road but with nothing surviving visible at the site. So I went on to the very well-known St Anthony's Well in the woods above Mitcheldean. My friends Madame Morbidfrog and Mr Romeburns had been in the area a couple of weeks ahead of me, and - as wild-swimming enthusiasts - had been bold enough to go in it. I was definitely not, but although the photo below isn't all that impressive St Anthony's Well is in fact a very impressive place, the sound of gushing water mingling with the wind among the trees in the loneliness of the woods. Actually it's not that lonely at all, but it feels it.

I followed in my friends' footsteps again at my next stop, Puzzlewood in Coleford; in fact had they not posted photos from their visit on LiberFaciorum I would never have known about it. This strange woodland landscape is a former ironworking site: after the mines closed in the later 1800s its owner refashioned Puzzlewood as a kind of fantasy garden to amuse his children, and some decades later it was opened to the public. Now you traverse the damp woods along walkways and little bridges between rocks green with thick moss, looking at the weird shapes which look like the kind of towering monoliths you associate with parts of China on a miniature scale. I'm reminded a bit of the Cleft at Hawkstone Park, but Puzzlewood is a fairy landscape rather than a Gothic one. How Madame Morbidfrog managed to negotiate her way even a few yards in with her massive skirts and pixy boots I can't imagine.

St Briavels came next - a closed castle and St Bride's Well -

- and the next stop was Chepstow. Monday is the day the Museum is closed at Newport; Chepstow's has Wednesday off, so that was another I missed. I didn't have the energy to tackle the Castle, and was quite content to take a couple of photos from the outside. Chepstow Priory is grand and full of interesting features.

My last calling-point was Staunton, a village back over the Gloucestershire border. My aim there was seeing two more wells. St John the Baptist's Well is the better-known, though it still isn't one of the more celebrated sacred sites in this part of the country. The church is dedicated to All Saints, and the Baptist being the Well's patron suggests it might have been used for baptismal water, though no legend says so explicitly. Instead a little plaque by the well, very quietly sitting at the bottom of a track, informs us that it appears in a 14th-century document and was one of the village's main water-sources until 1931 when a piped supply arrived. 'Restored', says the sign, and looking at the overlooked and overgrown little Well now I doubt any of it is all that old. However, St John's Well looks positively cheerful compared to the other old village well, Brindsey's Well. This is buried in the bank along a lane on the other side of the main road. I had to pull away all the nettles and plants before I could see enough to take a photo, and it's the driest dry well I think I've ever seen.