What Lies Beneath

This photograph involves the potential unearthing of a mystery. I only quite recently realised that the walls of the sanctuary of the church, around the old high altar which is now only used a couple of times a year, are lined in a spongy material painted white. At first I couldn't work out what this was in aid of. Then I took a closer look at an old postcard of the church interior, dating from about 1910, which had been sent to us from Germany of all places a couple of years ago. This shows that the walls either side of the chancel (presumably the unseen south wall would be identical to the north) were lined with decorative tiles. The east wall, behind the altar, is also decorated with a dark ground and a lighter repeated pattern, although you can't tell from the photograph whether this is tiling, paintwork or possibly fabric. I don't think it can be the last, as the decoration runs right up to the stone rail and there's nothing to hang fabric from. Later on this wall was covered in curtain which hung from a brass rail put there for the purpose.

Then yesterday we had a scout round the chancel and discovered a tiny patch along the floor where the foam board, whatever it is, has come away and the gap painted over with lashings of white emulsion. Some of the paint has flaked revealing dark reddish-brown ceramic. It flakes off quite easily, actually, with a bit of encouragement.

This means the original Victorian tiles are presumably still there behind the foamboard. When and why they were covered up is anyone's guess. Part of me would dearly like to hack all the wretched foam off the walls and uncover the Victorian splendour again - an urge only just restrained by the thought that the tiles might not be quite so splendid in reality as in my imagination. Not only may time and several decades of glued-on foamboard not been kind to them, but perhaps there may have been a perfectly good reason for their obscuration in the first place. It is, however, so very, very tempting. I have a Stanley knife in my toolbox.

Messy Scripture

Messy Church has been going at Swanvale Halt for over four years now and has built up its own clientele, or congregation as we are supposed to think of it. We always tell ourselves that, in theory, for some people who come, children and adults, it's the only faith and worship input they have. Not everyone: plenty of our regulars are pretty embedded members of the worshipping community, while others belong to other churches around the area. Nevertheless, the statement that for some people Messy Church is 'church' does hold true.

We had a Messy Church gathering yesterday. The theme was 'good neighbours' and one of the helpers devised a quiz (or two, one for adults and one for children) asking them to pair up the different sets of 'neighbours' mentioned in the Bible.

After everyone else had gone into the church hall for tea and cake and I was clearing up, I found one young mum sat on her own pondering the lists. 'I recognise some of the names', she said. It turned out she didn't have a Church background at all, but had been reading Bible stories to her daughter, who is 6. 'I ought to know more about them', she went on, 'But there are so many names and you lose track'. I draw no particular conclusions from this, only that here is one person who is obviously interested and thoughtful, and equally obviously doesn't know very much about Christianity, but is there at all because her daughter comes and does crafts, sings a song and eats cake.

Due Grottone

It's been more than a month since I last updated the blog. There seems not to have been the time, and I haven't had the energy despite there having been some things probably as much worth saying as anything else I've posted here. But there it is.

I won't add anything very pious this time. Instead here is a picture of the grotto as completed last week, first victory in my ludicrous campaign to refashion the garden in 18th-century fashion. I should Rococo, I keep saying to myself.

I'm rather pleased with this. It looks pretty much as I envisaged, once I worked out I couldn't construct the whole thing of rubble; instead the main part is brick, with sandstone slabs for the roof and a rubble arch to frame the opening and lend an irregular appearance. Eventually the grass and weeds will re-colonise the soil around (and on top) of the building and it'll look much more natural.

Sadder is the state of the old grotto at Wanstead Park in east London. I was enticed by reports and relatively recent photos of this structure, and we made a journey out East and then traipsed around the remains of the ornamental canals and pools - which takes rather longer than we anticipated. The grotto is just a wreck of its former self, and you can't even get to it. It's fenced off by a high spiked steel fence. Not too long ago it was far more tidy, but now the weeds and brambles fill it.

Continuity

Down in darkest West Dorset, in what they will one day call PJ Harvey Country hem-hem, is a village with the lyrical name of Whitchurch Canonicorum, the White Church of the Canons. The church of St Candida and the Holy Cross there is a fine one, although calling it 'the Cathedral of the Vale' is I think a trifle hubristic. Not that the Marshwood Vale, all of six miles or so across, offers any other rivals for cathedral status. In one transept stands a white stone box surmounting three oval alcoves. This is the Shrine of St Wite, one of only two pre-Reformation shrines in England which are still intact - the other is that of St Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey. The idea is that, should you be ill, you should pray at the shrine to blessed St Wite - supposedly a female hermit who lived out on the hills and was martyred by the Danes, though no one really knows - and place your afflicted part in an alcove. Her Holy Well is not far away to the south of Stanton St Gabriel, while there is another arched well just opposite the church itself.

My family first came here years ago. I was looking for the well, so I think I must have been about 15, which would make my sister 8 at the time.

This last week my mum was on holiday round the coast in Seaton with my sister and her family. It was her first holiday (apart from staying with me for a few days) since my dad died. They all went to the village of the White Church of the Canons, and my nieces, G (7) and J (3) put their hands in the shrine and lit candles, exactly the same as we had first done twenty-eight years ago.

Turton Villa

Once in a while you find something so interesting in a familiar place that you boggle at not having spotted it before. On hols in Dorset last month we had a wander about Weymouth and between the car park and the seafront we found a peculiar little tower poking up between the brick guesthouses.

This is Turton Villa, and this is about the only photograph one can get of it that gives even a remote idea what it might look like, as it's hemmed in by the buildings around it. English Heritage is right, notwithstanding the 1771 date above the doorway it looks mid-19th century rather than late 18th-century Gothick. Pevsner doesn't mention it, but then he wouldn't.

As you can see if you follow the link, there is a legend that the house is connected by a secret passage to Gloucester Lodge on the Esplanade so that George III could visit a mistress installed in the house. Unlikely on virtually every count, quite apart from the date.

St Dunstan's Well, Burstock

It doesn't look like much, but this dribble of water running under a log round the side of a modern house in the hamlet of Horsey, Dorset, is (probably) the Well of St Dunstan at Burstock - that very, very rare thing, a holy well for which there is some record in medieval documents whose existence was unsuspected until a short while ago. I mentioned it last year when I found the reference in the final volume of AD Mills's The Place Names of Dorset. I confess I had hoped for some brickwork, but one mustn't be greedy.

Perp Revival i'the North

When I did some research into the history of the Anglo-Catholic movement some years ago I ended up lamenting the fact that so little information existed about the role of the movement in the North of England. There was the story of St Saviour's, Leeds, paid for by Dr Pusey and others; Fr Ommanney and his work at St Matthew's Carver Street in Sheffield; and that was about it. All the talk otherwise was about the great Papalist churches in north and east London; the shrine churches of the West End; and the seaside strongholds in Bournemouth, Brighton, and other such places. But I knew it couldn't be the whole story. My old vicar in High Wycombe came from South Yorkshire and referred to the 'Biretta Belt' of churches there - Temple Newsam, Goldthorpe, Swinton, and others - and I kept coming across other references. There was precious little written about them, though.

Now there is, gradually. This week I was in receipt of a very welcome bundle of books and pamphlets from the Anglo-Catholic History Society, including Stephen Savage's Mission Accomplished: Five Lost Churches of Leeds, published a couple of years ago. This contains the astonishing picture you can see to the right:

This is Fr Nicholas Greenwell, first vicar of St Barnabas Little Holbeck, probably in the mid-1860s. The reason I find it so astonishing is the juxtaposition of vesture and clergyman. Fr Greenwell is wearing the full Eucharistic vestments, including maniple, at a time when doing so was something liable to get a priest into trouble (and, a few years later, in prison in some cases). He is also a very Victorian looking gentleman in his whiskers and slick hair, quite unlike his clean-shaven and Popish contemporaries in the South such as Fr Lowder of Wapping. It's that combination that I find interesting, and surprising. I can't remember seeing anything of the sort elsewhere.

Fr Greenwell had been curate at Leeds Parish Church under the great old-fashioned High Churchman Walter Farquhar Hook, but in churchmanship St Barnabas galloped far ahead of the mother church in the city centre and became an inspiration to other churches in the area. From the same milieu - the church of St James, in fact - came Fr Richard Twigg, who moved to Wednesbury and became known as 'The Apostle of the Black Country'; him I knew about, but I had no idea of his background. Slowly the story gets pieced together, it seems.