Gronthill Fottoes, I mean Fonthill Grottoes

Everyone knows how William Beckford built with slave-plantation cash the mighty, impossible Fonthill Abbey, whose central tower collapsed, before decamping to Bath and constructing the more feasible Beckford’s Tower where friends of mine have stayed, courtesy of the Landmark Trust. But the Fonthill Estate also contains follies, in addition to the insane folly of the Abbey itself. You know when you’re entering what was the Fonthill Estate – the modern version comprises only the eastern half of the land Beckford would have been familiar with – because of the monumental gateway with its hideous faces which was built not by Beckford, but his father (also, helpfully, William Beckford). Beckford pere also created the lake which his son enlarged, and it was around the lake that the follies were grouped. The most accessible now is a ruinous cromlech-like structure on a steep slope, quite rightly fenced off as it looks as though a good gust of wind would bring it down: this is sometimes described as ‘The Hermitage’, but I think that’s more likely to be the towering stone structure in the wood just below the cromlech, with a little arched doorway and two small windows. That building is separate from the Tunnel, which runs beneath the road that follows the west side of the lake: that you can only glimpse through two roughly circular apertures and a largely filled-in doorway, though according to Historic England it has ‘three arched openings leading to a domed chamber and then to a curving tunnel’. Probably the best site, the main grotto on the east side of the lake, is on private estate land and inaccessible, though a LiberFaciorum page has some photos of a structure with fake stalactites which may be it, unless that’s yet another unmarked folly on the public side which I missed. Headley & Meulenkamp don’t cover the Fonthill Lake follies at all, only mentioning a grotto in passing when they discuss Old Wardour and the grotto there; I got the reference from Dave Hamilton’s recent Weird Guide and he rather implies he followed the private path on the east of the lake to find the big grotto, which I balked at doing having seen two vans resplendent with the Fonthill Estate logo either driving about or parked up. An angler I asked insisted you could see the private grotto from the western side just by the boathouse, but that’s the Landing Stage constructed by William Beckford Senior, complete with four huge stone ‘urns’ (except that they don’t contain anything).

Does Fonthill count as a Gothic Garden? I’m inclined to say No. It has some of the elements we see in places that do, especially the arrangement of features around a lake or river, and Beckford was familiar with such sites – Hackfall drove him almost to distraction with imaginative excitement – but there’s nothing here that tends to the sublime, nothing intended to excite terror or induce gloom. Maybe if we had a clearer idea of how the structures we can see now were intended to work as an ensemble we might take a different view.

Weary Words

Swanvale Halt is quiet at the moment. Some of this is down to the schools being out, and some to the heat (it was absolutely deathly at the height of the heatwave). And things are quiet for me: a little spate of funerals and baptisms has come to an end, and it was in any case nothing like the numbers that I used to deal with when I was first ordained. I have found myself feeling increasingly exhausted; there have been days when dragging myself back up the hill from the church has actually been hard work, and I don’t think that was entirely to do with the heat. Why should it be, if I have less to do?

Every now and again I speak to Dale, a former parishioner, over Zoom: we started during the pandemic. American Dale has had so many careers and courses of academic study that I find it a challenge to work out how they all fit in: now he lives a somewhat health-restricted life in a south Midlands town. He thinks I am a cleverer and better person than I am. This week he mused on the kind of relationship he and I have, which is a sort of pastoral one but also one of peers. I used my tiredness as an example: I can’t tell actual parishioners how weary I feel as this will probably make them less willing to bother me with things I really should be bothered with. ‘Reverting to the career as a therapist I never pursued’, Dale says (another one? really?) ‘I would say that close attention to people – which is what Jesus does – is exhausting and a day that ends in a feeling of exhaustion and fulfilment has succeeded’.

I wondered how often ‘fulfilment’ described how I feel at the end of a day. Certainly I appreciate the sense of having had a helpful interaction with someone, even Mad Trevor, no matter how tiring it has been. My frustration is that I am so often unable to offer anything which feels meaningful. But is the meaning simply in the interaction, in the listening? Dale’s thoughts suggested it might be. I also reflected that I might also draw some energy from those interactions, a different kind of energy from the sort I expend, in the same way that in the world of physics kinetic energy gets converted to potential energy and vice versa. Maybe it was having fewer such interactions that made me feel exhausted, and the quiet time was a sudden withdrawal of a kind of energization I relied on.

That could be something that changes the whole way I view areas of my work, and life beyond my work in fact. Amazing that one can reach 56 and not know something so basic.

(Photo of my day-off lunchtime trip to a local pool for context)

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

The Principal of St Stephen’s House while I was there, Fr Sheehy, remains an Anglican parish priest in Lancashire, but his successor Robin Ward (who I have only met a couple of times) crossed the Tiber a few months ago in a move which surprised absolutely no one. The most recent edition of the magazine The Lamp carried an explanation of Canon Ward’s conversion – ‘Shivering at the Gates’, he called it, lifting a phrase from John Henry Newman whose experience he feels he shares. There is a lot here that’s moving and illuminating, even if one’s eyes widen at a panegyric of the stern ‘sacramental Protestantism’ of the old Prayer Book coming from a quarter of the Anglican Church which spurned that very Book whenever it got the chance. But the article also reveals to me how remote I now feel from some of the concerns that seemed to occupy my thinking in those strange, far-off days when I first found myself becoming a Christian in an Anglo-Catholic context.

I think the shift first began when I came to regard the model of the Holy Spirit working as a kind of divine electricity for which the wiring had to be exactly right as fundamentally loopy. It’s an idea that Dr Ward still subscribes to: he describes realising that because of the increasing number of women bishops in the Church of England ‘it would eventually be the case that the lineage of all or at least most male bishops would trace back to a female consecrator’ (what did you think would happen? one might ask). This is the idea that an ecclesial body, a Church, is legitimised because it contains legitimate bishops rather than the other way around – in Fr Couratin’s deft summary, a belief in ‘hands on heads’ rather than ‘bums on thrones’. There are other ways of framing the issue. Do we see Christians in a variety of ecclesial structures showing the fruits of the Spirit? Of course we do. Can a soul be saved outside this or that ecclesial structure? Of course it can: not even the Roman Church now reserves that capacity to itself alone. It could very well be that God intends one kind over another, and I certainly believe schism is a sin – though against charity, more than against truth – but it’s a secondary matter. The point is, in so far as you can, to pursue your salvation where you are: ‘let every one abide in the same calling wherein he was called’, says St Paul. We might also remember Christ saying to the disciples that he has ‘other sheep not of this fold’ when Dr Ward describes his sense of homecoming into ‘the One True Fold of the Redeemer’: I have long since ceased to believe that on earth there is any such thing, whatever the Lord meant by that ambiguous statement.

Of course Dr Ward never says the Church of England is illegitimate. He says it is compromised: ‘pluralist, strained, apprehensive’, and in saying so is quite right. It is the prospect of escaping that environment which seems to appeal most to him, and as life draws on the sense of rest has a powerful appeal. Who wants to carry on battling for what seems constantly under threat? I have often thought that a basic motivation in our Church lives is to try to safeguard the experiences which led to our conversion, unless we have consciously moved on from them. Dr Ward’s apologia makes me reflect that sometimes – no, often – those experiences come packages in an entire ecclesiology. But to the me of 2026, ultimately, all these things seem of little importance beside the ability to say my prayers, and carry on discovering the way of Christ alongside others. So long as a quiet 8am communion service exists within reach, I still have that even if I am not saying it anymore. Nothing else seems to matter overmuch.

Lending a Hand

Revd Harriet looks after the church at Temple Piper; one of four in her patch, though the diocese is doing its best to close one of them. Mind you, they've been trying to do that for about fifteen years. Several years of looking after four churches has taken its toll and Harriet is off sick, and I went over to Temple Piper to fill in at their main service.

It is always instructive to see how other churches do things, because within the main tramlines of Church tradition we tend to believe that we are representative. Swanvale Halt may be a moderate Catholic church but we shouldn't be that much different from any other church which has a eucharistic tradition, should we? The Mass is the Mass, even if you call it something else.

All right, Temple Piper used a slightly different order of service with a baptismal creed and a simplified confession and absolution, but the eucharistic prayer was the same, and there were the same kind of hymns and texts from the same translation of the Scriptures. I didn't have a chasuble to wear (a maniple? you jest) but there was a stole, and at the last church I helped in they didn't even have that. 

It was the communion arrangements that differed. At Temple Piper they have got into the reprehensible habit of using individual tumblers of wine, though the president still has a chalice. They use a small oval gate-leg table as an altar, exactly the same as one I have at home and which I have photographed so you can get some idea of what I'm talking about. Into this constricted space, I had to cram rather more than luxuriates across the full-size altar at Swanvale Halt, namely:

• a brass missal stand
• a wooden holder with thirty-five tumblers of ordinary wine and a handful of non-alcoholic ones which had to be moved from a pew to, well, somewhere I could get to them, and an inconveniently large cloth laid over the top of the whole thing
• a chalice and a cloth that was probably intended as a purificator
• a dish of loose wafers under a plastic dome with a handle on the top
• a tray with cruets and a lavabo towel
• an ablutions bowl

At least there were no candles. Those were on the old high altar a couple of yards behind me. 

I found myself constantly recalibrating my gestures to try and make what I had to work with conform to what I felt I absolutely had to do, without tipping it all over and causing chaos. My main problems was that there was no spare space to move anything into, and I could have done with a couple of extra hands. The sidespeople had overestimated the number of people taking communion by about ten, which was no mean number for a congregation of a bit less than forty. With no other instructions I ended up tipping the unused wine tumblers into the chalice and swigging what was left, but in theory I suppose I should have rinsed them all out. I have a horrible feeling they were just taken to the sink. I was sweating and trembly by the end and it wasn't really to do with the warmth of the morning.

A Little Light Shining

Christine the dog lady maintained in 2021 that she would never have another Boxer after her third died. In the end she took a final beast in from rescue. The next few years were a roller-coaster in terms of her own health and Larry's, and I was with them both when a kind vet came to ease his passage from this existence during a storm on Hallowe'en last year. 

A few days ago Christine called in at her local church to pray and light a candle. This church usually has a volunteer at hand when open; the votive candles they use are not the tea-light kind but upright ones that are stood in a tray of sand. Christine says all the candles available had been lit before, so she asked whether there were any new ones: the answer was that this particular church was committed to Eco-Church policies and when there were candles left alight at the end of the day blew them out to be used again. Christine doesn't have any superstitious feeling that if a candle is blown out the prayer is cancelled or anything of that sort: but on a deep level she found it hard to articulate it felt dismissive. 'I wouldn't have minded if they were used for something else in the church', she told me, 'but not reused in that way'.

At Swanvale Halt we use little tea-lights at the votive candle stand. Occasionally I have found a row of candles lit and then clearly blown out very soon afterwards. I don't know whether this happens when people don't understand the normal candle-lighting protocol, or when someone might be mucking about, but what is obvious is that nobody ever chooses to light a candle that's already been lit once. If I find a candle that's been lit and then extinguished, I usually relight it and let it burn down: the alternative is to gather them up to use for decoration at Christmas or something, but really for that you want candles that will reliably burn for a certain amount of time, so typically it isn't worth it.

This raises the question of what we think we're doing when we light a votive candle. 'The candle burning its life out before a statue', the New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia says sensibly, 'is no doubt felt in some ill-defined way to be symbolical of prayer and sacrifice', but that 'no doubt' suggests that the custom is not really talked about. I think we feel that the candle flame is carrying on our prayer once we have stopped, not of course in any literal way, but that it represents our continued intention to which we may return. To extinguish a votive candle, or to expect someone to reuse one, does go against that sense (note that nobody cares at all about having a secondhand candle for a liturgical purpose, like the ones lit for the Crib Service or the processions at Candlemas and Advent Sunday - they don't perform the same function). I wonder whether church communities realise how pursuing a perfectly reasonable objective can make them seem mean and petty in practice.

Nearly Forgot

I can only imagine Il Rettore was to blame for prompting the church, completely unsuspected by me untill it happened, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of my priesting on Sunday. We had fizz and cake and I cannot complain because there ought to be more occasions for that. I was also presented with a very striking vase I'd admired when it was under consideration for sale at the Spring Fair, and a certificate from the diocese. I had no idea such things existed - I suppose just remaining functioning is an achievement when I think of all those who have left the ministry!

Strangely the anniversary is never one I pay much attention to unlike some of the people I was ordained with and I wonder why that is. In any case I always think of my ordination to the diaconate as being the moment my status changed in the eyes of society, myself, and maybe even God. Perhaps it was because I never really sought this peculiar existence and would have been perfectly content to remain in the museum world had I been turned down at my selection conference: I thought it was what God wanted me to do, but I could have been wrong. I do always think an ordained person should have an idea of what they might try to do if they lost their faith or just their job, but my shadow life has changed over time. I now think it might be good to work for a dog rescue, but I don't think there's much scope there. Even fantastic Bliss Cavalier Rescue only has one part-time employee helping to save beautiful canines!

St Catherine in Bruges

Jean our sacristan and her husband have been on holiday in Bruges and spotted this image of St Catherine in the city museum, part of a group from 1623 including St Barbara and the Magdalene. I like the fact that she's treading on a bit of the wheel.