Carping the Diem in Lullington

So, in the spirit of seizing the fish, when I found myself on the Wiltshire/Somerset border this afternoon, with an hour to spare between dropping Son the Elder off in Dilton Marsh and being due at potter Jan Lane's house to help her with some technolologickal stuff, I decided to return to Lullington - top of my list of places, some of which I absolutely finally need to get to round to visiting this year - in the hope of getting into the church.  

The Church of All Saints, Lullington, dates from the 12th century and is famed for its Norman carvings.  You might call these grotesques 'gargoyles', but in Somerset a distinction is made between carvings that serve a purpose and those that are purely decorative, hence they are 'hunky punks'.  

Externally, however, this is the gem - the spectacular North Door.  

Here it is in context ... 

... topped by a niche containing a sculpture of Christ in Majesty.  

All this I had seen before. With luck today I would have time to find the keyholder and get inside.  

Gentle reader, I didn't even have to do that.  There was a car parked just outside the church, the door was open and a prospective bride and groom were being shown around by one of the parishioners. I slipped inside, rejoicing, to find this wonderfully wonky arch of Norman stonework which, at some point, metamorphosed into Gothickery.  

And see how beautifully lit it is ... from light into the darkness of Choir into the light of the Chancel. 

Here's a closer look at the crossing capitals, featuring two wyvern-type creatures with human heads and a green man ...

 ... and something I've seen described as an ox with two bodies and one head, though they appear to me to have rather leonine feet and tails, and a pair of birds, perhaps, preening each other.

More very well-preserved carvings ...

... including a head reputed to be that of King Edward I ... 

... and glorious stained glass light.

I loved this rather more modern Arts and Crafts memorial.

I adored the painted organ pipes.

Oh but the best thing of all, inside and out, is the deservedly famous font - early Norman (c11th century), with interlinked arches under a frieze of flowers, and inscribed with the motto 'Hoc Fontis Sacro Peveunt Delicta Lavacro' - 'in this holy font sins perish and are washed away'.  (Still not sure how a baby can be said to have sinned, but there you go.)  

Above the inscription is another frieze of 'green cats', which, it is believed, were supposed to be lions but which were carved by stonemasons who'd never seen the real thing - a bit like the Elephant and Castle in Chester Cathedral.   

And finally some snowdrops to cheer me on my way. Forget winter ... spring is coming.  

The Biggening Skies

With Son the Elder deposited at the seond day of Robot Wars events, my partner and I set out for the Norfolk coast.  After all, if you are this close to the edge of the country, you might as well continue until you can go no further.  'Anyhow, I've heard East Cromer is really nice,' said my partner.  A little later on, however, he decided that he might be thinking of East Coker.  'Well, my mate Steve definitely said Cromer's worth a visit,' he persisted. 

First, though, there were a couple of churches I wanted to stop at, although things didn't go quite to plan, as when tasked with directing us to Little Witchingham, the sat nav dropped us in the middle of nowhere - in fact, I began to wonder if the witches had bewitched the village away.  In the end I had to resort to reading a signpost.  Crikey.

Then there it was - St Faith's - no longer in regular use (owing to a lack of same?) and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.  And open!

And what a church, covered in wall paintings dating from the middle of the 14th century.  And to think they were almost lost for ever, having been discovered only in the 1970s when the church was in a ruinous state and earmarked for demolition.  

 

  

Not all of the South Wall appears to have been painted, but Eve Baker, the art historian who discovered the murals, believes that it had been prepared for painting and that something had intervened to stop it happening, almost certainly the Black Death of 1348.   

Outside I was still keeping an eye out for one of those bigenning skies and I wasn't going to go home till I saw one.  This at least was a start ... 

and this not a bad continuation ...

BUT there was something wrong with the qualitative flatness of the place.  I'd been expecting somewhere like the Somerset Levels, where the roads are raised and called causeways, and every winter the land remembers the implications of its name and floods.  But Norfolk - or at least this part of it - is quite bumpy, with hillocks and rises.  Not really flat at all.

Then I realised what was bothering me.  In Somerset your eye runs over the terrain until it hits a range of hills - the Mendips, the Poldens, the Quantocks, the Brendons, the Blackdowns - which accentuate the flatness of the low-lying land, whilst in Norfolk there are no ranges of hills.  It is a different sort of flat, and therein, I'd wager, lie the bigenning skies.  

Relieved, I drove on to Thurgarton, our next stop which boasts a towerless thatched church.  All Saints did once have a tower which fell in the 1880s.  The church was eventually abandoned altogether and only rescued in the 1980s, again thanks to the Churches Conservation Trust. 

Outside there was a pleasingly chubby cherub flanked by two toothsome skulls ... 

and inside a series of carved mediaeval bench ends.  Here's a man (a huntsman or wild man?) creeping up on two dogs fighting ... 

... a liony creature and a man playing the bagpipe, though the bag bit has been lost ... 

... a creature - possibly a gryphon? - holding a man's head in his paws and a dragon ...

... a rather more convincing elephant and castle, than the one I saw in the Choir at Chester Cathedral ... 

There were also some fragmentary Elizabethan texts on the walls.  (Not everyone was impressed by the litany that is the Ten Commandments.)

  

My favourite things were the sense of space you get - always a feature of Conservation Trust Churches which are stripped of all clutter - and the amazing hammerbeam chancel roof, which put me in mind of the final section of Seamus Heaney's sequence, Lightenings.

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise

Were all at prayers inside the oratory

A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep

It hooked itself into the altar rails

And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope

And struggled to release it. But in vain.

'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'

The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So

They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back

Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

  

Outside big skies were filled with sea gulls as a tractor ploughed the stubble.  We headed on to Cromer.  

Apparently the artist Algernon Swinburne visited Cromer in 1880 and said that it was 'an esplanady sort of place' ... 

... and in 1892 Oscar Wilde claimed he found Cromer 'excellent for writing, golf better'.  We struggled to find a decent pub. 

The colours, however, were gorgeous ... 

  

... and the skies, yes, the skies were very big indeed.  

A Proper Elephant and a Proper Castle

It was a tricky drive up to Queensferry in North Wales on Sunday. Every time I thought the sun was burning off the fog, the fog regrouped.  It was still dank by the time I reached Chester, having dropped Son the Elder off at his roboteering event, and the exterior of my destination - Chester Cathedral - looked more than a little forbidding.  My poor West Country eye, so used to the Cotswold stone, Bath stone, Ham stone,  granite, finds the blackened brick of the North and the South East difficult to accommodate.  But the leaves looked like fragments of stained glass hanging from the tracery of branches, so that was OK.

The Cathedral itself was closed to gawpers as there was a service in progress, so I had a sandwich and a cup of tea in the Refectory, enjoying the fact that this room has always been a Refectory, right back to when the Cathedral was an Abbey, pre Henry VIII and his murderous manipulations.  There was some exciting graffiti with serifs, quite high up on the back wall, dating from 1688.  Naughty Robert Hesketh and Joseph Saunders!

After that, I whiled away more time wandering around the cloisters, where, amongst the stone sarcophagi and carvings of mediaeval men playing bagpipes, there was a rather more modern memorial to two men of Chester, who 'adventured their lives even unto death'.  

Eventually I spotted an open door and nipped into the Cathedral itself.  For a moment I imagined that the fog had slipped in with me, but it was incense hanging heavily in the air.  Struggling still with the fabric of the place, I decided to concentrate on ferreting out quirk to delight the eye and there was plenty of that ... 

... like this fabulous fragment of mediaeval glass depicting the resurrection of a soul, we are told, though it looks pretty corporeal to me.  I thought at first that the line on its jaw was an exiting worm, which would have been brilliant, though in close up it's probably the hinge.  

Here on the St Werburgh's shrine there was not a resurrected goose, but this tiny carving of a dog scratching its fleas, which felt kind of warm and inclusive. 

There were also carvings of the mediaeval masons who originally worked on the building, literally holding it up, and a boss in the Lady Chapel illustrating the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, which mysteriously survived Henry's decree for all such depictions to be destroyed.   



I'd got it into my head that I wasn't going to see any utter magnificence in such a grim-looking piece of heaven upon earth, but that was before I reached the Quire.

It was stunning, not just in its entirety, but with regard to detail also.   There was someone naughty, presumably, being eaten by a dog ... 

... and someone else having a pint ... 

... and look! A green man.

But best of all is this elephant and castle and I'll tell you why - first of all, it's been carved by someone who has obviously never seen one.  It's got hocks and hoooves like a horse.  And second, its howdah is like a castle which kind of knocks on the head all that nonsense about the Infanta of Castile.  We want proper elephants and proper castles!  

Feeling gloriously middle age-y (in both senses), I departed for a wander around the city walls, which, uniquely, are almost completely intact.  And it was sunnily autumnal. Hoorah!  

The sight of all the mediaeval buildings made me wonder how Bristol would have looked, had it not been for the Blitz and the depredations of our post-war city planners.

I stopped off to have a bit of a fossick around the Roman ruins.  I was particularly interested by the amphitheatre.  Look, there's the shadow of Nemesis, falling over her shrine ... no, wait, it's me ...
 

I also popped into the Church of St John the Baptist, which is so close to the Roman ruins as to make you wonder whether it was originally built on the site of the martyrdom of a very early Christian. My disappointment at the lack of guide books was ameliorated by this fabulous painting of yer man on one of the columns ... 

 ... and the beautiful grave slab of Agnes, wife of Richard de Ridleigh, who died in 1347 'on the Sabbath next before the feast of Philip and James the Apostle'.  

A quick shufti at the River Dee and the Castle and it was time to return for Son the Elder.  As always, it seems, I need to return ere long for there was no time to see the three hares tile in the Grosvenor Museum owing to its truncated opening hours on a Sunday.  So, arrivederci, Chester ...