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This Court of Shades

30/4/2023

Yn lle llys cysgodion
Fe godwn llys celf, llys goleuni,
Bendith ar enw'r creawdrner
A wnaeth saeroniaeth y ser.
Nis diffydd gwynt hynt yr hydref
Afrlladen o nen y nef,
Fe wnawn fin celf, fin hanes,
Rhwng llleufer ser a lludw.

In the court of shades
We hold the court of Art and Light.
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
And round beneath it
Time in hours, days and years like a vast shadow mov'd.
Between starlight and ashes we must make our story.

Dafydd ap Gwilym/Henry Vaughan.

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Ilfracombe and Parracombe

9/7/2019

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The parishioners of Ashburton, the Devon parish in which I live, take enormous pride in their connection to the fourteenth century Bishop Stapledon of Exeter; justly perhaps, as the town was ecclesiastical property in the Middle Ages, and the Bishop responsible for establishing its market in 1309. He provided its chantry-chapel of St Lawrence that subsequently became its grammar-school. and which is still the focus of much of its traditional ceremonial. But despite a rather sticky end - lynched in London by opponents of King Edward II - Ashburton forgets that he was a dynamic force elsewhere in Devon. It was Stapledon's authority that drove the refurbishment of Ilfracombe's parish church, Holy Trinity. To find it, you go half-way up the hill, above the harbour and the holiday spots. There are generous views of the chiefly Victorian town and seascape below.
In many ways Holy Trinity is a typical large town church: a Norman tower has been engulfed by a growth of four naves, with other embellishments; the interior is untidy with children's play areas and outreach information boards and other clutter which I suppose at least testifies to a busy and enthusiastic support making the most of the available space. Fortunately, the points of interest for the visitor are chiefly above all that - in the literal as well as metaphorical sense. Firstly is the originally fifteenth century waggon roof, but which the Victorians went to town on, adding elaborately decorated and coloured wooden panelling above the chancel and particularly above the choir. This draws the eye upward immediately, and it is only after that one notices the extraordinary corbels down either side of the nave. These are so bizarre, and in a couple of instances obscene, that it is difficult to imagine the brief that was handed to the masons; "Whatever you dreamed about last night - that'll do". In which case the authorities must have been relieved that the twenty-five figures were skied almost out of sight - till God provided binoculars. The figures could be templates for Hieronymous Bosch, this mad mixture of half-animal, half-human gesturing grotesques. Stranger yet, each forms the base for wooden angels carved by a local man in the Victorian restoration to match their predecessors. Were they too painted black and gilded? But why not?
Nearer to earth, but just a little, there are some lovely stained-glass windows, mostly of Victorian date.
Holy Trinity is authentically busy, crowded and eclectic; and could not be more of a contrast with St Petrock's at Parracombe, about ten minutes up the road. I went there next. It's an expedition along the steep and narrow village street, and by a winding country lane which ends brusquely in the trees that shroud the little church.
The stone body of the church hunkers down among high hedges in summer sunlight; a conventional enough mixture of thirteenth century chancel and fifteenth century double aisle. But inside it breathes the spirit of the the eighteenth century countryside, one of the most visited churches in the country (though I had it to myself in May) and the very first to be acquired by the Churches Conservation Trust.
No overzealous Victorian restoration here; in fact, the Victorians sought to pull down its leaning walls ( the photo below is not misleading!) and it was only due to the likes of John Ruskin that it was saved. But how appealing to modern tastes! Plain white walls set off time-bleached box pews. Grey and Green and Buff predominate., from the random slate floor to the wooden tympanum over the low chancel screen, covered in texts of eighteenth century script, and topped by the Hanoverian royal arms, where just a little flourish of colour was permitted. At the west end, the pews rise up theatrically, to accommodate the village band: it is said that St.Petroc's was the last church in Devon to have such accompaniment. No doubt the musicians hung their coats on the nearby pegs the better to tune their instruments. In the current somnolence, one can almost catch a ghost of that West Gallery sound, the serpent and the bass viol. There is a clatter as the instruments are laid aside, and the minister,(who looks like Laurence Sterne) gathers the sleeves of his surplice to mount the little pulpit, clears his throat. His text, from Corinthians, is written on the sounding board over his head: For we preach not ourselves....

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Ashburton's Electoral Scurrility

11/6/2019

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I am pleased to say that I have recently joined the trustees of the little museum in our ancient town here in Devon. Amongst the wool-combs and fireman's helmets, the Ashburton History Museum has a display of mid-Victorian posters and ephemera that are as scurrilous and sarcastic about the town’s leading lights as anything in modern media. They originate in the General Elections of 1859 and 1865, which as we shall see were hard- fought in the town. They may still raise a wry smile of astonishment, but provide a good reflection of the national life of our Victorian forebears.
Prior to the Great Reform Act of 1832 Ashburton had been entitled to two Members of Parliament. The Act reduced this to one, but the right to vote was still restricted to certain householders. Nationally, only about one man in five was entitled to vote and of course, no women. From 1832, Ashburton consistently returned a Whig as its MP, the Whigs and the Radicals being the predecessors of the Liberal Party. The town favoured men who had a direct interest in supporting its principal trade, which was the export of its woollen serge to Chinese markets via the East India Company. From 1834, the trade was under threat because the government had removed the company’s monopoly on trade to the Far East.
In consequence, the town in 1841 was happy to elect William Jardine as its MP, despite the fact that his home was in Scotland. He was chosen because he was the founder and a director of Jardine Matheson, a company which had stepped into the vacuum left by the East India Company. The company created Hong Kong for its trading base. Jardine was a leading instigator of the Opium War of 1840 between Britain and China, fought to prop up the company’s smuggling of opium into China in one of the less glorious episodes of the British Empire. When Jardine died suddenly in 1843, there was a by-election, and who should the town choose but his co-director, James Matheson. Matheson was another Scot, and the second largest landowner in Britain. He bought the whole Isle of Lewis in 1844, and although making a lot of agricultural ‘improvements ‘ there, was responsible for the forced emigration of hundreds of its people.
At the General Election of 1847, Mr Matheson stood down, but only to be replaced by his son and company co-director, Thomas Matheson. But by 1852, the latter took the opportunity of a Scottish seat and stood aside in favour of the self-described Radical, George Moffat, who was elected unopposed. Mr Moffat was a career politician who had previously been the MP for Dartmouth, and after Ashburton, went onto represent Honiton and then Southampton. When not in London, he lived in a Gothic-revival castle in Herefordshire, but was probably attractive to Ashburton electors because of his connections with the Far East through the tea trade in which he had initially made his fortune.
1859 was the year for the next General Election. The Conservatives, still split over the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, had regained power under Lord Derby, but now faced serious competition from an opposition led by Lord Palmerston. This was the year the liberals, radicals and disenchanted Tories formed themselves into The Liberal Party. But the Conservatives were confident they had the right candidate for Ashburton, John Harvey Astell, because he was a director of the East India Company. Mr Astell lived near Cambridge: he had been elected as its MP in 1852, only to be unceremoniously dumped the next year by an election petition which alleged dubious election practices. Consequently the election in Ashburton was hard-fought, as the documents in the town’s museum attest. Although Lord Palmerston’s Liberals were successful nationally, Mr Astell unseated Mr Moffat by 91 votes to 90 – a close run thing. (The low numbers in a town of about 3500 people is a good reflection of the still very limited franchise.)
So the next General Election , in 1865, promised to be quite a struggle. The Liberal candidate to oppose Mr Astell was probably going to be Robert Jardine. Despite also living in Scotland, he was likely to be a shoo-in for the nomination as a nephew of William Jardine, and recently appointed head of Jardine Matheson. Then along came Thomas Eales Rogers. Capt. Rogers lived at Waye House, a late-Georgian mansion on the eastern edge of town. He had formerly been a Superintendant of the Bengal Marine, an arm of the East India Company, so he too had Eastern connections. Having, it seems, retired to Ashburton, he fancied a Parliamentary seat in the Liberal interest. He may first have sought a nomination in Liskeard, Cornwall, but to judge by the lampoon in our museum, was heartily rejected; but Ashburton was at least his home turf.
Mr Jardine’s supporters, led by his agent, the local solicitor Robert Tucker, obviously regarded this as quite a threat, and it was the jockeying for favour among the townspeople that led to the quite scabrous posters that we are still lucky enough to have. The Devon Weekly Times, a Liberal paper, thought there was a serious danger of a split vote letting the Conservative back in; it reported that Mr Jardine was buying the local Chuley estate, and it may have been his promise to provide the town with a water supply from it that won the day. In addition, Mr Jardine promised he would ‘come down once a year to give an account of his stewardship.’ No question of local surgeries then; his supporters clearly felt this was quite sufficient. In the event, and after much merriment keeping the printers busy, it was Mr Jardine who was preferred to Mr Rogers.
The election took place on the 14th July. It was an entirely public affair since voting took place in the open, and one can imagine an exuberant Hogarthian event. Hustings were erected in front of the Rising Sun Inn in St.Lawrence Lane, and the Portreeve, Mr Luscombe, was the returning officer in charge. Mr Jardine attended with his proposer and seconder. But for reasons which are not apparent there was no attendance by Mr Astell, although he had been reported in the town a few days earlier. Perhaps he had decided the outcome was a foregone conclusion, as the Weekly Times had previously suggested. In something of an anti-climax therefore, Mr Jardine was elected unopposed. He and his supporters adjourned to the London Inn for a celebratory luncheon.
It does not appear that Capt. Rogers pursued politics any further. In recognition of its tiny electorate the Ashburton constituency was abolished in 1868, and Mr Jardine simply took up a seat at Dumfries, rather nearer to home. In the meantime he did serve as Lord of the Manor of Ashburton, and as well as making good on his promise of a new water supply also promoted the construction of the current Town Hall.
Nationally, the Liberals were returned with an increased majority, but the election of 1865 was notoriously corrupt, with a Royal Commission subsequently unseating thirteen MPs on petition, largely for corrupt expenditure or fiddling the electoral rolls. In the enquiry at Totnes, a infamously venal constituency, it was alleged that Mr Tucker customarily paid voters in Ashburton £25 per vote. But Mr Tucker, and his son who succeeded to his business, continued to live and practice at The Hall in East Street quite undisturbed. Things were due to change with the enlargement of the franchise in 1867, and the introduction of secret ballots in 1872. But meanwhile, as the posters show, everyone had a lot of fun!

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Eggesford

31/5/2019

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I spent last Christmas and New Year in intensive care at The Royal Free Hospital in London (which perhaps explains to my disappointed readers the long gap since my last post). Intensive care - I would not repeat that sleep of near-death, for unlike Hamlet, I now know what dreams may come. Gradually a narrative has become apparent: at first an uneasy voyage, then a long stay in an underworld like an entombment, before being washed up on a cold beach.
I am largely recovered now, save for my stoma and weariness at the end of the day, and grateful to be back. And so we have our first jaunt away - to a cottage on Exmoor. Where I visited this little church, part of the old Eggesford estates of the Chichester family, the unlikely Earls of Donegal (of whom the sailor Francis Chichester was a descendant). The church sits in open parkland above the Taw, but despite its fine position it was not a building that had much appeal. It is chiefly an unremarkable mid-Victorian restoration, with an interior that would be dull and dowdy were it not for the elaborate and disproportionately large memorials.
The scene-stealer - partly because it confronts you on entering by the north door - commemorates the Earl and his two wives and seven children: all nine predeceased him. There is thus a poignancy here, though you have to look hard through the grandiloquence to see it. But to be fair, the sculptor has caught some of that poignancy in his detailing.
Diagonally across the chancel is the Earl's tomb for his parents, laid side-by-side in the time-worn fashion. This monument is equal in grandiloquence to the first, and its epitaphs fulsome in the praise of this early coloniser of unhappy Ireland. A third bleakly classical monument (unfinished? cannibalised?) to a later owner of the estate completes the trinity.
I can think of few things more painful than the death of a child, which seems outrageously against the natural order. Earlier generations, you might think, were accustomed to it, but I doubt it was ever less painful. But there is a particular sadness in these aristocratic attempts to hold on to the dead, who for all their nobility and riches remain just as dead, and the Earl presumably still as forlorn. But after five hundred years it is difficult to see these displays of grief and dynastic pride as anything other than ostentatious. Vainglory and lots of money have somehow overwhelmed natural feeling. I would suggest a simple test , if we could ever learn the answer - did the tenantry in Devon and Donegal mourn their landlords' passing?
Hoskins thought these monuments the finest of their kind in Devon., but this is not a church that speaks of much spirituality: it feels coldly unloved. And high on the hill above the church is the decayed ruin of the great house.

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Lisbon: small capitals

20/9/2018

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There is a lot of pleasure to be had even now walking in the smaller capitals of Europe. While still looking about, a flaneur can still stroll comfortably across the centre of Madrid, say, or Vienna, in an hour , or two at most, and absorb much of the scene on offer: Copenhagen, Oslo certainly, maybe even Amsterdam. They are cities where the centre remains organically of a piece, where their evolution remains largely traceable and apparent. They have not suffered the worst vicissitudes of war and planners; or where they have, their history has been treated with respect.
It must be obvious that London fails to make a list compiled to these criteria. It is too large and its story too long and diverse to have a heart. Its coherence was beaten out of it centuries ago as it sprawled from one village to anothe like some all-devouring amoeba .Its justification, you may say, is in its dynamism; there has been no period when it fell asleep and so consolidated itself. The sound most associated with it is the pneumatic drill, ripping like some crazed dentist into good and bad alike.
But I think you can add Lisbon to my list. At the north-west of the Barrio Alta lies the home of the city's greatest Fadista, Amalia Rodrigues. Two hours, if your feet permit, would take you comfortably down to the river, and so to her birthplace in the Alfama district, and back again through Baixa. A bit up hill and down dale, true, because Lisbon takes its character from its hills just as much as from its long waterfront, but you would rarely be smacked in the eye and so forced to ask yourself - how the hell did THAT get there? Like the best cities on my list, it gets its charm and civility from having taken time to absorb the representatives of its history, from the Moorish towers of Castello St.Jorge to the Romanesque austerity of its small cathedral, and from the nineteenth century boulevards of the northern hills to the grandiloquent Placa da Commercia by the river. Well, yes, the traffic can be as thunderous as anywhere else, but pedestrianisation has been substantial, and there's a good and functioning metro and tram system too. The narrow alleyways fill up when the huge cruise-ships arrive (there were three at once during my visit) and there is some prostitution of culture too, when it feels like Fado is sold in every other restaurant. (You will know what this feels like if you come from Dublin.) It's an argument for another day whether the culture can be faithful to itself and survive such pimping.
Of course, like all the cities in my list, the historic centre is only the heart in the much larger and organic body which it powers. Suburbs in Lisbon spawl out by fits and starts in all directions, endless high-rises of apartments for the most part, and some are no doubt rougher than others. It's a good test of civic virtue how much its inhabitants can share or take part in the cultural heritage a city offers. Portugal has its own backstory of colonialism, and a flying visit isn't enough to tell how successfully it has been absorbed or its relicts are able to contribute. There are quite a few black faces in the streets and trams, but very few at the Fado evenings I attended, though the clientele was largely Portuguese, and many, I guess, afficianados, for here and there they joined readily in the refrains, and at the second, many joined the musicians on the little stage for a final song.
The best of this music could only be Hispanic, for it shares with its near contemporary, Tango, and with Flamenco, a certain intensity of feeling in both the music and (as far as I can gather) the lyrics; something elegaic, where love and death are never far apart, something bitter-sweet. And the best performers carry this off with what Flamenco calls duende, but in Portuguese is saudade, a yearning. The favoured Fado combination is the voice accompanied by the Portuguese guitar and the Spanish guitar. The former is hardly a guitar at all, deriving in the eighteenth century from the English cittern. It has six double courses, paired in octaves, and surprisingly played not with a plectrum but fingerstyle. The fan-shaped headstock is its immediate marker. The strings, at least in Lisbon, are tuned BAEBAD.
In its Lisbon incarnation (and there are rivals) Fado was a true folk-music, in the sense of being the music of the poor and disposessed, produced in the streets and bars, and brothels too. The Fadista, heroic and romantic, struggles with fate - that after all is the meaning of the word Fado. It is a struggle that is doomed for all of us in the end. Meanwhile, with the Fadista, we can at least, in the words of Dylan Thomas, sing in our chains like the sea. Let's walk a little further...

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Ermington

3/9/2018

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The Ordnance Survey map doesn't name the brook that descends from Kitterford's Cross by Ugborough to meet the Erme five miles or so below it: but I like to think of this, in the Saxon way, as the Vale of Ugg. Despite that, very pretty it is too, and the A3121 which follows it has the feel of a country B-road. So its gradual descent is a favourite with cyclists, who can speed along with only minimal effort but still slow enough to take in the view.
Where the valley begins to open up and meet the Erme on its way from Dartmoor is the village of Ermington. The church above the river is famous for something that went wrong. There are not many spires in South Devon, and this may have been a salutary warning; shortly after it was erected in the fifteenth century, its poorly seasoned timbers buckled under the weight of its stone tiling. Thus it was that it joined a notorious club of twisted brethren. Fellow members include Chesterfield and, in Devon, Barnstaple.
But what gains the church of St.Peter and St.Paul its place in Gray is a sisterhood - the three Pinwell sisters who in a few years before 1900 learned the skill of carving to decorate the church's fittings. Their father had taken up the living in 1880, and set about restoring the church under the guidance of the London specialist architect John Sedding. Mary, Annie and Violet must have taken to their craft with single-minded dedication, for the pulpit and the large reredos are a riot of life-like and animated figures, illustrating of course Biblical stories; but the joy they took in the work is readily apparent in their inclusion of family faces (not least their own) as angels around the base of the pulpit. What fun they were having!
The centre of the reredos is their work too - this time in alabaster and possibly to a design by Burne-Jones. And the airy pinnacles of the font cover are also theirs. In fact, they so took to the work that they founded themselves a business in Plymouth, and became responsible for the decoration in a number of West Country churches, before the death of the last and youngest sister, Violet, in 1954.
So this church , in a way, became a personal statement. Fortunately it is large enough to set off beautifully such richness of detail. There is little stained glass, but instead the substantial windows have been created with leadwork that resembles airy spider's webs. The Jacobean rood-screens are limited to the minimum of classical wooden columns. This means the three aisles and small lady-chapel are full of light and no detail is lost. The south altar has been repurposed from a Sixteenth century tomb-chest of the Strathleigh family, and their war-helms and banner placed high above, reminders of an earlier generation who called this church their own.
The path from the south porch declines sharply by tombs of decayed slate to the elaborate gateway at the roadside. I pedalled off for home along the meandering flood-plain of the Erme, enjoying the warm sunshine of early autumn.

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The Pattern of English Building

24/8/2018

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Last weekend I went to Widecombe church, down here on Dartmoor, to see Alison singing with the Widecombe Singers. The little community choir was supporting Chris Hoban. He's a singer/songwriter from Topsham, and gaining quite a following in Devon for his well-fashioned narrative songs. They deal for the most part with historical events or local issues and he thus escapes the solipsistic meanderings of many aspiring acts. It helps that he has a strong voice matched by his accompaniment on guitar, accordion and keyboard. There is a lot of variety, and so your interest is held. The Singers too were worth a listen on their own account - much improved over the last twelve months - singing five or six well-known folk-songs lightly arranged by Paul Sartin or Sally Davies: arrangements which do not lose (too much) the simplicity of the originals, and give everyone a crack at singing that might be deterred from a solo performance: they are an ideal match for a choir who just like to turn up and sing for fun.
But sitting in the great nave of the church of St.Pancras - the Cathedral of the Moor to its admirers - provided a perfect demonstration of the central theme of the book I am just finishing, The Pattern of English Building, by the late Alec Clifton-Taylor (1962). The book is a magisterial survey of the history of (mainly domestic) building in England, which it approaches by way of geology. It insists upon the close connection of the character of the building to the local landscape and the materials the landscape provides. Thus the best buildings for Clifton-Taylor are those which are rooted in and at home in their environment. The massive but simple granite columns of the Widecombe church exemplify this well, cut of the same stuff as the great and very solid tors which dominate the local scene; the moorman and the tinner came to worship and be together in a building that was simply the bedrock of their lives writ large. They could readily appreciate the aptness of the Christian metaphor of the Rock; it demonstrated for them something that was not only unshakable but seemed a permanent fixture in their lives.
(In 1638 the church was was struck by ball-lightning during a service, the roof torn open and four people killed. Such a threat to stability and permanence could only have been the work of the Devil, so local legend attributes it.)
So it is through all the regions of the country. The farmer sowing his wheat in the flinty soil of Norfolk comes home to his house of flint, the ploughman of Yorkshire or Dorset all the long day turns up the very stones from which his cottage is built. Brick, being in the most part formed from local clay, takes on the hue of its setting. Even timber-frame building is a reflection of a lost England of forest and woodland. Of course, with the Industrial Revolution this began to change. Bricks could come from far away, a roof of uniform Welsh slate was a cheap option. So we have long reached the point when the sprawl of new estates are block and steel and render owing nothing to their surroundings, so that Whitby and Wigan and Worcester and the Weald every year grow more alike, with habitations that are everywhere and nowhere. The genius of place is lost.
The complaint that we have lost touch with the countryside is a commonplace; but maybe we have also lost touch with our built environment too, which equally shapes our sense of home and identity, almost unnoticed. Maybe it is this that in part accounts for the loneliness in the paintings of L.S.Lowry, which I recently blogged about.
It is a virtue of writers like Clifton-Taylor that they can make you see what may have previously passed unnoticed. The columns and walls of Widecombe church reflect the the harshness of the surrounding moor, but their starkness was borne upon the builders by the difficulty of carving hard granite. The narrow courses of Elizabethan brickwork were dictated by the builders' difficulty in firing bricks of any greater thickness. Georgian glazing-bars were a fitting counterpart to their classical surroundings, so that their loss to Victorian plate-glass seems like a jarring black eye. Does anyone but me resent the multitude of Edwardian terraced streets that could be instantly improved by replacing the plastic double-glazing and returning the iron railings cut down in the War? Instead of the houses leaning against each other like a row of bruised and exhausted drunks, simple suburbs could be refreshed and whole. Walking to the station on a workaday morning, we might all feel the better because not only have our surroundings become authentically pleasing and restored to their history but someone has cared enough to do it.

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Doddiscombleigh and Ashton

23/7/2018

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As the door swings open into the little church at Doddiscombleigh the first glimpse is of St.Christopher, in the glass of the north wall opposite. He carries the Christ-child on his shoulder across the river; those are his attributes, and make him an apt patron for someone who not only bears his name, but for anyone who may be travelling from church to church. Or through life, come to that.
St.Christopher has looked down from this wall for over six-hundred years, and he has not been alone, since the glory of this otherwise quite simple church is the ancient stained glass of its north and east walls. It is some of the earliest and best-preserved in the whole country outside the great cathedrals, having needed only very limited restoration, and miraculously surviving intact both the Reformation and the Civil War, and many other vicissitudes.
St.Christopher is succeeded along the wall by St.Michael, the patron of the church, and then by a variety of saints in the four windows of this wall, before we reach the famous window in the east wall, which is in three parts: a triptych, with Christ at its centre, illustrating the seven sacraments. There is much plain glass, making that which is coloured all the more striking, but the true delight now is in the solemn medieval faces who enact the various rites with pursed lips and beneath the page-boy haircuts of the period - probably the 1480's. Surely they could not have expected to have survived so long, or that the last trump would be so long delayed.
I managed to ride past the gates of St.Michael's without noticing them, for the church hides itself down a little lane and behind a vast copper beech. I should have taken directions at the Nobody Inn, where on this steamy afternoon a number of drinkers were refreshing themselves on the lawns outside. They were still there when I left later, up the remarkable lane to Ashton: it follows a long re-entrant in the hills, a world of its own, then climbing at last to reveal a sudden view across the Teign to Christow. The steep fields around were yellow in the drought.
Ashton church is a gradual pull up from the Teign, but you can't miss it - the tower is proud of the trees on a sharp outcrop. When you leave the bike, there's a short steep climb by stairs to reach its door. It's not auspicious: the churchyard is largely rank and overgrown, and a notice in the porch sternly directs you to the side-door, as if to a tradesman's entrance, which is actually the west door. But this makes the ensuing revelation when you finally step inside all the better. The nave climbs up in front of you by ancient pews of carved oak to a broad screen of oak across the double aisle: the eye is led to it by a font and then columns of Beer stone, still as white and unworn as the day they were set in place. There is a unity - every thing is of a Perpendicular piece. There are intrusions: the not-quite-yet-classical Chudleigh family memorial of 1657, the rood a Victorian re-creation. But the church breathes the spirit of the fifteenth century.
And not least in the detail, for the screen carries paintings of thirty-two saints and their attributes, original and vivacious (and in the case of St.George rather camp, as Todd Gray remarks). They have been dulled by time, but few have been defaced, and they would have given a lively hagiographic lesson to worshippers. But there is more, because the screen where it extends across the northern chapel is decorated on its reverse by paintings of a slightly later date, possibly it is thought copied from some chap-book, portraying figures from the Incarnation with accompanying texts in scroll-work. The small chapel, thought to have been a chantry for the Chudleigh family, is bare now: but this allows space to admire the paintings, and to stand back to view the fading medieval grandeur of a wall-painting: the vision of St.Gregory, revealed when the Chudleigh memorial was moved in 1899. What gasps that reveal must have elicited!
The few thatched cottages that make up Higher Ashton climb the hill behind the church, and there is a manor-house a few hundred yards below it. But this is a backwater in a backwater, a church built in a time when Devon lanes were barely tracks, and only serviced by ponies and sledges and packmen. Across the continent a renaissance was well under way; meanwhile in Doddiscombleigh and in Ashton, they secreted away these glories of an antique fashion.
And you still can't get a mobile signal in the Teign valley: I hurried down the river and was late for supper.

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Devon's Fifty Best Churches

17/7/2018

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Until the nineteenth century, it is probably true to say that the vast majority of ordinary people were largely excluded from the knowledge and enjoyment of visual art. Painting, sculpture and tapestry were for the delight of only those few, and their friends, who could afford them. The man-made world must have seemed a drab and a muddy place. But the world of the spirit would have been a different matter. Few would have access to the homes of the rich and powerful, but all had access to their local church, and the impact of entering its gate to stand beneath walls, towers and buttresses much grander and bigger than any dwelling nearby cannot be underestimated; and once inside, there was space and colour and stories; music too, if they were lucky. The promise of the next world to mean lives was made flesh before them.
In a world of change and struggle, these churches represented continuity and some approach to permanence. They were places you could turn to - if you were of the right persuasion - for celebration and for consolation. They were all the more powerful because your parents and grandparents and generations before had come there for the same reasons, and sanctified the building with their hearts.
So visiting an old church is a form of time-travel, where we can enter the world of our ancestors and in some part share their sorrows and hopes. We can briefly experience their spiritual world, and see reflected there the skills and crafts that they could offer to it.
If you are lucky, it is still a living thing. So my first visit of this scheme, which I will describe shortly, was to the splendid parish church of St.Andrew's at Cullompton, where on a Sunday morning at twelve-thirty the congregation was just emerging from the principal service of the day. Youngsters kicked a football across the grass: inside there was gossip, and tea-cup washing and the putting away of instruments, and the general sense of well-being that comes from a duty gladly done. An enthusiastic lady told me they could still draw on a congregation of five hundred even while they were reaching out to the less enlightened parts of the parish. But I'd have to leave now as she had to lock up: it's all the computers and electrics, you know. So sadly I did. But by then I'd had a chance to marvel at the fan vaulting in the airy south aisle, which cheers even the dark gloomy and very ancient Golgotha below, the medieval ossuary remains of what would have been a rood base. There is a fine West Gallery too, (and I'm fond of them, for Hardyesque reasons) which stretches across the whole substantial width of the church.
My little scheme - not being a Christian it seems hardly fair to call it a pilgrimage - is to visit by bicycle as many as I can of the churches described in Todd Gray's 2011 book Devon's Fifty Best Churches. I might take along the Devon volumes of Pevsner's classic The Buildings of England too. But Gray's colourful book, with the highlights of each church pithily described, is an inspiration. And like all such tick-lists (Munro's catalogue of Scottish mountains is a prime example) it has an important secondary function - it gets you to places that you might otherwise miss, and the chiefest joy is in the journey. Particularly if it's on a bike.
Cullompton is a sad place today. Todd Gray finds the glories of its church at odds with it. There are some fine old buildings of all ages in and near its bull-ring, but despite the nearby M5, it has remains blighted by the motor-car. and comprehensively devastated by supermarkets and the internet.. All these country towns need to repurpose themselves to build an environment that flaneurs ( like me) can be happy in, but their citizens too.
I pedalled the few miles to Kentisbeare after lunch. It was hot, the lanes deep and dark in the shade, but the verges sere and spiky from the drought that has blessed us so far this summer. Kentisbeare's pretty cottages straggle up a little hill. The chequered tower of St.Mary's beckoned above their roofs. A steep path through yews climbed up from the lych-gate, before I could rest my bike politely on a chest-tomb by the door.
From the riches of a town church - well, Cullompton was rich four hundred years ago - we have come to a village church. There's the peace of a Sunday afternoon, with only the clatter of a pigeon's wings to break it. The church is cool, and as you step beyond the porch, the first sight is the wonderful little East Gallery of 1632. It's low enough to decipher the three short verses honouring its donor and the naive paintings along its rail. Turning east, the chancel-screen appears, colourful and canopied, as flamboyant in this plain setting as Pevsner alleges. We are lucky that the wool-merchants chose to spend their money thus. The woolmen concerned, the Whyting family, also saw fit to import some domestic panelling for their little chapel, which in consequence has the air of an abandoned Oxbridge dining-room. Abandoned, because it is now largely empty since the organ was removed to the West Gallery some years ago: not a happy move for the chapel or the gallery, I feel.
There are some largely illegible graffiti carved into the wall of the church tower, some from the seventeenth century: it entertains us now, a little flourish of individuality from the past, though it tells us that even then there were people about with too much time and not much respect. Below the north-east corner of the churchyard is a lovely thatched Church House (surprisingly omitted by Pevsner) in a neat garden.
I cycled back down the Tale valley and so back to my start at Clyst Honiton, thirty-plus miles and two churches. That seems a comfortable target for these days out.

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L.S.Lowry at Salford Quays

16/7/2018

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My wife and I visited Manchester a week or so ago. It was a first for both of us to spend time in that city, which was belying its reputation as cold and wet by sharing in this summer's heatwave. The sunshine did it credit, lighting up its Victorian Gothic while we walked down the traffic-free Cross Street as if it were Las Ramblas in Barcelona.
The sun rarely shines in a painting by the Northern Master. It is difficult to know whether this is a consequence of the Lancashire climate, or of the pall of smoke and soot cast by the mill chimneys which frequently dominate his skylines. Their thin black lines punctuate the picture plane, phallic and aloof, and serve to further reduce his scurrying figures to little automatons. Each chimney is isolated and alone, a metaphor for the people at its feet.
Northerners have often sentimentalised Lowry's work, proud to have him as one of their own. It's a good thing to find someone who makes art out of the stuff of your own life - or at least fifty years on, from your grandparent's life. So you can say, I recognise that, those mean streets, that crowd at the factory gate, those grey skies, it was (or must have been) just like that. And thus saying, you identify with a community and a shared past that suddenly seems important and true.
But Lowry was not quite the northern archetype. He spent his working life on those streets he depicts, as that hardly popular figure, the Rent Collector. It allowed him to take some distance, to observe the people and scenes he was to paint, while never quite being of them. Spend a little time with the pictures and you find not warm-hearted togetherness but a frightening loneliness. The populace is a distant Other, separate from the artist and from themselves. Even placed in groups, his figures are busy in their own little worlds. They hurry along, bent and unseeing, as isolated as the chimneys above their heads.
Less well known than the mill scenes are Lowry's seascapes. He painted these mostly in holidays on the Yorkshire coast, and returned to this theme repeatedly over many years, refining the works to the point of emptiness, where a grey sky merges with a grey-green sea at some misty horizon. Some artists in old age move towards intensity of colour, Titian or Monet, grasping at colour before it finally vanishes for them at death. But in Lowry's age, the loneliness of his townscapes becomes the resigned emptiness of the seascapes. They have the sad equanimity of oblivion.
It is the sign of great art that you take some of it out into the world with you. We came out of the Lowry Gallery into the bright sunshine of its little piazza by the river. While we stood there, figures hurried across its space, each intent on something; but only they knew what.

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Devon's Fifty Best Churches

L.S.Lowry at Salford Quays

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