The twelfth century stonemasons of Herefordshire danced to their own tune. The Church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck may come on like a Christian normy but just a few moments in its company reveals its wacko side.
The famous south door (below) is crammed with Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian influences beyond the period-typical Norman Romanesque. To start with, there’s a green man, a ouroboros, a manticore, a basilisk…
Away from the door, on one of the ninety-odd corbels tucked beneath the roof is the equally-famous Sheela-na-Gig (below) about which the experimental novelist B S Johnson published a short story in 1964.
Visiting Kilpeck for the first time in March this year with my friends Showb and Andrew, I shot the video above early in the morning when the frost was still on the fields. My friends’ antiquarian interests are more coalesced than my own - Andrew runs the magazine Northern Earth and Showb writes the Substack Histories - and we’ve gone wandering, the three of us, with irregular persistence over many years: tramping down B-roads to find standing stones swallowed by unkempt hedges, or else sniffing out Saxon burial mounds smoothed out by graveyards’ theological proprietary.
With these two friends, and more often by myself, it is true to say that almost without exception such wanderings sooner or later end with churches.
In depicting his conversion to Christianity, the formerly Wiccan environmentalist Paul Kingsnorth talked of a process in which he repeatedly visited empty churches, ostensibly from architectural or antiquarian interest, but really as a denied aspect of his ineluctable journey towards accepting the Christian God. Similarly, the once-pagan storyteller and mythologist Dr Martin Shaw talks of his own long-denied journey towards Christ erupting whilst out on an animistic retreat. Knowing of Shaw and Kingsnorth’s journeys, and considering the truth that I find myself almost weekly in some berserko listed chapel or other - up some lichened lane or down some dog-legged street - it seems only honest to ask myself if I am in denial myself about Christianity’s spiritual pull.
So, I ran an audit. This is how it went.
My friend Laura died last year. She was mid-30s. Recently married. Cool as you like - style, smarts, kindness. She went to the doctors feeling peaky and was dead within a month. Lovely Laura. Tragedy, right?
At her Church of England funeral my solace came from the slanting light warming the stone of the nave’s octagonal columns. The words of the vicar felt like an irrelevant scamming of my friend into an uncomfortable didactic theological box. I wanted to shout, ‘Stop! You’ve won! No need! You’re occupying one of the spiritual places of this island. We get it. It’s yours. Can’t we just look at the light and the stone and feel the time and think about our friend.’
At another funeral last month, the Catholic Priest seemed to be talking himself into believing his own metaphysical contortions. It’s hard for me to relate to a person secure enough in their narrative to stand up and explain the life and death of someone they barely know to a gathering of grieving people who loved that person the best. The Eucharist then felt amdram. Withstanding the Priest’s schtick seemed like the price to pay for use of the site.
If the Christian liturgy leaves me baffled and sore, what of feelings provoked by solitary visits to churches? I have checked myself again and again as I sit silent and alone in various pews and strangely it never occurs to me to think about Christianity, unless if I am honest to lament the ugliness of a hung crucifixion spoiling the view to the altar. Self delusion is possible, but right now I feel about as likely to convert as I am to lay siege to Constantinople.
Whilst deeply grateful for much painting and music and architecture produced in the Christian tradition - I’ve literally written a book about my devotion to the Catholic painter Jan van Eyck - still, contact with those things doesn’t provoke any belief in the plausibility of Christ. Visting the church at Kilpeck wires me into the crazy stonemasons who lived out on the marches, and into the silence and the stone and the light.
Play the video. Listen to the birds. Enjoy the light. Have an excellent day.
==
PS: Alongside the Dirty Business dudes, I’ll be doing a reading from my novel Floaters on Thursday 23rd April in Oxfordshire. Tickets are free but there will be a collection for the Earth Raise campaign.
