Extollagy!

The next book is about landscapes, really, but I find myself itching to get down the highlights from some of the more striking buildings I discovered during last week’s 1500-mile grand tour through Yorkshire, County Durham, Northumberland, the Borders, Cumbria and Lancashire. The aim at all times was to discover the unfamiliar, and the landscape-rooted, but these included some architectural/art historical gems of the medieval (and other) world/s.

Stained glass at Horton in Ribblesdale

The first of these was Horton-in-Ribblesthorpe: a classic dark, bleak Dale-land/Pennine church, externally all Perp but with C12 arcades so simple they could as easily have been poor man’s C17. The highlight here was three tiny pieces of late medieval glass, high up in the west window and barely visible, yet striking in their implications: the head of the Virgin Mary; the head of Thomas Becket; the arms of Jervaulx abbey. These are arguably the two most aggressively proscribed images of the 1530s/40s, combined with the arms of a dissolved institution; not only that, but to retain just the heads — the part of an image most thoroughly focused on by iconoclasts, and equally a part most easy to slip from some shattered pile and spirit away — is a remarkable act; when combined with the badge of the dissolved monastery, one that surely has purpose. There was something very moving about the unknown backstory of these (apparently carefully preserved) fragments: one is reminded that here we are in the heartland of the anti-Reformation Pilgrimage of Grace.

Lastingham crypt

Lastingham, nestled in a verdant valley of the North York Moors, has strong connections to the early church and one of the less-known monuments to the remarkable years of the 1070s and 1080s, the earliest decades of the Romanesque in England. The highlight of this church is the extraordinary crypt, presumably associated with the cult of St Cedd, and one of the most significant monuments of a couple of decades from which, outside the cathedrals, very little survives. It is in a brusque early Romanesque rather reminiscent of the early castle chapel at Durham, and like that building, the simplicity and heaviness is combined with some determined attempts at decorative variety: in this case, every capital is different, and one of them is surely one of the earliest dated cushion capitals in the country. Upstairs the remarkably effective ‘restoration’ by Pearson preserves intact a top-rate Norman apse but seems to occlude the archaeological evidence for whether the enormous groin vaults are based on any evidence or not. All in all this was a small-but-rather-fine priory whose development, complete with crypt, halted in mid-build, leaving a structure which only has the stump of a nave to this very day.

I’m going to pass over Reivaulx (and Jervaulx, and Middleham) — but mention must be made of the chapter-house at the former famous church, a kind of miniature apsidal basilica perhaps associated with the cult of St Ailred: an odd place for a shrine, but he was buried there, and there surely can’t be another reason for the provision of an ambulatory? Perhaps the insertion of a little shrine-setting to the north of the central door in the C13 was an attempt to provide pilgrim access without having the hoi-polloi troop through the chapter-house itself? Another moving Dissolution-moment here, too: axe-marks on the stumps of the columns. I wondered offhand whether there was another religious building in Europe closer in plan to a C3BC Buddhist caitya hall. Which was also a gathering-place for monks, if rather more devotional in function.

Dod’s Law

Dod’s Law, Northumberland is not a church: it is a pair of iron age hillforts on a hilltop overlooking the distant domes of the Cheviots, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something ritualistic or religious about the remarkable, probably Bronze Age, rock-art  — like graphic maps, or Native Australian images of Dreamtime landscapes — laid out painstakingly on the great blocks of Fell Sandstone that litter the site.

Jedburgh abbey, east end

Next up, two great abbeys close to the border, in southern Scotland: Kelso and Jedburgh. Both are testament to a series of generalisations one can (perhaps) make about medieval Scottish architecture: that these buildings are not large by English standards, and until the C15 even the greatest of them lack the high stone vaults that were standard to the south by 1200; that by 1400 they have stylistically gone their own sweet way, almost pointedly ignoring developments in England — and that c.1150-1250 a great wave of building and rebuilding swept this country, resulting in structures of such inventiveness and sophistication that the story of architecture in the British Isles in those crucial years is incomplete without them. Witness the remarkable westwork, a richly-arcaded mini-Ely, at Kelso; and the handsome Giant Order, part of a story which is otherwise restricted entirely to southern England (Tewkesbury, Oxford, Romsey, ?Reading), in the east end at Jedburgh.

From here to Cumbria there is a B-road of spectacular beauty and emptiness, snaking for 30-50 miles through mountain fell and dales running with peat-black streams, with barely a hint of village or farm. Then, barely in England, and still in a landscape untouched by signs of tourism or Leisure Activities, one comes to Bewcastle. This is a tiny church at the centre of a cluster of farms, a pre- high medieval kind of setting, preserving much that was normal before the invention of the ‘village’.

The Bewcastle cross, among the gravestones

This is a place of astonishing silence, but don’t be deceived: enclosing the ruined Border castle and the churchyard alike is the earthwork of a major Roman fort, with a road connecting back to Hadrian’s Wall. In the C7/C8, therefore, this could easily have been a nodal point in a post-Roman, Christianised landscape — explaining the presence, still standing proud in the open air among the tombstones,  of one of the major works of the era of the Lindisfarne gospels, Cuthbert and Jarrow: a mighty, headless cross, covered in Runic inscriptions, well-carved late Roman decorative scrolls, and figures of such hieratic clarity they could be by Eric Gill, rather an anonymous craftsman of 1300 years ago. This is partly a commemorative monument, as the inscriptions demonstrate; the great flock of C18 and later headstones from which it rises, all their names pointing optimistically east, powerfully demonstrative of the continuance in the Christian tradition of the ‘commemorative standing stone’.

Sarah Losh’s church at Wreay

Then, firmly back in a more recognisable England, the extraordinary church built at Wreay south of Carlisle by local gentrywoman Sarah Losh in 1842. Losh guided every detail of this building (and the associated landscape of school house, mortuary enclosure, well-heads and funerary chapels, as well as a few domestic buildings), constructed entirely by local craftsmen with local materials. The result, infused by symbolic imagery drawn from personal, Christian and non-Christian sources alike, and powerfully informed by the early C19 understanding of early Christian art, is a testament to a convincing and unique aesthetic vision.  In other words, this was a revelation: there is a moment of spiritually-infused formal originality in the eC19, most purely embodied in the post-Blakean work of Palmer and his Ancients, arguably present in Turner, but not as far as I know expressed architecturally in any other religious building (Watts managed it later). It should be one of the most famous churches in the land: Losh as a kind of Victorian architectural Kate Bush (or Sir John Soane, for like Bush this is an art that transcends gender, will arguably being suffused by it).

Looking down the scree-slope, Pike of Stickle

West of here, in the great ice-scoured post-Volcano of the Lakes, the peak at Pike of Stickle has hanging down its vertiginous rampart a colossal scree slope that appears to be almost entirely man made. Though this entire upland was a terrifying third-world desert to medieval people, it was a place of great human significance in the late Neolithic, with a plethora of henge monuments all lying within 20 miles or so. And here, at the top of an often frost-and rain-shattered peak, stone axes were knapped from the landscape in such number and traded with such keenness that their products can be seen in many parts of Europe, and the axes deemed to have *failed* produced in such number that 100s of thousands, perhaps millions, still litter the hillside to this day, their sharp edges and knap-fractures intact.

Pike of Stickle has a special status in the great narrative of the anthropocene: just as this is when people first began to shift stones around so as to make permanent structures, this is also the first time that the products of a single place were spead so far and wide that the result is at once often found and entirely divorced from its geological origin. For the hand-axes of Stickle Pike or Grimes Graves, read Barnack limestone, York paving slabs, Welsh roofing slates, Portland stone, Italian marble, and every mineral product of the modern third-world mine that goes onto be spread around the world in laptops and handsets.

On to Furness, for more revelations. Here is a landscape on the way to nowhere, but also a mini-country of it is own, with its historic towns (Ulverston), dramatic industrial sandstone capital-city (Barrow), moors, wetlands and beaches, all overlooked by lowering Lakeland peaks. First there is Cartmel, not quite as eccentric a smaller priory church as Dorchester or Oxford but on the way, and with excellent glass and a remarkable C14 tomb to boot; and then there is Cistercian Furness abbey itself.

Furness abbey chapter house

I had expected this building to be somewhat provincial, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Of course, like so many of its peers, it is in a beguiling landscape, a valley near (but not in) a medieval ‘desert’, but presumably bearing a comparable relationship to the centre of serious power at Lancaster as Jervaulx does to Middleham, Rievaulx to Pickering or Helmsley (?), and Tintern to the Marcher lordships (and, further back, Lindisfarne does to Banburgh).  Like our Border abbeys, and indeed Lanercost to the north, it includes major examples of late C12 work, as well as the C15 stump of a prodigious western tower and a cliff-like east end, and a series of conventual/precinctual buildings of the later C12 that really should be better known.

The edge-of-precinct chapel and infirmary extension capture the mannered quality of some late EE/early Dec work, otherwise associated with very cosmopolitan buildings – Bishop Burnell at Wells and Acton Burnell, bishop Aigueblanche at Hereford. And the chapter-house, even in its current roofless and vaultless state, is extraordinary. This was once a hall-‘church’, its three rows of high stone vaults supported on vertiginously slender columns, its edges a series of mighty blank-tracery panels, like the York chapter-house vestibule blank ‘arcade’ filling an entire wall. Polygonal chapter houses are knockout, of course, and some of the more traditional rectilinear examples of the Romanesque era (Bristol is the best-preserved) clearly were, too. But I haven’t come across a Gothic-era rectilinear-planned chapter house in England of anything approaching this beauty and ambition. Wow.