Hailes, Gloucestershire

Ruined choirs

The ruins of Hailes Abbey are just across the lane from the small church in my previous post. The abbey was founded in 1246 by Richard, Earl of Cornwall, who was Henry III’s younger brother. Richard had the unusual additional title of King of the Romans, which was a sort of consolation prize because he had been elected Holy Roman Emperor by the German princes but his appointment had been rejected by the pope, who guarded jealously his power of veto over such appointments. Richard founded the abbey in thanks to God for surviving a shipwreck and it was home to a community of Cistercian monks. However, the abbey’s big boost came during the following generation, when Richard’s son, Edmund, gave it a phial of liquid that was said to be the blood of Christ.

It was Edmund’s donation in 1270 that made the abbey a major pilgrimage destination, second only in England to the shrine of St Thomas Beckett at Canterbury. The steady stream of pilgrims brought money to the abbey, and it was rebuilt in the 1270s, to create a very large complex. The place prospered until it was dissolved, like all England’s other monasteries, by Henry VIII in the 1530s. The foundations of the huge church can still be traced on the grass, as can fragments of the abbey’s domestic buildings such as the refectory, and several rows of arches still stand above the ground. Above is a photograph sourced on the internet that shows a little more of the site than I can see as I pass in the car on the way to our local farm shop.

When the abbey is open to the public, there’s much to see – including a good small museum explaining the history of the place and displaying some lovely fragments of carved stone that have survived the dismantling of most of the buildings after 1539. For now, it’s a lonely spot, one of the bare ruined choirs, as Shakespeare put it, where late the sweet birds sang.*

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* William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII

Photograph of Hailes Abbey © Saffron Blaze, used under Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 3.0

Farmcote, Gloucestershire

Ancient peace

Modern life, even here in the country, involves a lot of noise. Traffic, tractors, chainsaws, guns, the sounds of restoration, the crashes and bangs gleefully made by the people (known as the ‘clanky men’ in our house) who collect the glass bottles we put out for recycling. It’s part of life, and I accept it for what it is – and put on noise-cancelling headphones, or head for the hills. If it’s the hills, you will not be surprised to learn that it’s often some tranquil architectural setting where I end up. Often a church. Churches have more uses than the purely or conventionally religious ones. Churches: places to be quiet in and maybe even to ‘grow wise in’ (Philip Larkin*). Or graveyards: ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards’ (Samuel Beckett, naturally†). I have posted before about a couple of local favourites, Elkstone, a cherished Norman building, and Farmcote, partly Saxon, partly Tudor. Both attract me back, partly for the architecture, partly for the quiet.

Going back, there is always something different to see or learn. At Farmcote, talking to a local resident, I learned that the unassuming building in my second photograph started life as one of the farm buildings of the great Cistercian abbey of Hailes, just over the hill from here; a granary I think. It shouldn’t be a surprise. All over these hills the Cistercians must have run sheep and grown crops. Any building of great age in an outlying farm around here might have some medieval origin involving the monks. Their abbey may be in ruins, but their presence is still palpable, as palpable as that of the sheep, still ubiquitous on the Cotswolds, who break the rural silence with that gentle baaing noise of their own.

* ‘Church Going’
† Oh, it is mean not to quote just a little more: ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.’ Samuel Beckett, First Love, with an unfailing eye, and nose, on the word ‘must’.

Abbey Dore, Herefordshire

The monks and the birds

Near the border of England and Wales, deep in Herefordshire’s Golden Valley (the valley of the River Dore), among high hedges and garrulous rookeries, within sight of the Black Mountains with their evocatively named heights (Hay Bluff, Lord Hereford’s Knob), and close to one of my routes to the book-lovers’ haven of Hay on Wye, lies the sandstone Dore Abbey, home of the royal arms in my previous post. It’s the kind of quiet spot the Cistercians favoured, away from the distractions of the world and the city, where they could farm in peace (they were among the most successful sheep farmers in the Middle Ages), and build their monasteries and their communities.

Most of Britain’s greatest Cistercian abbeys, such as Yorkshire’s Fountains and Rievaulx, Gloucestershire’s Hailes, and Tintern in the valley of the Wye, are ruins now, but at Dore Abbey, part of the building – the choir, transept, and crossing of the original church – remains in service for parish worship. In the monks’ time, where there are trees in the left-hand part of my photograph above there was a long nave, and its disappearance accounts for the unusual shape of the church. As we look at this fragment, though, with its continuous background noise of cawing rooks, the tall pointed lancet windows give an idea of the building’s strong but simple Gothic architecture.

 
It is even more impressive inside. Repeated lancet windows, pointed arches, and piers with multiple shafts line the choir. Light pours in from the splayed upper windows, creating patterns of light where the arches are deeply moulded. There is a minimum of carved ornament (the austere Cistercians eschewed the sort of rich foliate carving that covered other Gothic churches of the time)  but a strong sense of linear pattern. The arches and mouldings create a clear sense of the kind of space the monks wanted – and it is a rare treat to find it all surviving as an interior, roofed and used and protected from the elements and enhanced with fine furnishings from the 17th-century restoration. And so quiet too, in little known southwestern Herefordshire, in a corner where now the rooks must far outnumber the human population but the lucky few who are left can enjoy a place of peace and a setting for contemplation.

Lancaut, Gloucestershire

Lost among trees on the Gloucestershire side of the River Wye is the tiny ruined church of Lancaut. There’s a farm and a cottage nearby, but no village – just some lumps and bumps in the ground that mark the foundations of neighbouring buildings that disappeared long ago. The church is 12th century, shows signs of having been heavily restored in the 18th century, and was abandoned in the 19th.

The church at Lancaut seems to be the archetypal remote ruin. You drive a long way up a dead end and take to a steep footpath before you get here. But it’s accessible from the river on the English side, the bank being level here in contrast to the towering 200-foot cliffs on the other side of the Wye. Perhaps that fact makes one local story plausible: that the Cistercian monks who later made their home a few miles away at Tintern first settled here before upping sticks and building their monastery at the more famous site. The Cistercians, with their love of remote locations, would certainly have liked the look of this place, and they had a history of trying out sites before moving on elsewhere.

If Lancaut was just too remote for the monks, it continued to serve a tiny local congregation before the church fell out of use in around 1865. The farmers and labourers who worshipped here baptized their children in a cast-lead font (one of a number in Gloucestershire made from the same mould) that is now preserved in Gloucester Cathedral, a small memorial to one of the remotest of English buildings.