Hailes, Gloucestershire

Well connected 

Hailes is a tiny, remote place I’ve featured here several times before. It gets my attention often because it’s close to where I live, indeed the church was one of the last I visited before the current lockdown. It’s one of those with medieval wall paintings, images that have faded and that put the modern viewer in a combined state of fascination and puzzlement. The paintings in the chancel – the detail in my photograph is a tiny fragment of three walls full of fragments and fading wholes – must have been very lavish. Large areas beneath and between the windows are covered with square and diamond grids contain heraldic symbols. If nowadays it seems odd that such a small and isolated place should display so much aristocratic symbolism, it’s because in the 13th century the church acquired a new neighbour, the large Cistercian abbey of Hailes, founded by Earl Richard of Cornwall (King of the Romans* and younger son of King John of England) to house a relic said to be the blood of Christ, which was to attract pilgrims from far and wide. The little church by the abbey appears to have become of the gate chapel of the larger foundation. The decoration in the church reflects this rise in the building’s status. 

The heraldic devices on a display include a large pride of lions rampant (visible here) and the occasional spread eagle: both are devices used by Earl Richard. Most of the other heraldry is said to belong to Richard’s wives – he had three, two of whom predeceased him. In the upper areas of the walls, above the windows, are scenes that are difficult to decipher possibly portraying the death of the Virgin, plus saints and Apostles. Another feature of these upper areas are grotesque and mythical beasts, such as the pair in my photograph. On the left is a dragon-like creature: its reptilian wing has faded but is still there in outline. On the right is another winged beast with a rather canine head. I’m really not sure what these creatures are doing here. There are plenty of explanations for images in this vein in sacred spaces – they’re survivors of pagan religion, they’re apotropaic images, meant to keep out evil spirits (often placed at ‘vulnerable’ points like doors or, as here, windows). But we can’t be sure, and scholars like Professor Paul Binski, who has been studying medieval imagery for years, advised in a recent lecture† that one should beware of overthinking them. Images like this, he argues, could just as likely be bits of fun, like the marginalia in Medieval psalters. And that is precisely what the Hailes images resemble.  

- - - - - 

* This medieval title means, in modern terms, king of Germany. 

† In a recent lecture for the Churches Conservation Trust in their excellent series of online talks; most can be found on YouTube at the time of writing.

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.*

- - - - -

* William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII

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

Hailes, Gloucestershire

At the abbey gate

A few hundred yards from the station in my previous post is the little church of Hailes. It’s one of those Cotswold churches that serves a tiny community – a couple of houses by the station, another near the church itself, a few scattered cottages and farms. Maybe there have never been very many houses around here. It’s likely that the church started out not as a parish church in the usual sense but as the capella ad portas, or chapel at the gate, of Hailes Abbey, in other words a small place of worship for the laity, specifically those who were visiting the abbey. There were a lot of visitors at Hailes because this remote monastery was a major place of pilgrimage – in the Middle Ages people flocked to visit the shrine of the Holy Blood of Hailes.

Like the abbey, the church is mainly 13th century. The windows are small and mostly narrow 13th-century lancets, and the architecture is simple – just a nave, chancel, porch, and a little timber-framed turret for the bells. Inside it’s very plain except for some lovely but fragmentary medieval wall paintings. But there is no going inside and looking at these in this time of social distancing and church closure, just time to pause for a moment and look, and think about those who still look after our churches and ensure their preservation. It’s usually quiet here – there are services, but not that often, and also occasional concerts of early music in the summer. In the building’s 13th-century heyday things would have been very different: a constant traffic of pilgrims arriving and departing, a confusion of bustle, subsiding as people calmed down and made themselves ready to enter with appropriate reverence and solemnity the great and famous abbey across the road. Now it is mostly tractors, callers at the fruit farm, a few cyclists – and cherishable calm.

Hailes, Gloucestershire

Halting for a moment

One of the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic for our household has been a change in the way we buy our food. We have avoided large supermarkets, all of which are anyway at least 15 minutes by car from where we live, opting instead to visit small local shops within walking distance of our house or, in one case, just outside the small Cotswold town where we live. This latter is the local fruit farm, from which we’ve been buying apples and other fruit and vegetables for years, and which runs a good farm shop selling all kinds of food – meat, bread, cakes, muesli, dairy produce, ice cream, etc, etc – mostly supplied by local producers.¶ It’s a good way, I think, to support local businesses while also avoiding physical contact (I order by email and collect from an agreed place on the farm).

In celebration of all this, I thought I’d share three of the architectural sights I see on my short car journey to the farm. First, Hayles Abbey Halt, the tiny station on the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway, a heritage line that runs between Cheltenham Racecourse and Broadway (many of the trains are hauled by steam locomotives). The original station opened in 1928, allowing passengers to alight and walk the short distance up the lane to Hailes Abbey.* It was lit only by oil lamps and on each side of the track was a small corrugated iron building offering shelter for waiting passengers. The little station was closed in 1960, and British Railways closed the line in 1976. When the heritage railway took it over, they did not reopen Hayles Abbey Halt (the volunteers who run the line had work enough to do laying track, building or restoring several other stations, and caring for rolling stock, after all). So it was only in 2017 that the halt was reopened, with a new platform, a neat little corrugated iron shelter and some cast iron signs. My photograph shows a view of the halt from the nearby road bridge. The shelter is about as basic as they get – there is not even the concave-curving ‘pagoda’ roof of many of the platform buildings favoured by the Great Western. But it’s functional, and, as my regular readers know, I have a weakness for corrugated iron.

The tiny station is quiet for now. As I drive over the road bridge there’s no sign of puffs of steam, no distant railway whistle, no people arriving to look at the abbey and then perhaps take the footpaths back to Winchcombe, no waiting passengers about to get on a train and head back the easy way. It’s all very Adlestrop, with the local birds singing their hearts out to show that their voices are as loud as those of their relations over by the line that Edward Thomas celebrated in his poem – as loud and strong as all the birds of Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire, and Warwickshire.

- - - - -

¶ Hayles Fruit Farm, website here.

* This place has two spellings. The settlement is officially Hailes and this is also the spelling used by those who care for Hailes Abbey, but the railway and the fruit farm opt to use the more antiquated form, Hayles. Hence the confusion of getting off at Hayles Abbey Halt to visit Hailes Abbey.

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’.

Hailes, Gloucestershire

Coloured counties

Travelling across Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire today, fields of yellow-flowered rape stood out in bands between green grass and trees, blue and deep grey skies. There wasn’t time, today, to stop and photograph such views, taken in beyond fences and dashing objects on the road. So here’s a picture from a couple of years ago, of a similar field in Gloucetsershire with the tiny 13th-century church of Hailes, probably originally the cappella ad portas of the once-great Hailes Abbey, a major medieval pilgrimage centre.

This image symbolises my belief, exemplified I hope by many of the posts on this blog, that a major part of the impact of a building has little to do with the architecture itself. Here at Hailes, the architecture is modest, although it has a simple Early English gothic perfection of its own. But it’s the setting that counts. Up a winding lane off the main road. Orchards beyond. Ruined Cistercian arches not far away. And in front a yellow field that would make the pulse of a Van Gogh race.