Ruardean, Gloucestershire

Hero in motion

Gloucestershire has a long border with Herefordshire, and it’s not really surprising that, in the west of the county, there are some examples of work by the renowned Herefordshire school of Romanesque sculptors, the artists responsible for churches such as Kilpeck and glorious works like the font as Castle Frome. One Gloucestershire example is the tympanum at Ruardean in the Forest of Dean. This shows St George killing the dragon, and a wonderfully vigorous carving it is, even if not quite up to the stellar standard of Kilpeck.

St George is on horseback, his mount stretched somewhat horizontally to fit the space, his cloak streaming in the wind,  his spear entering the dragon’s mouth. There’s the usual linear quality seen on many Herefordshire school carvings – it’s visible in the dragon’s head, the folds of the cloak and the saint’s ribbed lower garment. The horse is doing a good job of helping its rider by treading all over the dragon’s long, serpent-like body.

The horse’s elongated form, the blowing cloak, and the angle and thrust of the spear all give the carving a dynamism, as if the saint has made his strike while his mount is still moving at some speed. It’s an eye-catching image (it exhibits a wonderful collection of undulating curves that I find really effective), if not as well carved as some – Malcolm Thurlby in his book* on the Herefordshire school suggests that it may have been the work of an assistant to the master carver. Whoever did the work, it does a good job of conveying the power of the galloping horse and the thrust of the deadly spear.

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* For more information on the Romanesque sculpture of this area, see Malcolm Thurlby, The Herefordshire School of Romanesque Sculpture (Logaston Press, 1999)

Shobdon, Herefordshire

Oliver's arches

In the Middle Ages the Norman Mortimer family was a powerful presence along the borders of England and Wales. They came over with William of Normandy, maintained castles to defend their lands against the Welsh, and took key parts in political and military history – one of them, Roger Mortimer, led the rebellion that deposed Edward II, for example. In a family as powerful as this, their key servants were powerful too. In the 12th century their steward – the man who ran their estates – was called Oliver de Merlimond, and he was important enough for the Mortimers to grant him a manor of his own, at Shobdon.

Soon after he acquired the manor, Oliver undertook two acts of piety – he went on pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostela and rebuilt the small Saxon church on his manor. The tantalizing evidence we have of Oliver’s church tells us that it was small but stunningly decorated, its arches carved with dazzling patterns and mythical beasts, its shafts adorned with intricate interlaced decoration and figures, the semicircular panels above its two doorways bearing beautiful depictions of Christ in Majesty and the Harrowing of Hell. The church seems to have been the first building decorated by the celebrated Herefordshire school of sculptors, and was followed soon after by Kilpeck, Castle Frome, and a host of others.

So ornate is the Herefordshire sculpture, so unlike what was being done in the rest of England at the time, and so like other work in Europe, that there has been speculation that Oliver’s journey influenced it in some way. Did Oliver bring back a carver from Spain or France? Or did the group of pilgrims with which he travelled include a local stoneworker who absorbed the powerful influence of buildings on the route to Compostela?

We will never know, but whoever worked for Oliver created a masterpiece at Shobdon. He worked at other churches in the area too, carving in a style that seems to combine French, Celtic and Scandinavian influences and also teaching apprentices, sons perhaps, who carried on his work in the pink Herefordshire sandstone that must have been so rewarding to carve.

Oliver’s church survived until the 18th century, but then a lord of the manor with a taste for a very different kind of architecture decided that it was time Shobdon had a new church. In a curious act of creative vandalism, he pulled the old church down, but preserved the entrance doorways and chancel arch, taking them apart and re-erecting them – with added gables and pinnacles – as an eye-catcher in his park. They’re still there, and are universally known as the Shobdon Arches.

Although they are very worn now, the arches give some idea at least of what a wonderful building the old church must have been. To add to our enlightenment – and also, it has to be said, our frustration that such a building should have been swept away – a plaster cast of the Christ in Majesty was made in 1851 for the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace. As for the originals, they are sadly weathered, as if the once-crisp Romanesque carving has begun to melt away, like ice at the end of a long winter.

Shobdon Arches, detail

Cast of Christ in Majesty, Victoria & Albert Museum

Kilpeck, Herefordshire

Sheela na gig

A number of readers of the previous post have asked – via comments, email, or conversation – about Kilpeck’s most famous carving, the female corbel known as the Sheela na gig. Though I have no simple answer to what she is doing here – no one knows quite why pious masons of the 12th century should put such a carving on a church – I’d like to share her never-to-be-forgotten image with you and, startling, plain, explicit as she may be, not gloss over her or evade her as earlier generations must have done.

The Victorians indeed, who found it difficult to cope with such things, apparently removed some of the Kilpeck corbels because they couldn’t stomach such explicit images. But tucked away in the angle between chancel and apse, the Sheela survived. If 19th-century prudes needed to justify the survival, they had ways of reinterpreting the obvious. Years ago, for example, I was doing some work involving frequent trips to the British Museum, where one of the curators showed me the way some of the collection for which he was responsible had been documented in the 19th century. An old record card referring to a statuette of a woman, presumably a fertility goddess, holding up her large breasts in her hands bore the legend, ‘Woman carrying two heavy objects.’ How true, and how wrong.

One Victorian writer about Kilpeck took a still broader detour around reality. G R Lewis, whose mostly useful Illustrations of Kilpeck Church were published in 1842, described the Sheela thus in his survey of the corbels: ‘No 26 represents a fool – the cut in his chest, the way to his heart, denotes it is always open and to all alike.’

Well, church crawlers (especially in Ireland, but in Britain many other places in Europe too) get used to encountering Sheelas, though few this side of the Irish Sea are as well preserved as Kilpeck’s. The possible explanations are several, and are neatly summed up in the current guidebook to the church by James Bailey: ‘A device to ward off evil spirits, a fertility cult figure, a representation of the Great Earth Mother Goddess, a Celtic goddess of creation and destruction, an obscene hag, a sexual stimulant, a medieval Schandbild to castigate the sins of the flesh.’

In a medieval context, perhaps the last explanation is the most plausible. The carvings on the exteriors of medieval churches often portray grotesques, monsters, and the like, as a depiction of and warning against the sins and perils of the world, which we leave behind on entering the sacred, spiritual space inside the building. The Sheela could be part of that worldly community and a warning to sinners. Equally, she could well be a survivor from an earlier culture, a fertility figure most probably, kept on in this Christian context in the way in which one religion will preserve or co-opt some of the symbols of a predecessor. And I’d like to think, too, that medieval carvers were quite capable of knowing that their images could have more than one interpretation, just as we do.

Another interesting thing about the Sheela, and one that you won’t find in the guides and learned articles, is that she has a literature of her own – not the scholarly literature but a rich imaginative literature, having inspired poems by, amongst others, Seamus Heaney, Frances Horovitz, and D. M. Thomas, and prose by B. S. Johnson. These writings (many written for a publication called The Kilpeck Anthology published by the Five Seasons Press) are too rich and various to do justice to here. Heaney comes up with resonant images (‘Her hands holding herself | Are like hands in an old outhouse | Holding a bag open’) that take the poet back to his roots in the Irish countryside and bring us to the idea of fertility again (the bag is full of grain). Anne Stevenson looks back to Jewish lore, and, incidentally, to the humour of many of the Kilpeck carvings (‘This is where God first laughed | and created Lilith’). Nearly all the writers (Jeff Nuttall: ‘She is old in stone’; Fleur Adcock: ‘There was always witchcraft here, you say’) see her as something more ancient than this ancient church. B. S. Johnson traces her back to Egypt and to the prehistoric Beaker People. The meanings of the Sheela na gig are rich and varied, now as ever.

Kilpeck, Herefordshire

Virtuoso carvings

Last week I went to Herefordshire to show some friends one of my favourite buildings, the parish church at Kilpeck. It rained, and the local countryside, already sodden, took on a dark beauty all its own, the contrast between wet green grass and red soil and stone as powerful as ever. The light wasn’t ideal for photography, though, so the pictures are from an earlier trip.

The church of Saints Mary and David, Kilpeck, was built in the 12th century, probably the 1130s, and survives intact with very few later alterations. It is the best place to go to look at the sculpture of the extraordinary ‘Herefordshire school’, whose work is scattered through many Norman churches in the county and in parts of neighbouring Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, but is seen in its most concentrated form in Kilpeck’s small church, which is both well preserved and stunningly decorated.

The 12th-century Herefordshire sculptors produced carvings not only of saints and priests, but also of animals, monsters, and grotesques. Their work is capable of both stylish simplicity and complex detail, high seriousness and earthy humour, and it encompasses huge fonts, Kilpeck’s elaborate doorway, carved shafts and panels, and small, often humorous corbels. The photographs here show part of the doorway and a few of the corbels, which depict a range of subjects from real animals and musicians to mythical beasts.

Scholars have detected Celtic, French, Spanish, and Scandinavian influences in the Herefordshire carvings. The Scandinavian element may come via the Normans’ Viking heritage, the western French and Spanish from a trip made by local pilgrims through France to Compostela. The synthesis, though, carved in the red sandstone so typical of the area, is pure Herefordshire.

If I get the chance to return to Kilpeck in better weather I will post more photographs of this building. But meanwhile, most of the sculptures on the church can be seen here.


Kilpeck, a selection of corbels

Kilpeck, south doorway, drawing by G R Lewis, 1840

Hoarwithy, Herefordshire

With its green hills, apple orchards, and unspoilt villages, Herefordshire is what a lot of us think of as typical England. How surprising, then, to come across the parish church of Hoarwithy, its Romanesque belfry clinging to the hilltop like a North Italian campanile. This wonderful landmark, a reworking and expansion of an earlier church, was designed by J P Seddon in the 1870s, and a visit is a succession of revelatory experiences through spaces and past works of art that are like little else in the history of the English country church.

You enter up a sloping path towards the bell tower, entering through the round-headed doorway. This leads through the base of the tower into a cloister walk that runs along one side of the church, its arches offering shelter from the rain, shade from the sunshine, and occasional views of the churchyard and the green landscape beyond. The arches are supported on twin shafts, like cloister arches in Italy or France, and have carved sandstone capitals with intertwining abstract designs that are worthy of the 12th-century Herefordshire school of sculptors that created churches like Castle Frome or Kilpeck. Beyond is the doorway through which you enter the church proper.Inside the eye is led eastwards past rows of windows and pews to a quartet of columns supporting a small dome. Here the sculpture has an intricacy that takes us south again – but this time to Constantinople or Ravenna, where the churches of the Byzantine empire have just such delicate carving.

At the visual climax, in a semi-dome above the altar, is a mosaic of Christ Pantokrator – again, just what you would expect to see in a Byzantine church. The hand of God reaches down from the clouds and the sunlight catches the golden tesserae of the mosaic, as Seddon, and the Byzantine builders who inspired him, intended. Hoarwithy contains many other delights – carved stalls, a pulpit like one at Fiesole, Venetian hanging lamps. Altogether, this is a magical place, a testimony to Seddon’s vision, the skills of the craftsmen, local and from further afield, who built it, and the capacity of the English landscape to accommodate happily a building that is in many ways so foreign.

Castle Frome, Herefordshire

When not admiring Herefordshire’s black and white houses (see previous post), I’m diving into its churches to look for carvings. Herefordshire has its very own school of Norman sculpture, active between, say 1140 and 1190. This school produced work of outstanding vigour – figures, Biblical scenes, dragons, and beak-heads abound in that wonderful mixture of Christian and pagan that the Normans loved. The figures display deeply folded drapery, strong gestures, and, sometimes, unusual poses. This intense style of carving is not quite like anything else in Britain, but scholars have traced antecedents in various places on mainland Europe from western France and northern Italy to Compostela, where it is known that at least one local lord went on pilgrimage.

The font in the small, isolated church at Castle Frome is one of the masterpieces of this Herefordshire school. It depicts the symbols of the four Evangelists and, centre stage as it were, the Baptism of Christ. Christ has entered a rippling, fish-rich pool, St John stands by, the hand of God and dove of the Holy Spirit appear above. The scene takes one back, not just to the first century, but also to the Norman period, when a priest in a remote country parish about to baptize a baby could explain to his illiterate congregation their links to an event in the far western Mediterranean some 1200 years ago.