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.

Eaton Bray, Bedfordshire

Masters of iron and stone

Curving and recurving across the door of St Mary’s church at Eaton Bray is some of the most remarkable ironwork from the Middle Ages, a series of intricate scrolls that date from the middle of the 13th century. Structurally, they help to bind together the timbers of the door; they are also like a signpost telling visitors that they are in for something special here.


When you open the door you find the nave and aisles separated by two beautiful arcades. The one in the picture is the more ornate of the two. It is of a similar date to the ironwork on the door and shows the kind of workmanship you’d expect to find in a cathedral rather than a medium-sized parish church in a Bedforshire village. There’s great refinement here. The arches are made up of deeply cut roll mouldings – eleven rolls in all around each arch. Each pier is given extra richness with the addition of eight slender shafts– and there’s an extra trick, in that some of the shafts, such as those around the pier in the foreground, are just slightly detached from their pier, to give additional shadow and depth. Each pier is topped with a capital carved with stylized foliage in a design known as ‘stiff leaf’, a motif that represented high sophistication in around 1240 when this row of arches was built.

English parish churches have an endless capacity to surprise and give pleasure, but often the pleasure comes from homespun, vernacular design. Here it’s more sophisticated work in the style that has been known since the 19th century as Early English Gothic. The breathtaking quality is perhaps to do with the fact that the church had been given to the Augustine abbey of Merton in Surrey the previous century. The unknown mason they employed produced a design of power and grace that still stands out, more than 700 years on.