Loxley, Warwickshire

Recycling

Last night I gave a talk about parish churches to an appreciative local audience. January is usually a quiet month for talks – people tend not to book me to travel far in the unpredictable winter weather, but this talk was in a venue so close by I could easily have walked there, had it not been for the impedimenta (laptop, projector, extension lead, notes, wires, and other odds and ends) that I take with me on such occasions.

One picture that got a strong reaction was a wall made of rubble in a Cotswold churchyard, a place I’ve already featured on this blog. It reminded me that a few weeks ago I came across another example of a wall partly made of recycled bits and pieces at Loxley in Warwickshire. The winter afternoon was already coming to an end by the time I got there and found somewhere to park, and in the low light I thought I’d got the measure of the building as I looked at it from the road: medieval beginnings with lots of changes in the Georgian period including the nave windows and the upper stage of the oddly placed southwest tower.

A closer look revealed a lot of Saxon-looking herringbone masonry in the chancel and a vestry partly built of 17th- or 18th-century gravestones and parts of chest tombs. Winged putti, skulls, crossed bones, extinguished torches and a cornucopia, together with plentiful cartouches and scrolls, some of them quite vigorously carved, feature in these stones, along with some baluster shafts that are now doing duty as window jambs. They’re all arranged quite artfully, almost as if the size of this small extension has been dictated in part by the proportions of the recycled slabs.

Most of the inscriptions on these slabs have worn away completely or in part – those still legible seem to be to members of the Southam family. Their decay is sad in one way. But I for one would not mind if, a century for three after my demise, my memorial was repurposed in this way. Preferable at least to having my stone heaped in some corner to gather dust and moss. On the tower is a sundial with a motto: ‘I DIE TODAY & LIVE TOMORROW’. Indeed.

Fairford, Gloucestershire

‘Get a cat’

Time for a break from the parade of shops currently occupying my mind. So, a little feline diversion...

In his book Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, Patrick Leigh Fermor tells an old story about a Greek sea captain. Troubled by the number of rats on his boat, the seaman calls in a priest to perform the ceremony for casting our vermin. Chants, censing and asperging ensue, and the priest takes his fee, ensuring the man he’ll have no more trouble now, the rites have never failed. ‘”But there’s just one point,” he said. “What’s that, Father?” The priest stooped his bearded head to the seaman’s ear and whispered: “Get a cat.” Since then the phrase “getting a cat” means, in maritime circles, making surety doubly sure.’

Often, of course, the process of ‘getting’ a cat is rather passive. A cat arrives, and if the humans are welcoming enough, the cat stays. Something like this probably happened in 1963, when a tabby adopted the verger of Fairford church and his wife. Tiddles stayed, became the church cat, and attracted the affection of visitors, who come to Fairford to admire the stunning late-medieval stained glass, and of parishioners, on whose laps she sat during services. No doubt her mousing skills were not much used. But the parishioners of Fairford were doubly sure. And when Tiddles died in 1980, this stone, carved by Peter Juggins, was erected near the south porch. Requiescat.