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.

Wyck Rissington, Gloucestershire

Three ways  

In the bleak midwinter, with rain on rain in this part of the world, here's a photograph to remind us of last summer's sun, warming up the Cotswold stone at Wyck Rissington, northeast of Bourton-on-the-Water.  Aside from the obvious charm of this stone building in its tree-lined churchyard, I'm attracted to this building for various reasons. Here are three things that interest me about it; three ways of looking at a building, if you like.

First, the architecture. Although this is a small church, built by unknown masons and added to over the centuries in what looks like a haphazard way (look at the miscellaneous selection of window styles), it has had architectural pretensions, especially with regard to the chancel (in the foreground of the photograph). This small part of an obscure church represents a moment in English architectural history. It dates from the mid-13th century and the end wall, with its two pairs of lancet windows and small corner buttresses with pointed tops, is very much of its period. So is the surviving single lancet on the side wall (the larger windows are later; originally there would have been more lancets along this side). This was the period when English builders were beginning to group lancet windows together and add smaller openings (circles, trefoils, quatrefoils) above them to create windows with tracery – the window on the side wall next to the drain pipe is an example from a later phase of building. In the end wall, the two concave-sided lozenge-shaped openings above the pairs of lancets, and the plainer diamond opening above them, create a kind of proto-tracery, as if the masons were feeling their way towards this idea but not quite getting there yet: fascinating.

Next, what has happened to the building recently, for all old buildings need care and repair, and how this is done affects both their survival and their appearance. On my visit in the summer, the church architect happened to be there making an inspection, and we talked both about the 13th-century architecture of the chancel and about the recent work on the church roof. As you can see, the nave roof has been completely recovered in new Cotswold stone "slates". Some of the old slates were still in good enough condition to be recycled, as were quite a few on the chancel roof. So when the nave roof was finished, the chancel roof was redone with the best of the old slates. Both roofs are now good for many years, and the new slates on the nave roof will eventually darken in colour, attract lichen, and match the older ones on the chancel. 

Finally, a historical association, because the people who use old buildings are frequently just as interesting as the buildings themselves. In the early 1890s, the 17-year-old  Gustav Holst got his first job here, as church organist. He soon added a similar position at nearby Bourton-on-the-Water and this work helped to sustain the young composer until he got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music a couple of years later. Holst, who was born in Cheltenham, spent most of his adult life in London, but always loved the Cotswolds. One of his more ambitious works is his Cotswolds Symphony, the beautiful slow movement of which is subtitled "In memoriam William Morris". Perhaps his most familiar work, though, is one that many do not realise is by him, the tune called Cranham (named for another Cotswold village) which is the most popular music for the carol "In the Bleak Midwinter". Here it is, sung by that great British ensemble, The Sixteen.* Season's Greetings to you all.

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*Or there it was. The video I originally attached to this post has been removed from YouTube. There are plenty of other versions online, though, including one from the choir of Gloucester Cathedral, here.

Uffington, Oxfordshire*

Pointed architecture

Read the architecture textbooks and they will tell you that Gothic architecture is a way of building that developed in France – specifically at the Abbey of St Denis near Paris – in the 12th century, spreading to England by the beginning of the 13th century. In its classic form it’s a way of designing churches with pointed arches and high stone vaults, supported by flying buttresses, and lots of stained-glass windows that flood the interiors with coloured light. That’s quite a good description of the way the Gothic cathedrals were built, from Notre Dame in Paris to Salisbury and York in England. But what about parish churches? In the countryside, few parishes had the resources to build ambitious stone vaults and flying buttresses – if there are stone vaults they are on a smaller scale than the soaring stone ceilings of the great cathedrals. So in most medieval parish churches, Gothic means above all the use of pointed arches.

The parish church at Uffington, built around 1240, is a typical and wonderful example of the first phase of parish church Gothic – the style that the Victorians called Early English. The dominant feature is the tall, narrow pointed lancet window. These lancets can appear singly or in groups – there are lots of pairs and trios of lancets at Uffington. From the outside, they look rather austere. But inside, they’re treated decoratively, with slender shafts on either side of each window. Uffington is unusual in having an octagonal tower. The upper section is an 18th-century addition – the lower section was originally topped with a spire which came down in a storm in 1740 – but the extended tower still provides a graceful focal point to the building.

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Since writing this post, I've had some interesting comments, including one from Helen of Art and Architecture, Mainly, who asks who needs stone vaults and flying buttresses: 'Early English Gothic was about height and elegance, and the church dominating the townscape.' I agree, and I'd add that this way of building was also about line, as evidenced by all those interior shafts – and the shafts and mouldings at churches such as Eaton Bray, which I posted about a while ago. Height, elegance, line, and shadow: the essence of Early English architecture.

Uffington, chancel interior

*Although I still think of it as being in Berkshire, and it will be found in the Berkshire volume of Pevsner's Buildings of England series.