Hexham Abbey

Someone started practicing on the organ while we were walking around the Abbey.

The music swelled and filled up the church.  The organ fits this kind of space perfectly.  Elsewhere, it seems like a stout man trying to make his way down the narrow church pew without treading on anyone's toes.

These old churches take your breath away.

Effigies of dead people lay in one section of the Abbey.  Their faces were worn away.  I wish I had looked up their names (I don't recall seeing any placards), though they are dead and no longer care whether they are remembered.

That Anglo-Saxon man in the bottom of the picture is peering out at us.  You can get accustomed to being the anonymous person rambling about these grand old places that being noticed, even by an inanimate object, is a jolt.

These stairs are still used by the choir.  When they were first built, sometime in the 13th century, they led to the dormitory used by the canons who ministered to the Hexham community.  They lived according to the Rule of St. Augustine.

There was a row of these people on the outside of the Abbey, right at eye-level: the flying monks.  I'm not sure what would have been placed in the spaces above their heads.

They had pleasing faces.

The crypt beneath a church: Hexham Abbey

The next day we headed into Hexham on the very convenient Hadrian's Wall Country Bus, which passes the Old Repeater Station as it ferries visitors to various points along Hadrian's Wall.

First stop was Hexham Abbey, which has been around in some form or other for over 1300 years. An Anglo-Saxon crypt was discovered in the bowels of the Abbey while it was being renovated in the late 19th century.  The entrance to the crypt is in the middle of the church, in the nave.  If I were a child attending services, this hole in the floor would have creeped me out.

We descended the narrow stairs into the dim low-ceilinged space and bumped and shuffled our way around corners and through passageways. It was easy to imagine the shrine illuminated by flickering candlelight, standing out in the pools of darkness filling the corners.  How many pilgrims from long ago venerated the relics kept here?

The builders made free with stone from the nearby Roman fort Carla and probably Hadrian's Wall as well.  The Romans had been gone 300 years by the time this crypt was built.  Stone blocks like these, with decorative borders, were scattered throughout the crypt walls, positioned where they were for structural purposes rather than to maintain whatever design they had originally been carved for.  How would the Roman stonemasons have reacted if they had seen how their handiwork was re-used?

When a couple joined us in the crypt, the smallness of the crypt quickly became self-evident and we made our way back up the well-worn steps...

into the soaring airiness of Hexham Abbey.  The nave above was built in 1908.  Spaces were set into the wall on the right to show off various stone fragments that were uncovered along with the crypt.

Tons of these fragments were scattered throughout the Abbey, set in seemingly random places, as if they had so many Roman and Anglo-Saxon artifacts that they could afford to be careless with placement.

At the far end of the nave was the Sunday school space.  I loved the homely warmth of the children's area juxtaposed against the cold stone grandeur of the Abbey.

Bath, England

Today was our last morning in Lacock.  We bid the sheep a fond farewell as we trekked through their field one last time.  They ignored us.  Mostly.

We decided, sort of last minute, to go to Bath for the day before heading into London to catch the sleeper up to Scotland.  The Bath train station did not have a left luggage facility, but we gambled that there would be a backpacker hostel that would store our bags for cheap while we took the sights in.  Our gamble paid off and we left our bags with a mohawked, tattooed, albeit extremely polite and soft-spoken young man at the Bath Bathpacker hostel.

Bath is a beautiful city. The heart of the city is crammed with Georgian buildings and homes made with local honey-colored Bath Stone.

I wish our street signs could look like this

On a bright sunny day, the stone is imbued with a warmth (doesn't "honey-colored" make you feel warm inside just reading it?) that infects you with good spirits, so you stroll around Bath with a grin plastered on your face and a feeling that all is right with the world.

Georgian architecture is very pleasing to the eye.  Influenced by the classical architecture of Greece and Rome, it's all about clean lines, proportion, and elegant details*.  This devotion to order makes for handsome buildings that you just want to sit and stare at for a long time.  It's almost like meditation, letting your eyes roam over the perfect proportions of the buildings, unsnarling the kinks of your mind in the process.

We walked to the Royal Crescent and admired the half-circle of stately townhomes.  I couldn't help but think of the 2007 Persuasion, in which Anne is depicted running along the front of the Royal Crescent, desperate to get to Captain Wentworth and declare her love for him, or whatever it was that she had to do.  These are not buildings that you just start running in front of.  These buildings would frown upon such an act, such is the weight of awe you get just from looking at them from afar.  What better way could there be to show the risk Anne took with the simple act of running than to have her run in front of the Royal Crescent?

We stumbled upon the Jane Austen Center on our way back into the heart of Bath.  It was a nicely put together museum, with scenes of typical life in Bath during Jane Austen's time, complete with dummies wearing the fashions of the time.

J. and I snickered at the poster-sized reproductions of the portrait of Mr. Darcy as portrayed by Colin Firth in the giftshop.  We snickered even more when we saw the door to the men's restroom. 

We visited the Roman Baths.  The water really is that green.  And warm.  You could feel the heat if you sat down at the water's edge.

The museum was full of ancient artifacts, such as this mosaic floor. As Americans, it was a little breathtaking to be in the presence of such ancient history.

After a snack of black coffee and pain au chocolat at a hole-in-the-wall cafe, we explored Bath Abbey.  We were struck dumb.  The Abbey was an art form composed of light and air**. 

We went up the bell tower, climbing 212 steps. 

This is the ceiling we stood on

In addition to getting a bird's eye view of Bath, we got to stand on top of the vaulted ceiling.  Our tour guide pointed at the keystone, which was about 6 inches long and a hand's span wide, saying, "If you pull that out, the ceiling will collapse."  There was also a peephole through which we could see people milling about the abbey floor far below.  The peephole revealed the thickness of the stone we were standing on to be about 6 inches thick.  It was a little spooky.  Nonetheless, the workmanship of craftsmen from 600 years ago held and I am here writing the latest post in our British adventures. 

*Travellers with backpacks and worn tennis shoes will feel a little out of place inside such structures.

**Art is as much as about the "lack" of something as it is about substance.  Dancers will sometimes interject moments of stillness into their routines.  This lack of motion is as necessary to the dance as any leap or wave of the arm.  So, too, with magnificent buildings.  I notice the intricately vaulted ceiling, soaring columns, details of stone, but the space of light and air they encompass is the ever more powerful. As if the act of trying to contain the uncontainable illustrates for us the bittersweet futility of reaching for the unattainable in the here and now. We are all trying to touch God.

St. Cyriac's Church

We were going to Oxford for the day, but missed the bus to Chippenham by five minutes (it can be hard to walk briskly so soon after a full English breakfast*).  With an hour to spare until the next bus, we wandered to St. Cyriac's Church on the outskirts of Lacock.

We walked around the church, admiring the windows,

The church is known for its collection of "grotesques"

the gargoyles,

and the cemetery. We wondered whose grave this was, stuck in the ivy-strewn corner of the cemetery.

The rector came out while we were wandering the churchyard and told us we were welcome to enter and have a look.

This stone lady watched over the foyer.

The heavy doors opened after some coaxing.  We crossed the threshold into the silence of light and air, and our breath was taken away.  The walls were thick with the reverence of centuries of worship.

Not a relic of the past, St. Cyriac's is still a church. Sunday School tools were left out in the sanctuary.

These were the first of many death memorials we would see during our time in England. Scattered on the walls to our right were plaques commemorating church members who are most likely buried somewhere in the church floor.

Note the skull, or death's head.  Nothing like our modern day gravestones!

Here is a typical memorial.

Look closer and you'll see Sharington emblem: a scorpion

Up front, in the oldest part of the church, is the Sharington tomb, built in memory of Sir William Sharington, owner of Lacock Abbey, who died in 1553.

The ceiling above the tomb, with remnants of the original paint.

Our hour nearly up, we took one more long, fierce look about the church before leaving to catch the bus to Oxford.  Of all the churches we visited, this is the one where I felt most at home.

*We requested a full English breakfast little knowing what we were in for.  Out hostess cooked us scrambled eggs, baked beans, link sausage, bacon, black pudding, grilled tomatoes, and fried mushrooms.  And if that wasn't enough, there was also toast with jam and marmalade (which I did not care for), cereal, and yogurt.

Of course, there was tea.  There is always tea in England.