St Teilo, Llandeilo Fawr

      Tuesday we visited Moelfryn, a garden high on a Carmarthenshire hill side, open to the public as part of the wonderful National Gardens Scheme, and it was an absolute treat.  Eccentric and delightful. 

     From there we headed into Landeilo for lunch - least said about that the better.  The parish church being open I took the opportunity to take some photos for the blog.  Apart from the austere, Late Medieval w tower the body of the church is wholly 19th century, the work of the ubiquitous Sir George Gilbert Scott.  In a story that one feels could rival Gabriel Chevalier's 'Clochemerle', Scott was called into design the church after a competition to design a church for under £3,000 fell apart.  In the end the church cost nearly double Scott's original estimate of £2,500.

     The site however, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, is much, much older.  The site dates back to the 'Dark Ages' and St Teilo.  I'd like to think that the large churchyard (sliced in two since the early 19th century (?)) replicates the shape of St Teilo's original monastic foundation.  Wishful thinking on my part.  In the huge retaining wall along n side of Church St is what is known as St Teilo's Baptistery; a cave like space - probably not that old in the scheme of things - where water gushes out of a pipe and a gated passage leads mysteriously deep into the hill.  It was looking all spick and span on Tuesday, when on previous visits there were vases of flowers etc.

     The style of Scott's church is Cambridge Camden Society approved Middle Pointed.  Dark, massive like a cast iron safe.  Formidable, even unfriendly in places.  The east end in particular has a metallic quality I think this down to the masonry.  The walls are of rubble masonry - to match the tower, no doubt.  'The Buildings of Wales' just says that the church is of 'hard grey limestone', but looking at the multiple buttress set-offs it's hard not think that these, at least, are of a different, lighter, close-grained stone, and have probably been cut by machine, as is the church's most extraordinary feature: a huge batter of perfectly cut blocks at the e end of the n aisle, that is half roof and half buttress.  Elemental, industrial-age Gothic. It could almost be the work of a 'Rogue Architect' such as Samuel Saunders Teulon.  You know, I'm not sure it will ever weather into mellowness.
     The interior - aisle-less chancel, nave with n aisle and s transept - is big and barn like.  No money for refinements.  In recent years the church has been subdivided.  It hasn't helped.  Some of the detailing is plain awful.  Not much in the way of furnishings except some memorials in the chancel.  The churchyard, being in Wales, has a range of forceful Victorian gravestones.  Obelisks, spires and the like.

Ely Cathedral: The Furnishings

      Finally, to the furnishings.  And it must be said that Ely is particularly rich in them.  Their distribution is however not only uneven 'geographically' throughout the building (the majority are in the eastern limb), but chronologically (the majority are post-Reformation).  The latter is to be expected in a country where the Reformation was not Lutheran, but was, at times, decidedly 'Reformed'.  Time and neglect have done the rest.  Perhaps it might be valuable to see the cathedral subject to a series of tides that have both scoured the building of furnishings and left a flotsam of new ones in their place.  It also illustrates that we assume erroneously that buildings like cathedrals exist is some sort of stasis, when by their very nature the opposite is true.

      The most important survivals from the Middle Ages are the Choir Stalls (1338-48), and the funerary monuments.  In particular there are the Tournai marble tomb of an unknown bishop; the Purbeck marble tombs of Bishop Kilkenny and Bishop Northwold; and the tomb of Bishop Redman which is credited to John Wastell - we've seen his work so far at Peterborough Cathedral, and King's College Chapel, Cambridge.  Very little Medieval stained glass survived the onslaught of the iconoclasts - the overwhelming number of such windows in the cathedral today are Victorian.  In a similar manner nearly all the liturgical furnishings are Victorian or later.

     Little survives of the period between the Reformation and the arrival in 1770 of James Essex except a series of fine Baroque monuments.  Sadly, the rather fine marble font was exiled from the cathedral at some point during the 19th century; the bowl is in Prickwillow church, but the canopy has been lost. For shame. Late 17th century, it was the sort of thing you might in a Wren church in the City of London.  Of Essex's work at Ely next to nothing survives with the exception of two paintings in the s transept that served, in turn, as altarpieces for his High Altar.  Some it, surely, must have been ok?  And that takes us neatly to the work of Sir George Gilbert Scott - where to begin? Perhaps with the fine Italianate iron screens in the chancel aisles.  Scott also designed the new High Altar and its sumptuous reredos, the accompanying gasoliers, the marble and encaustic flooring of the choir and sanctuary, the organ case, the pulpit, and the choir screen.  It is perhaps no surprise to find that his time at Ely lasted some 30 years, no surprise either that his work has come in for some heavy criticism since.  Whatever its merits stylistically the craftsmanship is top notch.  

     In the nave are two sumptuous tombs in the N aisle.  Both Victorian. The tomb of Canon Hodge Mill by Sir George Gilbert Scott, and tomb of Bishop Woodford by Thomas Garner.  In the north transept the furnishing of the Cambridgeshire War Memorial chapel is by the Arts and Crafts architect Sir Guy Dawber - more remembered for his domestic architecture.  To be honest I'm not sure if I quite like it.  In the 1920s Sir J N Comper furnished Bishop West's Chantry, but more of that in a further post.

    In recent years a number of contemporary art works have been installed in the cathedral with mixed results.  The best is, perhaps, by John Maddison in Bishop Alcock's Chantry.

Ely Cathedral: The Interior

"....the inside has the greatest variety and neatness in the works; there are two Chappels most exactly carved in stone all sorts of figures cherubims and gilt and painted in some parts; the roof of one Chappel most delicately carved and hung down in great points all about the church; the pillars are carv'd and painted with the history of the Bible and description of Christ's miracles, the lanthorn in the quire is vastly high and delicately painted, and fine carv'd work all of wood...."

     The interior, as you can imagine, is vast and like any Medieval cathedral not immediately or easily comprehended. It is akin to a mystery.  A place to be experienced, in the which the visitor participates in the unfolding of that mystery.   It is, also, not easily written about.  I have found this post a struggle - how does one write about something so big and so complex?

     I will start as any paying visitor does with interior of the w porch.  As big as some parish churches - Early English influenced by the choir of Lincoln cathedral. Quadripartite vaulting. Arcading very elegant in contrast to the general heft of the structure.  The doors into the cathedral are by George Gilbert Scott - lots of scrolling ironwork.

     Through the wicket door the visitor steps into a sublimely vertiginous space - the lantern of the w tower.  It is almost overwhelming, but one feels, however, the absence of that missing nw transept.  The space is out of kilter.  That great blank wall filling the north tower arch somehow oppressive. The w wall of remaining transept is as highly decorated as the exterior.  There is no room for mural painting.  Architecture, even at this stage, has become its own decoration.  In the 1840s, before Sir George Gilbert Scott undertook his mammoth restoration of the cathedral, Professor Robert Willis (1800-1875) restored the transept - the ceilings of both it and the tower are his and he rebuilt St Catherine's chapel from near ruin.  Since the mid-19th century, the transept has been used as a baptistry, though the font looks bereft without a substantial cover.  Wondering since what, if any, was the original liturgical purpose of the w transept?  And another question while we're at it: has it ever been proposed to rebuild the nw transept?

     Ahead lies the immense Romanesque nave.  Its height (over 90ft) makes it feel a little narrow.  (It's at this moment that the critics suddenly invoke a French influence.  They do the same at Beverley.)  All is light, however, and there is a sense of expansion, of release to walk into this vast space.  A serene space.  The architecture mightily impressive and austere with little in the way of carved detail.  The high wooden ceiling was decorated in the 19th century by Henry Styleman Le Strange and completed, after his death, by Thomas Gambier Parry.  It is based on the early 12th century nave ceiling in the former monastic church of St Michael, Hildersheim, Germany.  The shape is just perfect, a flat ceiling, like, say, the one spanning the nave at St Albans would be inappropriate, deadening.  The aisles, I should add here, are groin vaulted, rather cave-like.  In the s aisle of nave are two outstanding Norman doorways that gave access the cloisters.  From the west, they are 'The Prior's Door' and 'The Monk's Door'.  In sharp contrast to the implacable architecture around them they are richly and intricately sculpted; the tympanum of the former, for instance, contains a Pantocrator.  How did it ever survive the rigors of the Reformation?  Little in the way of furnishings now but in the Middle Ages two screens would have stretched across the far end bays of the nave; firstly, a rood screen, and behind that, guarding the monks quire, a stone pulpitum.  The altar before the Rood also served as a parochial altar until a separate parish church, likewise dedicated to the Holy Cross, was built on Holy Cross Green adjoining the cathedral.  At the Reformation this church was demolished and the congregation moved into the Lady Chapel which was re-dedicated as the Church of the Holy Trinity.  The floors of the nave are, I think, Victorian.

     As Celia Fiennes wrote the 'Lanthorn of the quire is vastly high'.  It is indeed, floating over us mere mortals like an immense canopy or umbrella.  Beautiful, serene and remote.   Until James Essex re-ordered the interior in 1770 the choir ran e-w through this space within a high-walled stone enclosure.  In many ways such an arrangement seems odd to us.  We see the Octagon as a centralising space, so much so that it now contains a central altar as though it was some ideal church from the Renaissance, and there are historians and critics who see it as 'classical' in concept.  Under the influence of Bishop Mawson and James Bentham, James Essex essentially moved the choir and sanctuary eastward, to the Presbytery of Bishop Northwold, the High Altar coming to rest against the e wall of the cathedral, though the idea for such a radical liturgical re-ordering came a hundred years before from Bishop Gunning. Writing in 1848, just as Scott was beginning his work on the cathedral, John William Hewett did not spare anyone's blushes: 'Never was there a more ill-judged step than the removal of the choir to the east end [] to give it such stinted proportions, and for this purpose to displace some of the fine old monuments, and to hide others, to obscure the pillars and above all, to erect the miserable organ gallery which we now behold, must surely be pronounced most tasteless performances...' Indeed, a lot of harm was done in the process: the old Norman pulpitum was demolished and much damage done to the monuments.  However, it must be acknowledged that Essex's work on the fabric did ensure the building's survival.  Hewett wished to restore the choir to original position in the Octagon, but this was not to be.  Scott, in his own far reaching restoration of the mid-nineteenth century, and who undid just about all of Essex's work, merely moved the choir and sanctuary back 3 bays west to its current position.

     To the north and south of the Octagon, the transepts.  The oldest parts of the cathedral.  It was through the door in the nw corner of the n transept that pilgrims entered the church.  Their spatial experience of the interior must have been so profoundly different from ours as much of the church was simply out of bounds to them.  As at St Albans they seem to have been almost an afterthought, though they provided income enough. Flooring in the s transept, at least, yellow gaunt brick.  Aisles vaulted, late Medieval Hammerbeam roofs painted by Stephen Dykes Bower (?).  Rather good.

     At this point I entered n quire aisle and the eastern limb of the church - the quire and the presbytery.  The latter is the older - but under the under the episcopacy of Bishop Northwold; EE, based on the nave at Lincoln e.g. the tierceron vault and lavish use of Purbeck marble.  It was designed to hold the shrine of St Etheldreda.  The quire - which originally held both the choir altar and the High Altar - is even more lavish, with lierne vaults to both aisles and 'nave'. It dates from the time of Alan of Walsingham.  At some point during the Reformation the choir altar became the High Altar.  From the north aisle a covered passage leads to the Lady Chapel, but more of that remarkable building in a later post. In contrast to the nave the whole eastern limb is heavily silted up with furnishings. Elaborate Victorian marble and encaustic tile floors in around the High Altar and choir, the aisles however retain old 'rustic' flooring. 

     Finally at the far east end of both presbytery aisles are the fantastical chantry chapels of Bishops Alcock and West.  Extraordinary confections of stone. Intimate and intense.  Almost overwhelming with the profusion of architectural detailing that in a Late Gothic manner more typical of Europe obscures the logic of the architecture.  The n possesses a fine fan vault with pendant, the s a net vault, profuse with Renaissance motifs.