St Michael, Golden Grove

      Gelli Aur (Golden Grove) is a attractive, somewhat straggling village on the southern side of the Towy valley. An estate village, serving the mansion of Gelli Aur the home, in turn, of the Vaughans and the Cawdors.  It was the 1st Earl Cawdor who commissioned the church.

      St Michael's was built in the late 1840s, the work of that eminent and incredibly prolific Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott Snr.  It is not at all flashy but a simple two cell building with porch and vestry. It all looks rather 'natural', a quality often lacking in Victorian churches including those by Scott.  There has been a church on the site since the beginning of the 17th century, when the original parish church down in the valley was abandoned. In terms of style St Michael's is early Dec and with its little wooden bellcote looks as though is has strayed from the Welsh Marches. Don't let that put off any visit, because the interior is a wonderful time capsule. I doubt it's been altered much since construction, and the place is full of the most charming details.  A great example of a moderate Tractarian interior, rather serious, though with attention to those important details and elements of sumptuousness, and inventiveness, that lift it beyond the ordinary.  Decoration is concentrated, rightly, in the chancel.  The encaustic tiles, for instance, are a treat. The only jarring notes are firstly the red carpet in the nave and the secondly the reredos, complete with gradine and fake tabernacle, and which dates from between the wars, and is completely alien to the Tractarian ethos.

A morning on Gower: St Cenydd, Llangennith

      Our final port-of-call was Llangennith, the largest of the three communities we visited and the most (but discreetly) 'touristy'.  Attractive none the less, with a crowd of houses facing across the sloping green to the church.

      St Cenydd's was built as a priory under the authority of the abbey of St Taurin, Evreux, but the site has a longer history still - see the slab of interlace now standing in a niche beside the chancel arch but long associated with the traditional burial place of the patron saint in the chancel. St Cenydd was a hermit from the 'Age of the Saints' living on the nearby island of Burry Holms. There imitating the Dessert Fathers he became a 'Miles Christi' - a soldier of Christ contending against 'the world, the flesh and the devil'. As I wrote of St Guthlac, 'Making Catharsis on the path to Theosis.' Both saints remind me of Bede's description of St Cuthbert as a 'beata Christi athleta', referring in part to St Paul's description of fasting etc as 'askesis' or athletic training. 'Miles Christi' was one of a whole number of descriptions of ascetics and their striving for union with God in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: militum Christi/spiritualis, agon, certamen, conluctatio.  Words denoting conflict, warfare. (Not, when one thinks of it, words that denote passivity, but activity.) Athanasius, the Egyptian bishop who during his exile in the Western Roman Empire introduced monasticism to the West (he, not Benedict, is the Father of Western Monasticism), described monasticism as a sort of prolonged martyrdom. On the village green is a small holy well dedicated to Cenydd. A minor place of pilgrimage then.
   Always small, the priory was suppressed in 1414 along with all the other alien monastic houses in England and Wales.

      The church consists of a long, aisle-less nave and chancel with a austere tower attached to the north of the nave.  The parts make a very picturesque whole, but the interior, it has to be said, is a disappointment.  The light blue colour does not help neither the drastic restoration by J B Fowler which raised the floor level by 4ft.

A morning on Gower: St Madog, Llanmadog

     The next village west of Cheriton - at the very north west of the Gower - is Llanmadog.  The sacred enclosure of St Madoc.  Early gravestones found in the churchyard and now inside the church indicate that this was an important site for the early church in this part of Wales. One of the stones dates from the late 5th century and reads: ADVECTI FILIUS GVAN HIC IACIT.

     The founders of the church could not have chosen a more lovely site - there are beautiful views across the estuary of the Loughor, and along the northern shore of the Bristol Channel west toward Tenby.  A serene place. A place to treasure. The church is tiny, just a two celled structure with bristly, dumpy west tower; the interior is atmospheric, redolent of Ecclesiological Society correctness. Again there is a sense of the ancient although the church was enthusiastically restored in the 19th century by John Prichard for Rev J D Davies who, as at Cheriton, made some of the fittings himself. In the porch swallows or martins nest above the church door.

Own work: The Rustiche of Sebastiano Serlio XXIX

     Not sure what to say here that hasn't been said before! Still I am finally getting to the end of this long project - as I type this post downstairs in the kitchen which doubles as my temporary studio the final drawing is awaiting completion.

A Morning on Gower: St Cattwg, Cheriton

      Thursday morning and a trip to the far north-west of the Gower peninsular.  A wonderful morning it was, travelling around such a remarkable and beautiful landscape.

      Our first stop was Cheriton, a tiny village nestling deep in the valley of the Burry Pill.  Atmospheric and remote. The church is small but rather monumental thanks to its clear design and heft. It consists of nave, sturdy tower and chancel - three simple volumes.  There are no aisles, but there is a south porch and a Victorian (N) vestry disguised as a N Transept. The church dates from the 13th century, but one could believe it is earlier still - the walls are thick, windows are rare, small and simple in design.  There is a simplicity and primitive quality to this structure that is entirely satisfying.

     The only decorative elements are the really fine s door and the corbels that help support the arches under the tower. Indeed they are the only real carving inside the church for the the interior is just as simple as the exterior which, alas was rather dark when we visited, but then it was pouring with rain outside - a passing shower really but very heavy.  The interior, however, was very moving; a holy place one felt. I was particularly taken with the relative narrowness of the two crossing arches (how 'Anglo-Saxon' this arrangement seemed) and felt the e wall of the nave was crying out for two cathedral-scale icons; Pantocrator on the right (S) and Theotokos on the left (N).  But then, forgive the wild conjecture, that was perhaps how a wall like was actually used at one point, covered in images. St Benedict Biscop decorated his monastic churches with icons he obtained in Rome, and later Anglo-Saxon clerics on pilgrimage to Rome bought among other things silks manufactured in the East Roman Empire and the Caliphate with which to make vestments and altar hangings.  But I digress, but we forget that Rome in the Early Middle Ages was one of the centres of Byzantine civilisation, the walls of its churches sheathed in mosaic and its altars and priests dressed in Byzantine silks. Hard sometimes to believe that the Roman Rite was actually conducted in a space such as Santa Maria Antiqua, it hardly seems to 'fit'. But that really, really is another post.

     No fittings of note except that the Victorian vicar here, the remarkable, scholarly J D Davies, not only had the roofs coloured (quite successfully), but made a number of the fittings himself - slightly clumsy, to be honest, but fun.