All Saints, Stamford

     Across Red Lion Square from St John's church stands All Saints.  It's appearance, like St John's is of Perpendicular gothic; the nave appears low and spreading, even a little workmanlike as sometimes Perp can be, next to the spectacular, assertive, tower and spire.  There is a element of fantasy too about both porches: the S spiky with buttresses and a huge ogee hoodmould, the N like a miniature castle from an illuminated manuscript has suddenly sprung into 3D. Charming.  Uniquely the base of the E, S & W walls is arcaded - EE along the E &S, Perp on the W.  The culminative effect is of something a little beyond the ordinary.
     Inside is spacious but oddly cave like as though it is partly hollowed out of the sloping ground, but perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised as All Saints was restored by Edward Browning in 1857, though the reredos and the septum (exotically made of Mexican onyx) are by T Treadway Hansom and date from the 1870s, and as at Uffington and Clipsham Browning was good at producing richly decorated cave like spaces.  Church as schatzkammer.  All Saints in comparison to those two smaller churches is not so successful.  It lacks the numinous. Perhaps the budget was not large enough or the scale of the building too big for his talents to come fully into play. For whatever reason in all a bit worldly, and I think it would be fair to say that the interior of All Saints has been ill-served by conventional Anglican taste. Sometimes Protestant use sits ill in a medieval catholic shell. Still there are things to look out for: the fine EE arcade in the nave and the capitals in the chancel; the Late Gothic ceiling of the south chapel; the  brasses to the Browne family, very rich from the wool trade, who paid for the Perp rebuilding of the church as well as founding Browne's Hospital in Broad St, and, I think, Stamford School.

     William Stukeley, the antiquarian, was the parish priest here in the 18th century.

Spalding III: Ayscoughfee Hall and gardens

     Adjacent to the parish church is Ayscoughee Hall, a late medieval house started in 1429 and added to and altered over the years.  It now belongs to South Holland District Council who run it as a museum, and is open to the public everyday except Tuesdays - Market Day in Spalding, along with Saturday.
     Built of dark red brick with stone dressings, and although a little municipal in feel, the Hall is a discreetly attractive, picturesque building - a mixture of 'genuine' Medieval Gothic, Georgian and Early Victorian Gothic and the classical; at times formal at others domestic. Sprawling.  For me the most interesting feature is the oddly detailed bay lighting the back of the hall. Almost as though it has arrived from the Late Medieval Holy Roman Empire. Interesting too that odd little door adjacent  very like the priest's door on one of the side chapels in St Mary's church. 

   The interior is fun but a little chill.  A sense that it was a bit of a challenge to fill the spaces.  As I have mentioned before one of the upstairs rooms was floor to ceiling with glass cases of stuffed birds.  All flown, alas. Period furniture and decor would certainly help warm the place up a bit.  The best spaces are the entrance hall, - a neo-classical refit of the original great hall - and the the warmly, Victorian, paneled library.  I could spend many happy hours there.  The great hall retains its original medieval roof, and and bay window.  

     In the early eighteenth century Ayscoughfee was the home to Maurice Johnson the founder of the Spalding Gentleman's Society, an example of thriving provincial cultural life.  Its members included Pope, Addison, Sir Hans Sloane, and the Lincolnshire antiquary William Stukeley.
     The hall stands in the remains of a formal, walled garden of c1730, which contains the the only building in Lincolnshire to be designed by the great Sir Edwin Lutyens - the town War Memorial of 1925.  In addition there are a number of sixties additions: a café and an aviary.  The 'Buildings of England' suggests that the designer of the gardens was the local architect William Sands.  The yew hedges have long since escaped their original bounds and now form huge billowing cloud-shapes.  It would be a shame to loose them in a full restoration of the garden, but certain features, like the enormous, and missing, gate pier at the back of the house could be put back to match the surviving pier and that would add hugely to the romance of the place.

Thorney

     The theme continued.  Wednesday saw us in the fenland town of Spalding and the newly restored Ayscoughfee Hall.  Alas, they had ridded themselves of the immense flock of stuffed birds that haunted one of the rooms, but there was however a lovely temporary exhibition on William Stukeley and his garden designs - he planted circles of trees in imitation of megalithic circles apparently.  I recommend a visit.
     Anyway the real subject of this post is the visit we made on Thursday to Thorney, in the Fenland just east of Peterborough.  I had been there before as a child to the zoo that then existed there.  I haven't been back since, except passing through on the top of a double decker heading for King's Lynn, but it has always intrigued me.

     Like Crowland to the north, Thorney is built on a fen 'island' and is the site of an ancient monastic community.  Its oldest recorded name is 'Ancarrig' - the isle of the anchorites - referring to the community traditionally founded by Saxulf Abbot of Peterborough c.662.  In 870 it was sacked by the Vikings and three of the hermits there, Tancred, Tothred & Tova, were martyred.  The island reverted to wilderness and the name changed over time to Thorney to reflect its abandonment - the island of thorns.  In 972 a new monastery, Benedictine, was founded by St Ethelwold.  It soon began to amass a massive collection of relics, and became a place of pilgrimage.  In the 1530s the monastery was dissolved and abandoned, the stone being quickly carted off to use in Cambridge.
     I was not a disappointed pilgrim.  The village and the church are especially attractive, more like a village in the Great Limestone Belt to the west than a fenland community.  This is due mainly to the fact that Thorney was an estate village, owing its appearance to the Dukes of Bedford.  Rows of pretty cottages line the main street.  Around the remains of the abbey are rather muscular Victorian Gothic cottages and shops, and to the south of the church is a village green lined with older, grander houses.  The church itself is basically Norman (1085-1128), built under Abbot Guenther.  Sadly all that remains of the church are the west front and the five western most bays of the nave.  The church originally was nearly 300ft long.  The nave has been stripped of  clerestory and aisles.  In 1638, when the local fens were being drained to form the Bedford Level, the church was restored to use, apparently by Inigo Jones. The attribution though might be apocryphal. The west window and door, and the plaster vault inside date from that period. In the 1840-1 Edward Blore added a chancel of sorts - a crossing and transepts in a monumental, rather Germanic, Romanesque - making the church 'T' shaped in plan. The churchyard is crammed with monuments, the Georgian ones very distinctive, the relief sculpture being deeply cut and often bearing a representation of the Lamb of God.

London and 'Celts: Arts and Identity'

     Another busy trip to London on Thursday.  The main reason for my visit was the exhibition 'Celts: Art and Identity' at the British Museum.  And I've been trying to quantify my response to it ever since as this exhibition raised some very interesting questions.  The premise of the exhibition is simple;  modern celtic identity is by and large a construct of Early Modernity based on a limited knowledge of the past and a series of assumptions that fed into, and were in turn fed by, that knowledge.  For the organizers of this exhibition the term 'celtic' is a cultural and not racial category.  The first mention of the 'celts' in written history was by the Greeks, who applied the term 'Keltoi' to people living in central Europe who traded with, and raided, the Classical world.  The Romans referred to the 'Galli'.  'Celt' was not a label that those people used about themselves - but then they left no written record.  And it is certainly not a name used, until the Modern Period, by those we now associate with celtic identities today - Breton, Welsh, Irish and Scots who became literate in Late Antiquity.  Since Thursday I've watched a BBC4 programme 'Meet the Ancestors' presented by Julian Richards and he assiduously avoided the label 'celtic' when he referring to Iron Age burial customs in England.  It was far too loaded a term.
     Now to the exhibition itself and the wonderful objects it contains. After a slightly wobbly start we meet 'things'.  Sculptures in the form of enigmatic warriors, or gods from central Europe and later grave slabs and the monumental Cross of St John (a cast) from Iona.  There are great swords and shields, and a spectacular horned helmet - votive offerings that have been recovered from rivers like the Thames and, here in Lincolnshire, the Witham where the ritual deposition of objects continued past the Anglo-Saxon 'takeover' into the Middle Ages.  Objects that because of their antiquity, and their use of a long forgotten visual and symbolic language, are mysterious, evocative things - not fully 'present' to us.  And there is gold - lots of it.  Torcs and penannular brooches and all manner of, well, treasure. The brooches, made in Ireland, are works of immense skill.  They are very small but they are decorated to within an inch of their lives.  Quite stunning.  And oddly, perhaps, it was the small things that remained with me the longest.  Anyway all of these objects are arranged chronological order from the Iron Age to Late/Post Modernity - today; from Paganism to Christianity and secularism.  Simultaneously moving across Europe from east to west.  From 'Hallstatt' culture, through the swirls of 'La Tene', through Classical Antiquity to Late Antiquity and what exactly?  And there, perhaps things get tricky; where perhaps that old, and persistent, clear cut notion of a dualism of 'Celt' and 'Anglo-Saxon' begins to soften.  One of the first objects on display is a gravestone, a 'Pictish' gravestone, and it is decorated with interlace and what are called 'Zoomorphic' animals.  Later on there is a wonderful gold item, a buckle I think, from the Sutton Hoo burial from near Woodbridge in Suffolk and it too is decorated with interlace and most incredible zoomorphic animal.  It is believed to be the work of an Anglo-Saxon goldsmith.  But which is the celtic object and which is the Anglo-Saxon?  They both contain the same motifs.  No wonder than that various other names have been coined to categorize these objects 'Insular', 'Hiberno-Saxon'.  Hanging bowls are another example: originating in late Roman Britain they continued to be made after the end of Roman rule (but in all likelihood outside the boundaries of Empire).  They are decorated with the swirls associated with 'La Tene' culture, and so are markedly 'celtic', but are overwhelmingly found in Anglo-Saxon graves.  In fact both interlace and the zoomorphic figure are believed to originate with the Anglo-Saxons, as did a number of smithing techniques such as chip carving, granular and filigree work, and cloisonné inlays that were taken up by goldsmiths working mainly in Ireland.  At this point in the exhibition it was these objects from Ireland that dominated; there seems to have been nothing comparable made in Wales or Brittany.  There was obviously more of a shared visual culture between the two, Celt and Anglo-Saxon, than we once believed.
     It is at this point historically that in architecture and in the visual arts that the 'celtic' slowly disappears giving way to firstly the Romanesque and then Gothic culture.  It is more, I think, than merely the politics of conquest and colonisation; both Romanesque and Gothic simply presented more compelling visual languages.

     And then the long 'Celtic Twilight', which makes up the final quarter of the exhibition.  That cultural 'half-life' that I find so fascinating.  It starts out, oddly enough, with English Antiquarians such as Lincolnshire's very own William Stukely (1687-1765), who was happy to accredit anything ancient and not obviously Roman to the 'Celts'.  Even odder was the view Stukeley, a Anglican priest, had of the Druids, who he saw as practitioners of an ideal rational, 'natural' religion.  He inadvertently started a trend that was picked up by the emerging Romantic Movement.  Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams) is a notable example.  Williams, (1747-1826), was born in Wales, lived in London, and was a mason by profession and a radical in politics.  In London he was active in a couple of Welsh societies 'The Honorable Society of Cwmrodorion' and the 'Gweneddigion'. Like Stukely he re-invented the Druids as followers of 'Natural' religion.  A kin to Deism, I suspect.  He also re-invented the Early medieval Welsh past as a Golden Era of liberal politics - something that still occurs today; you only have to read 'The Rough Guide to Wales' to see that.  Like James McPherson, in Scotland, Morganwg was not averse to fabricating celtic verse.  In 1794 the first meeting of his Gorsedd was held on Primrose Hill, North London.  The ritual was claimed to be authentic.
      The exhibition has a number of items objects associated with the National Eisteddfod, which is a descendant of that first meeting in North London.  I was stuck immediately by their secularised religiosity; they either took there cue from 19th century Anglicanism - for instance the banner at the start of the exhibition, or the stole that makes up 'vestments' one of the officials, or looked as though they were designed by use by some group of ritual magicians like 'The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn'.  Perhaps there is some link through the radical Williams to Freemasonry.  Opposite are two Scottish paintings, both luscious in colour and heavily Late Romantic in feel - dreamlike one could say: the famous and fabulous 'The Druids; Bringing in the Mistletoe' by the Glasgow Colourists George Henry and Edward Atkinson Hornel; and the less well known 'The Riding of the Sidhe' by the Dundee artist John Duncan.
     Duncan contributed to Patrick Geddes's short-lived magazine 'The Evergreen', and 'Celtic' was to have a profound influence on the Arts and Crafts movement as it developed in Edinburgh and Dublin - what was called the 'Celtic Renaissance' in Scotland - and also affected Arts and Crafts design in England. In all cases it was essentially decorative, rather than architectonic. Both these paintings display a shift in attitude to the 'Celtic' from Stukeley and Williams, who saw in the Celtic as a progenitor of Enlightenment Values to one in which the Celtic is held up as an alternative to Modernity, a place of dream, of mysticism and other values (including unease) beyond the 'greasy till' of mercantilism (to use W B Yeats's telling phrase).  This view of the Celtic has its origin in the revolt of Romanticism, and is essentially conservative. It is there in the works of Sir Walter Scott and later W B Yeats and J R R Tolkien.
     I have in my collection of pamphlets and guides a catalogue of an exhibition held in Dundee Art Gallery in 1973 of the work of a contemporary of Duncan's called John 'Dutch' Davidson.  The title is 'The Hills of Dream Revisited'  An apt for this exhibition too, for in the nebulousness of the term, in the mystery of the art - of its not being entirely 'present' to us - 'Celtic' becomes the receptacle of both our wishes and our unhappiness.  We back project on to it.  And it is that that unites William Stukely, New Agers, New Celtic Christians, Nationalists and Romantics, radicals and conservatives.