Hawkwood

When William Capel inherited a fine historic Jacobean manor house on the wooded rolling slopes of the Stroud Valley in 1842, he did what any rich, assertive young Victorian squire would have done. He demolished it and had it rebuilt in a fashionable neo-Gothic style.

He was an extremely wealthy landowner and landlord of many houses and cottages all around the Painswick and Stroud area. He was a powerful Tory and a County Magistrate, one time High Sheriff of Gloucestershire, and he built the imposing and dominant house not just as his residence but as a fitting emblem of his status. What he didn't know, as he sat in his luxurious living room quaffing his port and peering through the mullioned windows at the expanse of his copious estate, was that the door-frames and skirting boards all around him were filled with secret messages.

It's impossible to know exactly how the site, now run as Hawkwood College, would have looked through the ages. At the time William Capel inherited it – just one of a family line who lived in the house for centuries – it was known as The Grove and occupied its beautiful position as part of a substantial estate. During the 17th century the house was owned by a family called Mayo, and when their surviving heir was a girl, Hester, who married one Samuel Capel in 1700 and bought out her sisters' shares in the estate, the family name changed but the genetic line continued. It's unclear who built the Jacobean manor house but traces of medieval stonework have turned up which indicate an earlier origin for the site. I'd always understood that there was a monastery (or more likely, a small religious cell) there at one time, but so far no evidence has been found to support this. Other than the occasional psychic impressions of visitors, who have been known to 'see' cowled figures mooching about the grounds, even when they didn't have any previous knowledge of the monastery story.

I'd go a step further and say that the Hawkwood College site has the feel of having been a sacred place throughout time. It has the most extraordinary atmosphere, and is quite unlike any other place I've known. It has a focused and contained kind of energy, as if its sanctity is insulated from the outside world, and when you're inside it you feel as though anything is possible.

The building, which feels as magically charged as the land it sits on, is perched on a ledge in the landscape underneath a slope covered by woodland. It has a magnificent view to the south over the meadows to the town of Stroud and beyond (the clod-hopping white bulk of the new SGS College campus notwithstanding – how did they get planning permission for that?) and the adjacent Cotswold scarp, and if you go and stand on the top of the Toots long barrow on Selsley Common you can clearly see Hawkwood across the valley with its distinctive Gothic gables. On the lawn beside the house there rises a spring, whose cool bright chalybeate loveliness flows steadily throughout the year (when I was younger I used to take it home in bottles and make wine with it – it's wonderful stuff – makes a lovely cup of tea too).

Immediately beside the spring is a mammoth, venerable sycamore tree. This tree has its own spring welling up underneath it, and the thick roots of the sycamore form a basin in which a little pool of water stands, lightly strewn with leaves. It's a scene straight from the legend of Gereint and Enid in the Mabinogion, where a sycamore stands beside a spring in an enchanted garden. I wouldn't like to speculate how old the tree is (at least 300 years, I'm told, and probably older, which is unusual for a sycamore), or whether the spring was ever considered a holy well, but standing beside it the whirly churning feeling in your stomach tells you that this is a very special place indeed. The Hawkwood double spring has a very special active-passive energy, one spring gushing out over the land and the other gently enclosed by a naturally formed well.

William Capel is shown in the 1841 census in his early 30s and living with his mum in what must then have been the Jacobean manor house. He was still unmarried at the time and in fact didn't marry until later life. He's described in the following census as a Magistrate and Proprietor of Land, Farming 500 Acres. Among his domestic staff, in 1871, can be found a young man called William Gurney, who lived in the house as a domestic servant. He came from Maisemore and was in fact Ivor Gurney's uncle!

Presumably it was when William Capel's mum passed away that he decided to knock down the ancestral home. A few bits of stonework from the older house still survive, but the rebuilding was substantial, and he also had some new cellars added. The Gothic design of the building is very much the style of the classic Cotswold manor house and built from beautiful honey-coloured local ashlar. There are some beautiful decorative details, like this foliate head – which may be a green man but probably more likely a lion or similar beastie.

Among the skilled craftsmen employed to work on the rebuilding of the house was a carpenter and joiner named William Clifton. He was born in Chipping Norton on or around 24th January 1816, and after serving an apprenticeship in Witney, spent the rest of his life in Tetbury, where he married the daughter of another carpenter. In 1843, at the age of 27, he was working at The Grove (Hawkwood) where he was responsible for much of the decorative woodwork around door frames and skirting boards. We know this because he signed and dated many of the fixtures before fitting them in place.

A number of intriguing pieces of wood with pencil scribbles on the back have been coming to light over the last 40 years or so in the course of repairs and alterations. But the extent and detail of it only became clear a couple of years ago, when a burst mains water pipe in the upper part of the house caused a devastating flood in the downstairs sitting room. In the course of clearing up the damage, the skirting boards were taken off and revealed the prevalence of William Clifton's literary endeavours – and his political views.

"Down with Kings and Queens and the Aristocracy and all Tyrants". One of William Clifton's secret messages, written on the back of a chunk of wood which lay hidden within the house for 168 years.

 This piece is signed "Wm Clifton Chipping Norton" (his birthplace, although he lived in Tetbury) and is dated 1843. The two slogans read "Down with Kings and Queens" and "Universal Suffrage for ever".

Like many working class people in the 1840s, William Clifton was a Chartist. Some of his slogans include direct references to the Chartist movement, others refer more generally to its principles. One of them was signed "He who has no voice in the making of Laws by which he is governed is a Slave. William Clifton".  I don't know how he felt about his employer William Capel and whether he had him in mind when he condemned the ruling classes – Capel was a respected man in society, but what kind of person he was and how he treated his staff is much harder to know – but Clifton was performing a powerful act of talismanic magic in hiding such fiery sentiments under the boards of a country squire's house.

And in its way, his magic worked, even if it took its time. The last of the Capel dynasty died in 1932, and the house and its somewhat diminished estate was sold to a bloke called Colonel Murray. Murray was a bit of a military history fanatic, and it was he who rechristened the house Hawkwood – named after his hero, the 14th century mercenary Sir John Hawkwood. A few years later it was sold to Roland and Lily Whincop, who founded an adult education college there based around the principles of Rudolf Steiner.

William Clifton didn't live long enough to encounter the work of Steiner; he died in Tetbury in March 1872 at the age of 56. But he would probably have been pleased with what the house has turned into: a socially and environmentally responsible college which anybody can attend for education or spiritual refreshment – with the landed proprietor and the class system of unbalanced social power long gone. He also didn't live to see the introduction of universal suffrage, the cause in which he believed so passionately, although one of the succession of "Reform Acts" in the Victorian era may possibly have granted him a right to vote in 1867 when suffrage was extended to include skilled working class men (prior to that, you had to be an owner of property to have the vote). But universal suffrage didn't find its way into British statute until 1918.

Hawkwood remains an incredibly special place. As well as its education programme it provides a venue for all kinds of creative and spiritual groups, and was the scene of Gareth Knight's legendary ritual workshops during the 1980s. The Gareth Knight Group was founded in its dining room in 1973, and still meets at Hawkwood today. And if you're among those who encounter one of the strange presences that are occasionally seen or heard in the upper rooms and corridors of the house, don't be alarmed, just remember that it's a place where the walls are full of magic.

With special thanks to Dave James, Head of Maintenance at Hawkwood College, who provided much of the historical information and kindly allowed me to photograph his collection of door jambs.

Severn Tided Framilode

Right, so I was driving down this meandering lane inside the horseshoe bend of the River Severn looking to check out an ancestral village (I thought all mine came from from Somerset, but I recently found a branch which was rooted right here, in the landscape which flows in my soul, focused somewhere around the parish of Fretherne inside this delineated loop) and I could feel my aura prickling with the heightened energy of the land. It's thought that the Celtic tribes who lived here in the pre-Roman era regarded the horseshoe bend as a sacred place, and the area inside it is really buzzing. I saw a signpost to a place called Framilode and liked the name; couldn't work out why it sounded familiar. So I took a detour through the village (very nice it is too) and down the long cul-de-sac which stops by St Peter's church on the very edge of the Severn.

There was a footpath going through a patch of meadow beside the river so I went for a muddy squelchy stroll. Everywhere is muddy and squelchy this year, but at least the rushes on the riverbank were doing well. It was a most beautiful place. You can't see the whole of the horseshoe bend when you're inside it because it's too big, but you can see the lean of the river in its outward curve before it swings sharp left in the distance. Along the curve is a little beach of peachy gold sand dotted with curious beached objects and washed up tree-stumps, lined with drifts of dark birds. As tempting as the sandy bits along the Severn may look, they will gobble yer legs up given half a chance, so they're more fun to look at than to step on. The Severn here looks much as it always does in its standard (i.e. non-flooding) mode: ice-blue, flat and placid. You can see May Hill from here too, easily recognised even by the most geographically challenged thanks to its little crowning tuft of jubilee trees. And beyond the curve of the horseshoe, on the distant bank, the stodgy wedge of the Forest of Dean.

 Across the Severn to May Hill

As I was walking down the riverside taking my piccies a fellow walker came the other way and stopped to say hello. Then he said, "Do you know Ivor Gurney?" Well, yes. In fact this blog launched with an Ivor Gurney poem. It's not surprising that his work appeals to me because his deep sense of the soul of the Gloucestershire landscape and its almost painful beauty is pretty much what this blog is about. This chap told me that Gurney kept a boat here in Framilode and used to sail up and down this stretch of the Severn, during a time (in 1913) when he was lodging in the house of the village lock-keeper. In honour of this he was doing an "Ivor Gurney walk" which he'd found in a book, and Framilode was mentioned as one of Gurney's special places.

He didn't mention what this book was called, but it didn't take me long to find it: Ivor Gurney's Gloucestershire, by Eleanor M. Rawling. And a very interesting read it is, and curious just how many of Gurney's other "special places" I've visited recently without realising the connection. But at least now I knew why the name Framilode had seemed familiar.

FIRST FRAMILODE

When I saw Framilode first she was a blowy

Severn tided place under azure sky.

Able to take care of herself, less girl than boy.

But since that time passed, many times the extreme

Of mystery of beauty and last possibility 

Of colour, sea breathed romance far past any may dream

With Treasure Island, Leaves of Grass and

Shakespeare all there,

Adventure stirring the blood like threat of thunder

With the never forgotten soft beauty of the Frome

One evening when elver-lights made the river like a stall-road to see.

(June 1925)

The little church of St Peter at Upper Framilode, meanwhile, had me fooled to start with. It was built around 1854, but at first glance I thought it was Norman – at least the chunky little nave with its semicircular apse looked that old. It's very compact and timeless, set among fiery red beech trees only yards from the steely glide of the Severn. But when you look closer it's obvious that the design is a pastiche of the Norman style, with a sharp zigzag outlining the memory of dog-tooth chevrons and the corbel table adorned with geometric shapes where faces and beasties would normally be. Quite ahead of its time really. It was designed by a bloke called Francis Niblett and would originally have served the people who were employed on the local landowner's estate. It has a weatherfish on the top instead of a weathercock (if it was me I'd call it Michael).

Its Victorian provenance is not in doubt though once you get inside. It's a lovely peaceful little place but the inside of the little apse is painted in a way that only the Victorians would find bearable to look at for the entire duration of a Sunday service. It's quite magnificent, with stars funnelling up between the rafters and gleaming gold Thou Shalt Nots between floating angels. The full works.

Unusually for a Victorian church, it has some very curious beastie heads serving as label-stops around the west window. It's also blessed with a lovely decorated blue and silver ceiling with stencilled decoration all over it. The amount of work that must have gone into it (with artists getting a crick in their neck and all the blood running out of their arms) is quite mind-boggling. A gentleman I spoke to during my wander round the church told me that originally the walls of the nave were completely covered with a dense fleur de lys pattern. But at some stage in its recent history somebody must have got fed up with the migraines and decided to bring in the Dulux Magnolia. While I do like Victorian church-paintings, I'd be the first to admit that they can be monstrously overwhelming and I can't blame anyone for wanting to tone them down a bit. There's also the issue of how dark churches become when their walls are painted, and no doubt this one is a lot brighter without its fleurs.

The name of Framilode goes back to the 7th century, and denotes the decanting of the River Frome into the Severn (as mentioned in Gurney's poem). Historically there was a ferry across the Severn somewhere near here, and it was also formerly a good place for mills; not just the usual corn mills but also for manufacturing tinplate. This mill complex occupied an island in the middle of the Frome but it's all gone now. In the days when ships used to trek up and down the Severn there was even some ship-building going on in the village. But now it's a place of soft reedy rushes and quiet lapping ripples, and the lush memories of a war poet before the thump of the guns.

The Chosen Hill church scratchings

At the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, a pencilled notice was visible above the south door of St Bartholomew's church on Churchdown Hill. Very possibly it still is, obliterated by layers of scribbles, scratchings and daubings. The notice read: "Non scribe Ecclesiae Muris Quia Deus Dominus Tuus In Ecclesia Habitat". Which translates as "Write not on the walls of the church for the Lord thy God abides within". Given the continued rampant defacement, perhaps something more on the lines of "Don't write on the fucking walls" might have got the message across.

  The south doorway, where pencilled signatures of the early 20th century make an odd accompaniment to carved Norman studded chevrons.

I have to confess though that I love church graffiti. Not that I condone the daubing and etching of sacred buildings, but the historical graffiti is fascinating and it's one of the most direct and personal relics our ancestors have left us. It often shows considerable patience and stone-working skill, and beautifully proportioned letterforms – largely lost skills, which show up the casual wall scratchers of today as rank amateurs with no sense of beauty or proportion.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the best historic graffiti is found in places where people could scrape unobserved. Isolated churches, where bored people had to hang out for long periods, are a rich source of them, especially when they're not overlooked by any roads or buildings. Perched as it is on the top of a sacred mound at the corner of an iron-age hillfort, high above the surrounding countryside and quite a steep trek even from its adjacent village, St Bartholomew's on Churchdown Hill (or Chosen Hill as it's called locally) has acquired quite a collection of graphical scrapings from every age of its history. They adorn more or less every part of the church, inside and out.

When it comes to unobserved spots, St Bartholomew's church is pretty impressive in its isolation, perched on top of the ancient ramparts of Chosen Hill.

For sheer flagrant cheek, it's hard to beat the contribution of Thomas Badger, who carved his name in crude capitals deep into the stone of the chancel arch, in a way that cannot fail to have led an incensed vicar straight to the culprit – unless perhaps this part of the wall was covered up by furnishings in his day. His vandalism is currently exposed for all to see.

One of the things that intrigues me most though is a symbol which appears over and over again all over this church, but particularly on the north side, and which I will name the Churchdown Sigil. It comprises a lozenge with an arrow through it – invariably pointing upwards, although it has a few variations such as multiple arrows or multiple lozenges. The best example can be found in the north porch, just to the left of the door, where it appears alongside another intriguing pattern based around a quartered cross.

The Churchdown Sigil (right) and the quartered cross

The guidebooks describe it as a mason's mark, and that certainly seems very reasonable. I've seen masons' marks on other churches which look very like it. But masons are skilled stoneworkers and most of the examples of this symbol are a bit amateurish, as if they were carved by somebody who didn't have the right tools or skills. There's also the sheer number of them – sometimes several times on the same block of stone. An obsessive amateur copier of mason's marks? Or something else? If anybody has seen this symbol on any other churches I'd be interested to know.

Alongside this figure of a bird and someone's initials are more examples of the Churchdown Sigil. A small one and the point of a much larger one, plus an incomplete one (far right).

The north porch (pictured at the top of this post) has some of the best of Churchdown's amateur chisellings as well as the highest concentration of sigils. The porch is an unusual two-storey job with a priest's lodging above it, which was added to the church in the 13th century. Some of the graffiti is probably not far off being contemporary with it, and in fact it's possible that some of the carvings pre-date the porch on stones re-used from elsewhere. A good example of this can be seen on the outer walls of the porch where the base and lid of two Crusader coffins, complete with incised cross, have been used as building blocks. (I have a Joe Orton-style mental image of the masons turfing some poor benighted skeleton out of its coffin so they can nab the decorative lid.)

Here's a rather nice fleuron, bunged in for no apparent reason as if someone was practising and got bored half way through the second one.

Much of the graffiti in the porch is highly enigmatic, and the more you stare at it, the more you see different ways of viewing or interpreting it, especially as it's often hard to distinguish the lines of a carved image from natural marks or chips and scrapes in the stone. I think it's always important to look at these things with an open mind and be prepared to come up with your own thoughts about them, rather than taking anyone's view as established fact – even when it's in a respectable guidebook.

Perhaps one of the most curious to interpret is the figure, now extremely faded, on the door jamb of the porch's outer door. William T. Swift's book Some Account of the History of Churchdown, a valuable local history resource published in 1905, includes a description which Swift most likely got from the Rev. Dr. F. Smithe, who was vicar at the time he was researching the book, and who took a tremendous interest in the church's history. In their view it represents "a gaunt figure, or emblem, of Death – having the long hair and breasts of a woman; the fleshless arms are extended; in one hand an hour-glass is held, to denote the brief span of man's life, and in the other hand, to signify the grave, is an aspergès, which was used when the sprinkling of Holy Water upon the corpse (at the grave-side) was enjoined in the rubrics of the Old Uses or Service Books, such as that of Sarum."

Far be it from me to question the judgement of Dr Smithe or W.T. Swift, but to me it looks patently obvious that this is a mermaid. As faded as she is, she clearly has a scaly fish's tail, and underneath her is a symbol which looks very much like an anchor. Whether that could be an hourglass in her hand I couldn't say, but the other thing, an aspergès?! I'm not sure where these gentlemen are coming from in their "female Death" interpretation, but I think they might have got a bit tangled in a Biblical mindset. Last time I saw a priest asperging, he was using what appeared to be a pastry brush.

Given that she seems to be a mermaid, it may be fair to assume that the objects she's holding are a comb and mirror, since the majority of English pre-Reformation mermaids are depicted with them –  though admittedly the comb looks more like a television aerial. 

Another very striking image is what appears to be a face of Christ, with radiating aureole, chiselled into a lump of blue lias. Swift/Smithe reckon this to be pre-Reformation, and may well be right. And yes, all around this Christ-head you can see crude but distinctive Churchdown Sigils, some with multiple arrows.

Not all of St Bartholomew's wall chisellings are illicit; this official one (below) is rather nice too. The original Norman tower of the church fell into a dilapidated condition and was rebuilt in 1601. The rebuilding is commemorated by an engraved stone tablet at the back of the nave, incised with big bold letters and prahper Glahhsterrsh're spelling.

"This Belhows was buyldede in the yeere of our Lode God 1601". Plus additions.

The outside of the church has loads of carved grafitti – some of it quite brazen, other examples more subtle so that you spot different things every time you look. The oldest dated piece of graffiti I've found so far on the outside walls was apparently done in 1624.

Names and initials on the west wall of the tower dating back to 1624, not long after the tower was built. The Badger family have been at it again.

The church guidebook (an exceptionally good one, by the way) mentions a scratch dial on the outside north wall of the chancel, but this is very faded indeed and you need sharp eyes to spot it – all that's really visible is the hole for its long-lost gnomon. Another little enigma of this extraordinary church is why anybody would carve a scratch dial on the north wall, where it would have been as much use as a chocolate teapot. Most likely it was originally on the south wall and the stone block got moved during a past rebuilding: there are numerous re-used carved stones all over the fabric of this church, which point to the likelihood of an earlier building on the site whose stone was recycled. The fact that it's so weathered backs up the idea that it could be very old. Either that or it was etched by somebody with no sense of direction and a very poor grasp of physics.

 The northerly scratch dial. (NB This photo has been tarted up in Photoshop to enhance the outlines, otherwise, honestly, you wouldn't be able to see a damned thing.)

I feel like I've barely started extolling all the delights of St Bartholomew's Church so there will definitely be more to come. It always seems to be omitted from any books about interesting historic churches, but it seems to me to be a very special place and much underrated. Not to mention its position on a pre-Christian sacred hill where the powers still flow, and its magnificent views over the Severn Valley.

Sources:
Swift, William T., Some Account of the History of Churchdown (1905).
Waters, Gwen, A History and Guide to the Churches of St Bartholomew and St Andrew, Churchdown (church pamphlet, 1989, 2004).

Selsley Toots

 
The Toots long barrow

The other day I was driving up towards Stroud on the high road across Selsley Common when there was the most extraordinary downpour. I couldn't see where I was going even with the wipers on full pelt, but there was something strangely exhilarating about it too. And it went on and on and on, relentlessly, until the road was running like a stream. I decided to pull off the road on the edge of Selsley Common and wait for it to pass. And once it had eased off a bit I got out of the car with the camera stuffed up my jumper and had a squelch across the common, having intended for some time to visit its subtle but distinctive landmark – a long barrow known as The Toots.

I got completely soaked but I did manage to capture some attractive cloudscapes as the storm passed over.

 Toots on the horizon

Why does a long barrow attract a name like The Toots? It's got nothing to do with either smoking marijuana or farting, though no doubt both those things have been done there at various times over the centuries. Nor is the name a corruption of 'Tits', as is sometimes suggested by those who can't look at a tumulus without thinking of giant goddess boobies. But it's a name you often see associated with burial mounds in high places, and often those with a road or track running close by. Among many examples are barrows called the Fairy Toot and Wimble Toot, both in Somerset, and Toot Hill at Healing in Lincolnshire which has a likely barrow on the top. The name also sometimes occurs in relation to beacon hills and hilltop camps and castles, such as Toot Hill in Macclesfield Forest, Cheshire.

There isn't any definite etymology for the name but it's clear from the sheer number of them that are readily found across the country that 'Toot-hills' meant something significant at one time. Perhaps the most compelling suggestion is that the name comes from the Saxon word "teotan", to look out – a word which evolved into the Middle English "tote", to watch, or to look out. In short, most Toots have a view.

The view west from The Toots long barrow, over the village of King's Stanley, to the sandy silvery expanse of the River Severn and its great horseshoe bend, and the Forest of Dean on the far side.

That's certainly the case with The Toots barrow on Selsley Common. The barrow sits just on the crest of the Cotswold ridge with a magnificent panorama across the west, where the River Severn meanders like a silver serpent through its green valley with the Forest of Dean beyond. You can see the horseshoe bend in the Severn which stands out on every map of the UK, and also the sandy banks to the south west where it turns from a river into a tidal estuary. To the north, green rolling Cotswold tumps delight the eye as far as it can see.

I ought to know a thing or two about Toot-hills, because I was practically born on one. I spent the first years of my life in an old house on the Mythe just north of Tewkesbury, a round hill graced by a tumulus, known as the Mythe Toot. It fulfilled many of the criteria for Toot status: an obvious look-out point, a man-made tump on top of a natural hill with an old road (the A38) running right next to it – and the house was haunted – though not in an unpleasant way. But I have no more idea than anybody else what significance Toot-hills had to our ancestors.

If their purpose was as a lookout point though, that would make some sense. There are many other sacred places and landscape 'points' visible from The Toots, including some on the other side of the Severn where there were temples and shrines, not to mention a huge range of potential beacon hills. It's reasonable to assume that you would also be able to see the nearby Nympsfield Long Barrow and Hetty Pegler's Tump if it weren't for the woodlands that have grown up around them in recent centuries. With The Toots itself visible as a bump on the skyline from all around, it could be seen as a sighting point for a ley-line, as per Alfred Watkins' system of "old straight tracks". When I say ley-lines, I mean the straight-line alignments of physical features in the landscape, rather than earth energy lines (which to me usually appear to be spiralled more often than straight).

The Worcestershire antiquarian Jabez Allies, writing in 1852, was also intrigued by Toot-hills: "Although the Anglo-Saxons may have used such hills as 'lookout stations,' still many of them may have been of ancient British origin and derivation; and the fact that all the above-mentioned hills or places in Worcestershire [i.e. toot-hills] are either close to, or near upon the sides of roads, appears to favour the opinion that they were sacred to the Celtic Teutates, who was the guide over the hills and track-ways. Bryant says, Theuth, Thoth, Taut, Taautes, are the same title diversified, and belong to the chief god of Egypt."

I'm not sure I can quite get with the idea, now popular among new age questors, that the names of British sacred sites are derived from those of Egyptian gods, and/or that Egyptian priests came over here to share their secrets with the ancient Britons. I'm not completely closed-minded to the idea, but it always feels to me as if the British landscape and group-soul has a wondrous enough mystery system of its own, if you care to delve into it, without needing to be bolstered with bolt-on theories from more readily accessible traditions. The god name 'Teutates' sounds a bit classical to me and not very Celtic, though if it's derived from a simpler form such as 'Taut', or the Brythonic 'Dú Taith', then fair enough. But I must admit the idea of these hills being named after a specific god doesn't ring true for me either, for reasons I can't put my finger on. The word Toot seems more directly functional somehow.

Toots long barrow, looking north along Selsley Common. The dip visible across the barrow here is, unfortunately, a scar left by meddling Victorian twerps.

What can I tell you about The Toots long barrow then? Er ... not that much. It's never really been excavated, other than having a few gouges taken out of it by amateur antiquarians of a previous era, who neither recorded their activities nor made good the damage afterwards, stupid buggers.

The barrow gets a one-line mention in L.V. Grinsell's The Ancient Burial-Mounds of England: "This is one of the longest examples on the Cotswolds, being about 210 feet long," he says. That's it. It may be one of the longest long barrows, but thanks to the twerps of yore digging a big slice out of the middle, it actually looks more like two shorter barrows joined end to end. It has a nice atmosphere but not an overwhelmingly 'buzzy' one; it's more of a passive giver and taker of subtle forces, slowly breathing them. It doesn't have an obvious entrance either on inner or outer levels, but invites your consciousness to go spiralling in.

It does exert a certain magnetic pull over people wandering on the common. The place is thrumming with dog walkers even in the vilest weather, and at more clement moments it's a popular place for flying kites and other airborne toys. It's very possible that many of the people who feel compelled to go and stand on top of The Toots don't even realise it's a long barrow, as it has no distinguishing features: no visible stones or chambers. But stand on it they do, as if drawn to it by something unconscious. And perhaps that's as much as you need to know about its power and purpose.

Quarry remnants on Selsley Common, echoing distant hills

Sources:
Allies, Jabez, On the Ancient British, Roman and Saxon Antiquities and Folk-lore of Worcestershire,  2nd edition, 1852. (Good info on Toot-hills)
Darvill, Timothy, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds (Tempus, 2004)
Drayton, Penny, 'Toot Hills', from Mercian Mysteries No.21, November 1994; available online here.
Grinsell, L.V., The Ancient Burial-Mounds of England (Methuen, 1936)

Lamented Lassington

"John thought sadly of Lassington and its little church. The tower was all that was left of it. For some reason, now forgotten, a Norman church had been demolished and rebuilt in neo-Norman style in 1875. But the foundations had been faulty and the chancel had begun to part company with the nave. The end had come at a Harvest Thanksgiving service in the early 1970s. A sudden downpour in the middle of the service had deluged the visiting preacher in his stall. The church, used only occasionally by that time, had finally been abandoned..."

— Anthony Duncan, Faversham's Dream

What's left, a Grade II* listed stump, perches on a small semicircular tump rising from the farmland within a wider loop of the Leadon. The grass coarse, rough-mown, fends off waiting brambles. St Oswald still has his tower. The church, a ghost, is present only in the long rectangular gap; its delineation faintly seen and dimly imagined.

Almost buried, the steep churchyard steps disappear under grass, ankle-twisting tussocks in the dips and hollows of slipping graves whose stones lurch, defaced, generations flaking from memory, blank bones of stones under frost-sheared scrolls.

Only the lawnmower paces the line of the aisle and bumps over the vanished floor, its vaults mossed over and its chapels a figment in the grass. The skinny, blue-lias tower is silent, a bell-free shell.

I've lamented many times the misguided Victorians in their zeal for church "restoration" which usually involved destroying centuries of priceless heritage. Wall paintings scrubbed away or chiselled off, medieval pews chucked out and ancient atmosphere sterilised. But the restoration of Lassington church by Medland & Son in 1875 was so catastrophic it can only echo Michael Caine's immortal words, "You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!"

I haven't been able to find any evidence either to confirm or deny Anthony Duncan's description of events, taken from a fictionalised account, above. But as well as being a writer with a deep interest in, and love for, historic churches, he was rector of the adjoining parish of Highnam (into which Lassington had been absorbed) in the early 1970s and was pastorally responsible for Lassington church around the time of its demise. It's very possible therefore that he was present at the service where the preacher got drenched.

What is certain is that the church was abandoned in 1972, and as it was dilapidated and structurally unsafe, demolished in 1975. Leaving only the tower.

I'm seeing this in so many churchyards at the moment: recent harsh winters have stripped the inscriptions from old graves, in this case what looks like an early 18th century Forest of Dean cherub headstone.

There is an aching sadness about Lassington churchyard even on a summer's day. It's not much visited anyway, being stranded at the end of a long, pot-holed lane. One minute you're driving down a nice smooth road towards a well-appointed housing estate and then ker-thunk, watch you don't scrape your exhaust pipe. There is no village at Lassington apart from a few individual houses strung out along the lane, a rather nice old Court, and the roofless ivy-smothered shell of a derelict building opposite the church. Being the hub of such a small community, Lassington church endured neglect and underinvestment for centuries.

Originally built under the patronage of St Oswald's Priory in Gloucester, hence its dedication to St Oswald, for most of its history it was served only sporadically by a succession of curates and absentee rectors with a roster of eccentric names. One 19th century curate went by the name of Powell Colchester Guise. Going back to the 1640s, the incumbent was Ezra Graile, who had taken over from the exquisitely named Elias Wrench. Not so eccentrically named was the 16th century rector Henry Smith, booted out in 1518 following a charge of sexual incontinence.

In the west wall of the tower – ancient window, modern glass

The Victoria County History records that in the 16th and 17th centuries the church was "in a poor state of repair, lacking paving, glazing and tiling." Though in those days it wasn't that unusual for rural parish churches to have to make do with a bare earth floor. It had a little surge of better fortune in the 19th century when the village population grew and the church was better appreciated, culminating in the money being raised for its drastic and ultimately disastrous rebuilding. Some of the original Norman stonework was retained in the rebuilding, and it had a magnificent chevroned chancel arch (now lost). By the mid 20th century the church was slipping into terminal decline. Which is really sad, as its remaining stump is close to 1000 years old.

The surviving tower was built in the 11th century and may well even be Saxon. The first two storeys are the oldest part, and have the little round-headed lancet windows which are typical of the Saxon and early Norman period. These windows are deeply splayed, which means the openings on the inside are much bigger: large round-headed arches narrowing to a tiny little slit for the actual window (unfortunately the tower is kept locked so it's not easy to get inside and see this). The one in the west wall contains a blue guilloche glazing which is very pretty even if not very old. The window on the south side has a stone jutting out above it which may originally have been carved, but it's too weathered to tell for sure. It certainly looks very like the Anglo-Saxon window-head carvings, similarly weathered, on the nearby Saxon church of St Mary at Deerhurst.

The top chunk of the tower was added in the 14th century, and has the wider ogee-topped windows belonging to that time period. It also includes a few salvaged Roman red bricks in its fabric (one just visible in the photo above, to the top left of the upper window). There were apparently traces of Roman buildings in Lassington visible as recently as Victorian times, in the area south-east of the church where the medieval village used to be – all of which is now just lumps and bumps in a field. It's worth having a look at the aerial view of Lassington on Google Maps (you can find it quickly using the Reference Map tab above). The outline of a large square moat is clearly visible to the south-east of the church, which probably belonged to the manor house destroyed in the Civil War. You can also see the remains of strip lynchets and old roads from the vanished village.

Lassington's pagan connections are possibly thriving more actively. Long beloved by Druids and a gathering place for gypsies, the Lassington Oak was a significant landmark in nearby Lassington Wood, thought to have been getting on for 700 years old at the time of its demise. It had a girth of 29ft and had to be propped up by a complicated assortment of wooden struts. In 1960 it was blown over in a gale, and now only its recumbent trunk survives, although a ring of 12 oak saplings was planted around it in 1921 by a Druid Order. Its spirit also lives on in the Lassington Oak Morris Men who continue the age old traditions of mummers' plays and morris dances in the area.

Writing in 1938, when the church was still extant and in use, Arthur Mee mentions a giant elm tree at the churchyard gate with a girth of over 20ft, and another in the churchyard standing over an ancient coffin. All gone now.

There is now a visitor information board beside the tower which includes some heartbreaking photos of the interior of the church during its last days, derelict and crumbling.

This doorway in the east wall dates back no further than 1976, constructed as part of a necessary shoring up of the wall following the destruction of the body of the church. The wooden door itself is Victorian and was originally fitted during the rebuilding scheme in 1875, while the ironwork on it is known to have been salvaged from the church's original south door and is much older. This ironwork closely resembles that on the west door of Rudford church, a mile or so up the road.

Lassington church is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, a charity which has saved many historic churches from destruction, doing a great job despite facing a 20% cut in its funding.

Sources:
Victoria County History: Gloucestershire vol. VIII (draft version, 2010)
Mee, Arthur, The King's England: Gloucestershire (Hodder & Stoughton, 1938)

Wholly innocent: Isabella and the angels of Highnam

When Thomas Gambier Parry's young wife Isabella died of tuberculosis, following closely on the deaths of three of their children from the same cause, he was a bit put out. As he was an extremely wealthy artist and art collector whose family had got rich in the East India Company, he had the means to honour his lost loves in the way he felt they deserved. These days most people are content to commemorate their loved ones by planting a tree or getting a little plaque put on a park bench. But the Victorians were of a different mindset and didn't do anything by halves; for the depth of Gambier Parry's loss, nothing less would do than a personal cathedral of grief.

 Thomas Gambier Parry

And so, in the grounds of his country estate at Highnam Court, three miles north of Gloucester, he set aside a square of land in a field and built Isabella an enormous temple of decorative neo-Gothic opulence and painted the inside of it himself; a decorated monument to melancholy, his stricken love etched in with every brush mark.

Gambier Parry worked swiftly. Having got permission from the bish, he got started on building the vast church in 1849, a year after Isabella's death, and had the whole thing complete and ready for consecration in less than two years. He could well afford to: he hired a good architect and spared no expense in building the church to the highest standards and fitting it out in the costliest opulence.

The church was built tall and thin, with a nave of towering proportions. He bought the finest brass candelabra to light it, set beautiful brass insets into the floor tiles with jewelled glass 'eyes', and warmed it with monumental decorative radiators in cast-iron filigree. He filled every window with stained glass, including one with a red cross set into a green background which blazes a fiery red cross of light onto the altar each evening at sunset.

And then once it was finished, he began painting.

Gambier Parry was clearly going for a medieval look in his new church. It was the custom in medieval times for church interiors to be painted all over – ostensibly to help a largely illiterate congregation to learn and remember bible stories, but I always think they actually did it just because they wanted to. (Well, why not?) Weather and puritanism took their toll on this heritage and not that many medieval wall painting survived as far as the 19th century, and those that did were almost routinely chipped off or scrubbed away during the Victorian era in a lamentable frenzy of so-called "restoration". There's something of an irony that while all these misguided chumps were cheerfully destroying centuries of irreplaceable wall-painting heritage, Thomas Gambier Parry was busy painting new ones.

Victorian it may be, but the style of Gambier Parry's church is 14th century Gothic, and the frescoes added to the medieval fantasy. All around the church he placed biblical quotes, often dwelling on themes of judgement and redemption. Vines and blossoms twirl up arches and columns, with fleurs de lys stamped in gold. Passionflowers unfurl across the end walls. A long frieze of biblical figures lines one of the aisles, and the chancel area is smothered with stars and angels. This is his tribute to Isabella.

Gambier Parry already knew a thing or two about loss. An only child, his parents had died when he was only five and he'd spent his childhood being passed around an assortment of relatives. The stability he had sought in Isabella and their six children was whittled away quickly, as three of the children died from TB aged seven years, seven months, and just a few hours respectively. And then just 11 days after the birth of their sixth child, Hubert, Isabella herself succumbed to TB. Thomas was left alone again, a widower at 32 with the three surviving children.

In honour of the lost children, he dedicated his church to the Holy Innocents. And in honour of Isabella, he built a special side chapel. Ostensibly a private family pew, situated beside the chancel and screened off from the rest of the church by a decorative grille and with its own private door to the outside, it amounts to a private shrine to the squire's young wife. On the eve of the church's consecration, when all was quiet and nobody else was around, he brought a bust of Isabella from the house and placed it in a specially prepared niche in the wall of the shrine. Thus, every time he attended the church he could sit in his private pew with Isabella there beside him.

Gambier Parry's private shrine to his wife Isabella. The bust is still in the spot where he placed it.

However, the uxorious squire was not one to show off his love and grief simply by throwing his money about. The wall paintings in the church are almost entirely his own work. While he allowed his assistants to do the lettering and some of the more routine patterns, all of the artwork was his personal labour of love. He ground and mixed his own pigments by hand. He drew dozens of angels and clothed them in every colour of the rainbow, using his own unique formula of "spirit-fresco" paint carefully blended from beeswax, turpentine, spike lavender oil and assorted organic resins. He crouched on scaffolding in the dimly lit building for week after week, month after month, etching his vision with painstaking detail on the virgin plaster. It took him more than 20 years to complete it.

There were good practical reasons for this monumental effort too. He was pioneering his own method of fresco painting which still had to be tested and proven. He'd been to Italy in his youth and studied traditional frescoes, but the Italian technique had proved to be a woeful failure in the UK as it wasn't compatible with the English climate. Gambier Parry resolved to overcome this by developing his own spirit-based paints with better permanence. Highnam church, along with Ely Cathedral, became test pieces for this new "English fresco" method which is still known today as the Gambier Parry process.

Within a short time of the church's consecration Gambier Parry had remarried, and his second wife Ethelinda features in the frieze on the north side along with one of their daughters. Swift remarriage was the done thing at that time for widowers with young children, but still, Isabella was the love of his life and nobody could really replace her. He could only fill the void with angels.

Clearly the church at Highnam was meant to be a lasting monument, an art treasure which would endure and be valued by subsequent generations. But as time passed it was consumed by darkness.

Gambier Parry had purposely made his church dark. Whether the sombre lighting was intended to inspire awe and sanctity or whether it was an expression of his loss, under natural lighting the church is exceptionally dark even in summer daytime. This is largely because all of the windows are glazed with stained glass, which lets through very little light. To compensate for this, Gambier Parry was generous in his provision of candles, and during his lifetime the church was entirely candlelit – which must have looked beautiful. In the early 20th century the candelabra were replaced with oil lamps, but again, it required an awful lot of them to light such a large building.

Unfortunately, what hadn't been taken into account is that both candles and oil lamps produce soot. Lots and lots of it. It penetrated every nook and gable, and slowly coated the walls with a thickening veneer of oily grime. As time passed, the condition of the wall paintings deteriorated drastically. The colours faded to a mute grey and the creamy plaster turned to sooty charcoal. By the time the church was converted to electric lighting the damage had already been done. Anybody visiting the church in the 1970s and 80s would have found it difficult even to imagine what Gambier Parry's frescoes were supposed to look like – they were blunted to near blackness.

It also didn't help that the church suffered from a lack of investment during the 20th century, and parts of it began to crumble. Rain came in through the worn out roof. The damage was bodged up on the cheap, which in the long term made it worse. Shoddy repairs gave way and let more rain in.

"dark, lofty, mystic, beautiful and sad ..."

It's a great credit to the parishioners of Highnam that they wouldn't allow the deterioration to continue, and the church's rescue between 1987 and 1994 was due in no small part to their fundraising efforts under the initiative of the late Tom Fenton, great-grandson of Thomas Gambier Parry, who inherited the Highnam estate in the 1970s. They managed to raise enough money to fix up the roof and then, once the leaks were stopped, they got the frescoes cleaned and restored. The result, it has to be said, is a stunning transformation.

Detail of the Judgement scene above the chancel arch, painted in 1859. Angels sound the last trumpet while Christ summons the saints, throned and crowned within a vesica piscis. If the haloes look 3D, they are. They were cast in plaster of Paris and then gilded, and they really shimmer.

The Judgement scene in context.

Detail of the angels on the lower right of the Judgement scene, chasing off "ye cursed" with flaming swords.

The ceiling inside the chancel, filled with stars. And along the cornice – more angels.

 It is quite overwhelming in its detail, and if you're not a fan of extravagant Victorian decoration then it may well give you a migraine. But it's a remarkable expression of one man's devotion and artistic vision, and the survival of the bright colours and crisp details after 160 years is a brilliant endorsement of Gambier Parry's fresco process – clearly he had his formula spot on! His other major work, in Ely Cathedral, has also survived beautifully.

* * *

And so what brought me to Highnam church on a showery August morning? I was following the trail of one of its former rectors, Anthony Duncan, whose book The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic I've recently been editing for a re-issue. Tony Duncan was a family friend and a remarkable person, not by any means a run-of-the-mill Anglican priest. In particular he was sensitive to presences and resonances from the past, such as those expressed in this poem (Tony was rector of Highnam from 1969-1973, so the poem dates from the time when the church was suffering from disrepair):

Highnam

[Church of the Holy Innocents]

The plaster cracks and drops, the frescoes fade;

the builder’s cheats let water in, let fall

the ill-plugged pinnacles. A sinking floor

makes crazy the great candlesticks. Great books

of Cranmer’s, bound in brass, now lie

dust-gathering, his Church has passed them by.

These holy innocents were carried off;

their Herod was tubercular, their mother’s too.

This holy shrine is God’s and theirs,

cemented by the Squire’s cruel tears;

dark, lofty, mystic, beautiful and sad,

and crumbling, maturing, changing down the years.

The brick-box multitudes attend here now,

all brash and cheerful; their liturgy profound

but language vulgar, angular and new.

God’s Holy Mother occupies the pew

where Squire glared and counted through the grille.

But I have seen, have seen! Unbound

and unbereaved, and out of time, and how

that older, gentler family attends here still. 

– Anthony Duncan

I arrive at Highnam just as a sunny morning is giving way to black cloud, and the vast bulk of the church looks spectacular in the storm light. What immediately strikes me is that stepping into its grounds is like walking straight into a medieval vision. A somewhat Victorianised, constructed vision, but nonetheless one which feels authentic and true to its source. The churchyard is delineated by a low stone wall perched on a ha-ha which rises from the surrounding field. A row of tidy Irish yews forms a genteel avenue down one side with tall monkey-puzzle trees screening the perimeter (Thomas Gambier Parry, among his many interests and skills, had a thing about conifers and planted them liberally all round his estate). On the opposite side, a wide grassy dell sweeps down to a very romantic little gate-in-the-wall with a path curving away beyond.

The other immediate impression is the sheer size. In fact for a rural parish church it's absolutely enormous. Money was no object to Gambier Parry, but you have to wonder at the burden now placed on a small community having to care for such a large building at a time when everything is so expensive. They bear their responsibility with good grace though, because everything here is lovingly and immaculately maintained.

The square churchyard delineates a medieval vision. It's carved from the landscape where the fading undulations of medieval ridge-and-furrow farming seem less real than the colourful fairy-tale within the perimeter wall, its intensity giving it a permanence. Thomas is a medieval knight, and with his long cloak hitched up on his horse behind him, stands by the wicket gate and gazes out along the scrubby pathway towards the house hidden behind distant trees. The vista is empty but he knows she is there, and so his longing is eased by the swaddling comfort of certainty. He paces out the perimeter, under the intense evergreen and down the sunlit dell, but always he returns to the wicket gate. Isabella parades between the sculpted yews, courted by birds passing over, feeling the drag of her dress over the sunlit grass. Confined to the path, she is both in this place and out of it. But the path leads to the wicket-gate.

The medieval dream reaches to outlying posts. Gambier Parry built a number of companion pieces for his church, including a generous vicarage (now a private residence), a beautiful little schoolhouse with a teacher's cottage attached (also no longer used for its original purpose) and a Gothic lodge which combines ecclesiastical style with medieval fantasy, complete with a round turret.

 The lodge at Highnam, just north of the church.

As the storm clouds move in and obscure the scene, I arrive at the church door just as a lady with a key is locking up and leaving. But she very kindly offers to re-open it so that I can have a look at the inside and take photographs. The inside has an intense atmosphere – intense darkness under the glow of its own windows and intense colour when the electric lights go on. The melancholy hangs like a pall among the rafters, but it's a beautiful sadness. As I walk up the tiled nave I get a flash of something else suspended in the air above, a bluish, translucent thing. A risen Christ, or an angel. It hovers there in semi-permanence, made from shards of light.

The inside of the church really is magnificent, tall and slender with angels coloured like a tube of Smarties. Did Gambier Parry do all of this just for Isabella and the lost innocents? It's hard to tell. He was a follower of the Oxford Movement and so he had ideological reasons for wanting to build a church, and practical reasons for wanting to test his fresco colours on it. Throughout his life he was a generous benefactor who wanted to use his money to make the world a better place, and giving this church and its accompanying school to the local community was part of that impulse. But Isabella infuses the fabric of the building like a veneer on the walls.

And then as I walk through the chancel I look to the right and catch sight of the side chapel built to Isabella's memory, and it's got such a presence about it that my stomach does a somersault. Its doorway is guarded by corbels of carved angels among swirling golden vines and stylised blossoms. Although it's now used as a Lady Chapel, it clearly belongs to Isabella. Her presence is felt all over the church but this is where it's focused.

The lady-with-the-key gives me a fascinating guided tour. She shows me the one window of old stained glass, whose colours are richly saturated and far more beautiful than the colours in the Victorian windows. Mr Gambier Parry brought it back from his travels in Italy, she explains. It depicts Herod's men snatching a small child from a distraught mother. "And he put it right next to the font!" I can't help but admire the font, which has an immense chain-winched cover of intricately carved wood like a miniature spire, all pinnacles and crockets, hollows and sinews. My guide seems marginally less enamoured with it. "They had maids to do the dusting for them in those days," she observes drily, which is a fair point.

At the other end of the church is the pipework of the organ, not currently functional but exquisitely decorated in shades of purple and gold. It was on this organ that Isabella's last child Hubert, born just a few days before her death, used to practice his keyboard skills as he was growing up in Highnam. Hubert Parry, later Sir Hubert Parry, ended up pursuing a life in music as a scholar and composer. At first I thought I hadn't heard of him, but then it dawned on me with a clang like being hit on the head with a frying pan that he had composed the famous hymn Jerusalem. That most beloved of hymns which is becoming England's de facto national anthem, although William Blake's words carry much deeper resonances than most casual singers of it realise, as 'Jerusalem' was the name he gave in his mythology to the female 'emanation' of the giant Albion. Or in other words, the inspirational, imaginative, feminine aspect of the archetypal group soul of England.

As I'm about to leave Holy Innocents church, the brewing clouds have dumped their load and it's absolutely pelting down. So I sit in the porch and wait for the sun to come back out. The place seems to sit half in and half out of the passage of time, as fresh as the day it was built and yet a relic of something from a past era. The grass outside is a vivid green and the background noise is constant, a drumming of rain on the porch roof overpowered by a constant whooshing of traffic on the nearby A40.

Thomas Gambier Parry died in 1888, and is commemorated in Gloucester Cathedral, where more of his painting survives. In addition to all the things he built at Highnam and the spectacular gardens he created here, and the various church paintings (which were always done gratis), he left behind a string of philanthropic projects including an orphanage (he was of course an orphan himself), a children's hospital and a college of science and art. A few years later Sir Hubert Parry inherited Highnam, being by then the only surviving child of Isabella. He added a parish hall to his father's portfolio of beneficence, and was buried in St Paul's Cathedral after his death in 1918.

The ups and downs of the last century have seen many changes, but what doesn't change is the medieval dreamworld imprinted with such permanence on the place, and given physical form in the church and its founder's imaginative vision. Just the kind of vision that Blake meant when he spoke of Jerusalem.

Sources:
A Guide to the Church of the Holy Innocents, Highnam, Gloucestershire (guidebook from the church)
And I'm very grateful to the lady who generously gave up her time to give me such an interesting tour of the church interior.

* * *

Should you decide to visit Highnam church, you may find it useful to know that it has a generous car park, accessed through the Community Centre entrance. However, neither church nor car park are visible from the road, and it's only when you go into the Community Centre driveway that you see a signpost for the church car park – so it's very easily missed (especially if you've got some prat in a 4x4 driving up your backside).