Astonishing Gigapixel image of Exeter Cathedral

Part of Peter Stephens’ navigable gigapixel image of Exeter Cathedral, looking west from the crossing.  Reproduced by kind permission.

The other day someone sent me a link to this extraordinary three-dimensional image of Exeter Cathedral, taken right under the crossing of the nave and transepts.  The photographer, Peter Stephens, has produced a navigable 360-degree ‘gigapixel’, that is, an image consisting of over a billion pixels.  To see what that means, try zooming in — and keep zooming in! — to reveal its incredible detail.  The glass in the west window, the carving on the organ screen, the masonry in the roof (which is the world’s longest continuous medieval vault)… all can be brought in a flash to stunningly close quarters.

Most astonishing to me is the eye-watering clarity with which the roof-bosses, right up in the heights of the vaults, can be seen.  It is impossible to see these in any detail from the ground with the naked eye, but this image reveals the care and skill with which they were nevertheless carved and painted.  The workmanship is no less accomplished for its remoteness from mortal eyes — and why should it have been?  It was meant for Someone else to see.

The gigapixel also offers a chance to admire the wonderful fourteenth-century minstrels’ gallery up in the triforium on the south side of the nave (on the right when looking towards the great west window).  Behind the twelve carved angels with their beautiful instruments is concealed a chamber large enough to accommodate dozens of singers.  To the medieval pilgrim, hearing but not seeing the choir, it must really have seemed angels’ music.

A remarkable image of a treasured cathedral, which I must visit again once this pandemic subsides.

Update: Peter Stephens writes here about the considerable amount of work that went into making this image.

A fourteenth-century roof-boss high in the vault of the nave.  Reproduced by kind permission.

Ten Years Since Benedict’s Visit

Pope Benedict leaves Lambeth Palace for Westminster, 17th September, 2010

Already it has been ten years since Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Britain.   Ten years, then, of tea twice daily from my souvenir ‘Papal Mug’ (I make that over seven thousand cups), and ten years, too, that my life has been on the course on which those four days confirmed me: a course with a particular direction, with a particular confidence, in the service of a particular Person.  I cannot be the only one for whom the whole experience helped to affirmed and clarified all that matters most in life, and indeed what life really is.  So, not least because it also happened at a formative time for me, on the threshold of university, I remember the Papal Visit with great happiness, and continue to draw strength from its memory.  It will remain a high moment for the rest of my days.

The long-serving Papal Mug

This had not always seemed likely, however.  One way and another, the months before the visit constituted a rather unpleasant prelude, in which whole swathes of the press and media engaged in an eight-month campaign of hostile publicity not simply against the idea of the visit, but often explicitly and unashamedly against the person of the Pope and the Catholic Church as a whole.  The opposition, overwhelmingly secularist-atheist in character, often went well beyond legitimate criticism of the Church’s institutional failings, or reasonable scrutiny of public expenditure, and curdled swiftly into ill-veiled hatred of the Christian faith itself.  Commentators who ought to have known better indulged in highly personal attacks on Pope Benedict’s character, or fulminated against caricatures of Catholic teaching, or simply ranted against religious belief in general.  Crazed calumnies about Joseph Ratzinger’s supposed corruption or Nazi sympathies or authoritarianism, all nonsense and all child’s play to refute, were sent gleefully off to the printers instead of the compost-heap where they belonged.  Deep down, of course, what these commentators really disliked was Benedict’s resistance to moral relativism; his quiet insistence on the absolute truth of the whole of Catholic Christianity, including those aspects that our age finds difficult.

The most enthusiastic opponents organised themselves into an outfit calling itself ‘Protest the Pope’ (American style — they didn’t even have the decency to protest against the Pope in the British and prepositionally proper manner!).  It was extraordinary to see how much they loathed the Church, or at least what they mistook for the Church; it was both sobering and instructive for us to hear things said and left to stand which, if uttered against almost any other visitor to this country, let alone any other religious leader, would have been seen by all for the smears they were.  The ‘Protest the Pope’ gang was from the outset both very silly and very small, but it received such disproportionately generous airtime from the media that things at one stage began to look serious.  Would Richard Dawkins and his accomplices actually attempt a stunt like a ‘citizen’s arrest’ of Pope Benedict, ridiculous as it sounded? Were they seriously going to ruin the whole thing?  It is by inducing such anxiety that many bullies work, intimidating others as much by their threats as by their actual deeds.  Even in March there was a sense that the whole visit might be in jeopardy:

Some would oppose this proclaimer of peace;
Some disbelieve what he wants to increase;
Some would believe that the world has no hope;
Others know why we must welcome the Pope.

Some have more interest in money than God;
Some are content to give anger the nod;
Others, who know what is built on this rock,
Welcome his peace.  Let him come to his flock.

Well, in the end, this prayer was answered, thank God.  For at last the day came, and the moment Pope Benedict landed in Scotland, the mood changed utterly.  No sooner had all and sundry seen what he was really like, and the public’s true attitude became clear, than the press changed its tune.  The hatred and opprobrium vanished; it was shown to have been over-amplified, even illusory; it was gone with barely a whimper.  ‘Protest the Pope’ simply ceased to be relevant.  There was no longer anything to fear, and we bore our disparagers no ill will.  The BBC, transformed, began excellent and thorough coverage of the visit.  (It is so often the way with the Corporation that it does come up with the goods in the end, when it knows the world is watching!).  Above all, Pope Benedict received the warm and triumphant welcome he deserved, and there followed in succession four days of remarkable gestures, images and experiences.

What strikes me, in retrospect, is to see the different ways in which these moments worked and touched us: though always the same man, he was visiting us in various different guises.  Here was a head of state, a pastor to guide his flock, a thinker with ideas to contribute to our cultural and social conversation, a missionary to a land forgetful of God, and a priest entrusted by Christ with His authority and consolation.  He was both ‘world leader’ and ‘humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord’, and a figure of interest even to non-Catholics, even to non-Christians, including some of my own friends.  This many-layeredness was evident from Pope Benedict’s very first engagement, his meeting with the Queen in Edinburgh.  This being a state visit, the first of any Pope to the British Isles — St. John Paul II’s 1982 journey having been technically a ‘pastoral visit’ — Benedict was, formally speaking, Her Majesty’s guest and counterpart.  But, in the very same moment, the head of the Church of Rome was greeting the head of the Church of England, and the healing of old religious as well as political wounds was continued.  Most simply, and perhaps most importantly, we saw two people who understand and believe the Christian faith and share its hope, who know both the burden and the importance of duty, offering by their steadfast example quiet encouragement to millions of people.  So it was that, even within the first hour, Benedict had touched the people of Britain in the national, the ecclesiastical and the personal spheres.

The day in Scotland concluded with a Mass in Bellahouston Park (with a specially-composed Mass setting by James MacMillan), and the next day, the seventeenth, the Pope came down to London.  That afternoon a group of friends and I went to see if we could catch a glimpse of him leaving Lambeth Palace on his way to Westminster.  Now at last I could see for myself just how mistaken the media had been in the months beforehand.  The mood among the waiting multitude on Lambeth Bridge was one of unalloyed excitement; open delight was alive in this city that is often so jaded and cold-shouldered.  The anticipation steadily grew and grew, until a ripple of cheers rose to our right… all at once the Pope-mobile was in view, sweeping rapidly towards us — and there he was!  A wave of jubilation accompanied Benedict across the bridge in the twixt-season afternoon sunlight.

Only an hour later, the Pope was giving his remarkable speech in Westminster Hall, a speech which remains no less urgently relevant a decade later:

The role of religion in political debate is […] to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves.  And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion.  It is a two-way process.  Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person.  Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.  This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.

Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.  In this light, I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. […] I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.

Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Representatives of British Society, 17th September 2010. <http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile.html>

Then came the first visit by any Pope to Westminster Abbey, and sung Evensong.  For those who love England and long for Christian Unity, it was greatly moving to see the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope embracing and kneeling side by side in prayer before the shrine of St Edward the Confessor — and then what a sheer treat to hear the music of Herbert Howells thundering from the organ, and the beloved hymn beginning — 

All my hope on God is founded:
He doth still my trust renew.
Me through change and chance He guideth,
Only good and only true.
God unknown,
He alone
Calls my heart to be His own.

Some readers might wonder: why all this excitement for one man?  Well, of course, the Pope is a mortal like all of us.  But the office he holds goes all the way back to Christ; the first of his predecessors was St Peter himself, to whom Christ turned and said ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church’.  So he is Christ’s earthly representative — though the authority entrusted to him is not simply raw power to do with what he likes; rather, his is the responsibility of the hand on the tiller and the eye on the horizon.  He keeps the Church together on the straight and narrow through time and space, so that the one eternal Gospel can be proclaimed anew in every age.  This responsibility remains whether or not the Pope himself is a good or a bad man — though it obviously helps if he is a good one.  That Benedict himself is a kind and gentle man, blazingly intelligent and perceptive to the crises and opportunities of our time, only gave us more reasons to love him when he was Pope.

Procession of parish banners in London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

The summit of his 2010 visit was to be the beatification of the much-loved Cardinal — now Saint — John Henry Newman, at Cofton Park on the outskirts of Birmingham.  But it was the vigil the evening before in London’s Hyde Park that was the high point in my book.  As on Lambeth Bridge, it was the atmosphere that made this gathering extraordinary.  The first hint was at at Victoria station, where a proliferation of the distinctive yellow bags with which we had all been issued drew my eye to a large group of fellow pilgrims.  There was a feeling of recognition, of fellowship, of deep togetherness, not in the least bit oppressive, but refreshing and liberating, which only swelled as we converged on Hyde Park.  As we realised how many we were, the great cultural headwind subsided, and another, sweeter spirit took its place.  Eighty thousand of us all together — I had never been in a gathering that size — and with no need of an enemy for our unity.  Yet for all that volume of people, it felt rather like a family gathering, which of course is exactly what it was.  It was such a simple thing, for us all to meet like that together, but even then I knew the memory would be so happy that it would last for years.  Great assemblies of people can be joyful or they can be ugly… but here we had all fallen in with a very good crowd.

Pope Benedict arrives at London’s Hyde Park, 18th September

And we young people present could see for ourselves, by our own sheer numbers, that we were not as alone in our beliefs and hopes as we might feel in ordinary life.  We all went wild when Pope Benedict arrived, of course, but the hush that descended at Adoration was more memorable, and more unique.  What else would bring about such a moment?  Who else could deliver such a lucid, sincere, quietly but deeply stirring address, with that way of calling us ‘Dear young friends…’ as no mere celebrity or political ideologue would do?  Here was a man who knew how seriously young people want to take life, who knew the depth of our hunger for truth and wisdom, who would not patronise us, offering us a serious speech which was also a message of great joy.  He called us not to mere comfort or apathy or fruitless self-indulgence, but to truth and to greatness and to love — the real thing, measured not by the world’s standard but in a higher currency.  Quoting the same John Henry Newman he was to declare a near-saint on the morrow, he urged us to see dwell deeply on our vocations.  He gave us not the off-hand secular doctrine that drawls at us to do as we please, but the call first to discern and then to follow the true path that God has in mind for us, and thereby to discover the only way to real happiness and real greatness:

Here I wish to say a special word to the many young people present.  Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you.  Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.  Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life.  He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel.  He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer.  And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.  Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you! Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!”   

Pope Benedict XVI, Address at Hyde Park, 18th September 2010. <https://thepapalvisit.org.uk/home/replay-the-visit/day-three/the-holy-fathers-hyde-park-vigil-address/>

Perhaps it was then that I knew I belonged to the Benedict Generation.  Most thoughtful young people do indeed hunger for some great mission; they do want to be called to marriage or to make some great vow of love; they are drawn to authenticity and integrity; they yearn for worthy and meaningful lives and to pursue truth and goodness; they want to know how to help others, and how to understand the world and the mystery of life.  

There could hardly have been better words ringing in my ears as I began the adventure of university.  I was to encounter the spirit of the Benedict Generation again at Fisher House, the student chaplaincy, where I learned that the Faith is intelligent as well as beautiful.  I was to find it in new friends I have made in the years since.  I was to see it in churches and at lectures.  I know I was not alone in this — it is alive in the articulateness of Catholic Voices, and in the lives of many Catholics now in their twenties and thirties.  It is also worth mentioning Paschal Uche, who delivered an address to Pope Benedict on behalf of all young people in Westminster Cathedral’s Piazza the morning before the Hyde Park vigil.  Since his ordination last month he has been Father Pascal: the call he discerned was a vocation to the priesthood.  In short, we in the Benedict Generation know what we learned from our German Shepherd, and will draw strength from that treasure-store for ever.

The Hyde Park vigil begins

So it was that those four days made certain things very clear to me at an important moment.  Whereas I had already been well aware that that the Christian faith was hardly the in-thing in the twenty-first century, the visit’s prelude showed me that a significant cohort of fashionable secularist Britain, not content with mere mockery, hated it outright.  But they did not have the last word, nor did they even speak for most ordinary British people, who remained their usual tolerant (or at least rather apathetic!) selves.  For the visit itself revealed the groundlessness and weakness of the hatred — of all hatred — before the strange strength by which inner goodness and holiness drive out evil; the way in which (to quote Douglas Gresham, C. S. Lewis’s step-son) ‘Christianity simply works.’   

How could people hate a man so gentle as Benedict?  The situation presented a clear choice to me.  Whose side was I on?  Was I to go along with fashion, or to be loyal to my Church and my faith, even if this meant dissenting from the spirit of the age?  Yes, I would be I was on Benedict’s side, the side of the Church, and the side of Him whom the Church worships.  I knew where my loyalties lay, and I have never since had cause to regret that choice.  Even when Catholic life requires courage and hard work and unwanted conspicuousness, and however clumsy my efforts, it does not call on any strength that it cannot also supply.  It is the only way.  As they sang in Westminster Abbey, 

Christ doth call one and all:
Ye who follow shall not fall.

Thank you, dear Pope Emeritus Benedict!  May God bless you!  And, as you asked on arriving in our land, “may all Britons continue to live by the values of honesty, respect and fair-mindedness that have won them the esteem and admiration of many.”

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ returns to Rzeszów

One of the many casualties of this year’s pandemic was the annual ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ open-air hymn-concert.  It is usually held in the city of Rzeszów every Corpus Christi — and had been without fail since 2003; not even the rain-storm and flash floods of 2010 could defeat it  — but this year there was an obvious reason why forty thousand people could not gather in the city’s Sybiraków Park to sing into the night.  The organisers (or JSJD ‘family’) were resourceful enough to prepare and record an online version to stream on the feast itself, but now plans have been made for a ‘real’, open-air concert to be held — and streamed online — on the 20th September at 8 p.m. Central European Summer Time); 7 p.m. BST for readers in Britain and Ireland.  There won’t be so many there as usual — attendance is regulated by ticket — but I don’t think we are in a position to complain, and it will doubtless be uplifting all the same.  Dziękuję organizatorom!

Update: the concert can now be watched here: https://youtu.be/3AiUnLM0SSA?t=2700outu.be/3AiUnLM0SSA?t=2700

Cab Ride to Liverpool

I came across the video above on YouTube this week.  It was taken on Thursday, 30th May, 1985, and records the view from the cab of a class 86 locomotive (86257 ‘Snowdon’) hauling a morning express from London Euston station to Liverpool Lime Street.  It is a nice opportunity to see the West Coast Main Line before the modernisation of 2004–2008, and also the ‘old’ (1902) Crewe station only days before most of it was levelled for complete remodelling, not to mention the electrified catenary whose installation my grandfather had a hand in overseeing in the 1960s.  I was a little taken aback by the blasé attitude to safety on the part of the permanent-way gangs, ambling around in the four-foot, right in the path of trains bearing down on them from various directions — see for instance the departure from Watford Junction! — but it is otherwise rather a relaxing way to spend the best part of three hours. 

It is enjoyable to see so much of the old British Rail traction out and about that is almost all now long withdrawn and scrapped, though I believe a few class 86s survive on freights.  It is good, too, to see the line so busy with trains and the stations with passengers, for in many ways the railways were in the doldrums in the mid-1980s.  The Beeching Axe had dealt its mortal blows to a third of the network only twenty years before, the motor-car’s supremacy was uncontested, and British Rail, being a nationalised industry, was scraping by on grudging Government subsidies.  The revival of the new millennium was still a good way off.

As well as the view ahead, I also found the conversation of the three men in the cab thoroughly absorbing — especially the running commentary provided by Traction Inspector Peter Crawley with the sort of articulate, measured voice that is seldom heard these days.  As well as being able to explain the ingenious solutions to the intricate puzzle of running a railway, he clearly knows and loves the line itself, the southern half especially, and is able to point out many interesting sights — everything from the Norman castle at Berkhamsted to the M25 motorway under construction at Kings Langley, from the reputed hauntedness of the slow lines’ tunnel at Watford to the factory of Armitage Shanks, renowned manufacturer of bathroom fittings!  There are the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral, Izaak Walton’s cottage just north of Stafford, the majestic crossing of the Mersey at Runcorn, and the dramatic final descent through the hewn tunnels into Lime Street.  We even encounter the Royal Train near Hartford in Cheshire.  On the approach to Crewe, Inspector Crawley points out how alarmingly near the station the Coronation Scot had got when it reached its record speed of 114mph in 1938, and therefore just how late the driver left it to slam on the brakes (too late, in fact, for the crockery in the dining car).

These days YouTube abounds with oodles of excellent modern-day cab-ride videos, many with highly informative captions: some of the best for British routes are supplied by Don Coffey, Ben Elias, ‘emmo999’ and Richard Griffin, who is one of the group maintaining the preserved ‘Hastings Diesel’ multiple unit.  But there is also something highly satisfying about this older, comparatively rudimentary film and the spontaneity and immediacy of the commentary.  It is almost as if Peter Crawley is reciting an old, familiar tale: for him the railway is no mere ‘transport artery’, but a corridor of associations and memories and jokes, with lore lying around every curve.  The film would be simply a non-stop miscellany of facts and trivia, if it were not held together by the thin bright narrative threads of the twin steel rails.

Railways are romantic because they tell stories as they go; they cannot help turning the landscape into the setting for a grand epic poem.  Whereas a motorway tramples amply wherever it will, railways are mindful of their surroundings as they weave their way ahead — regardless of their respective engineers’ intentions, good or ill, this is how it seems to be.  This is why, on long rail journeys, I often find myself putting my book aside in favour of the other, wordless narrative unfolding outside the window.  I find myself watching it all unfold, trying to learn England, so that it will become for me, as for Peter Crawley, a known and beloved land, full of fond sights; a gift to be passed on to others.

Poem in July 2020

Entered for a poetry competition organised by my parish.

  And we were once again the Israelites,
  Lost in the desert, driven with our tents
  Into lean lives for forty days and nights,

  With fear for foe.  But from that lengthiest Lent’s
  Bright soundless skies
  There fell strange manna, semi-sacraments:

  Unsullied sunlight, bolder birdsong, the surprise
  Of spring’s long-hoped-for leaf-burst jubilee;
  New green, new gilding, seen with clearer eyes.

  And more: the Gospel-truths shown differently,
  How we are all one body, and how light
  In shadow only shines more radiantly.

  Let quiet thanks, although there is in sight
  No end of troubles in the years ahead,
  Be given for the easing of our plight,

  And for our brethren, all whose souls were led
  Out of this world of mingled grace and vice,
  Let Requiems be said,

  That by the Lord’s love, and His sacrifice,
  They may see Paradise.

Vaulting above One Island Pond, 29th May, 2020.

Ruth Gipps: new recording of Clarinet Concerto

Yet more good news concerning the music of Ruth Gipps!  A recording of her Clarinet Concerto (op. 9, 1940), whose world première in London last November I so thoroughly enjoyed, was released on a new disc last Friday.  The record is called ‘Reawakened’ and is catalogue number CHRCD160 on Champs Hill Records.  It features several other neglected clarinet concerti by Iain Hamilton and Richard Walthew, as well as John Ireland’s Fantasy Sonata.  Robert Plane is the soloist, and he is accompanied by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins.

The slow movement was broadcast this morning on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Record Review’, and can be heard here for a month from now, about 1 hour 39 minutes into the programme.  It is a beautiful rendition.

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’: online edition

The feast of Corpus Christi, which was celebrated in Poland yesterday, is usually the occasion for the great ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ hymn-singing concerts (about which I have written here and here).  This year’s, however, has gone the way of all large public gatherings: yet another casualty of the Coronavirus pandemic.  

The organisers did not admit complete defeat, however!  They put together an edition of the concert to stream over the Internet so that, although the Sybiraków park in the city of Rzeszów lay empty, where it should have been full of tens of thousands of people, the music at least could carry on.  It’s not the same as the real thing, but definitely something to cheer us all up.  See below to watch it, or click here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f9V3DJ_9gU>.  

Trinity Sunday

Lord, who hast form’d me out of mud,
 And hast redeem’d me through thy blood,
 And sanctifi’d me to do good; 

Purge all my sins done heretofore:
 For I confess my heavy score,
 And I will strive to sin no more. 

Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me,
 With faith, with hope, with charity;
 That I may run, rise, rest with thee.

       George Herbert (1593–1633)

Happy Trinity Sunday!  This jewel-like lyric makes its meaning perfectly plain on the first reading, but then — a revelation to which I owe John Drury in ‘Music at Midnight’, his unforgettable biography of Herbert (London: Penguin, 2013) — notice all the threes wrapped up so tightly in it.  Three stanzas of three lines each; the first giving one line each to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the second to the past, the present and the future, and the last having three elements in each line, thrice three.

Fr. Mark Langham preached another wonderful homily this morning from Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy of the University of Cambridge.  The Mass can be seen and heard here; Fr. Mark’s sermon begins 18 minutes and 23 seconds into the video.

Lincolnshire Towers: St. Wulfram’s, Grantham

The steeple of St. Wulfram’s church first caught my eye, as it must many people’s, at about 105 miles per hour, the speed at which non-stop express trains hammer through the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, shooting out onto the high embankment across the town, leaning into the curve — and there, soaring above the chimneys and rooftops flashing jaggedly by in the foreground, there is Wulfram’s tower, with the same serenity with which it has weathered the seven centuries of its age; and the spirit soars with it.  The vision hangs and swivels, lingering for perhaps fifteen seconds, and is gone, and the train is pressing on towards Lincolnshire’s borders and London, or Yorkshire, or Scotland.

There are those who call the East Coast Main Line dull and boring, mainly because, south of County Durham at least, it runs relatively straightforwardly through England’s flatter counties.  But there are more than mountains to be seen from the window of a train.  For this line, as much as any other, I am sure, is proof of the poetry conjured up by that conspiracy if churches and railways.  Four medieval cathedrals — Durham, York, Peterborough and Lincoln — can be spotted to varying degrees at various points along its length, and plenty of other fine churches greet the eye as well, from the fifteenth-century spire of St. Mary Magdalene at Newark-on-Trent to Doncaster Minster’s Victorian Gothic, or handsome St. Peter’s at Offord D’Arcy.  But of all these, save perhaps only Durham, the sight of St. Wulfram’s at Grantham is surely the most thrilling.  Here the line speed (105mph beats ninety at Durham!), the eye-level view from the embankment, the church’s proximity to the railway, and, above all, the sheer beauty of the steeple, all conspire to lend those few seconds of the journey a meaningful, harmonious, unforgettable form, that of a theatrical scene, revolving like a snow-globe.  In other words, they turn Grantham into a poem.

St. Wulfram’s spire from a passing London train, 6th June 2017

Other travellers have noticed this before me.  For the writer Peter Hitchens, who ‘normally make[s] a point’ of looking out of the window whenever he comes this way, this is ‘one of the loveliest steeples in all England’.  And, according to the BBC programme Songs of Praise, which came to Grantham in 1980, ‘a certain Fr. Stanton’ would apparently stand up in the middle of the compartment to raise his hat in honour of the spire and its builders, and request his fellow passengers to do the same.  For myself, I resolved one day to visit Grantham properly, and to savour the poem more slowly, more closely, and from within.

That resolution was to be fulfilled one brisk autumn day in 2018. The train had pelted headlong from London, so it was barely mid-morning when my sister and I alighted half-way up England, under shredded bands of cloud scudding intermittently across the face of a kindly sun.  Off we set, through a pleasing warren of terraced houses immediately east of the station, down to where the Great North Road swoops in.  Even now it is not difficult to imagine the stage-coach days, with the inswooping mail trailing its column of dust, all wheels and thumping hooves and harnesses ajangle.  Not far along the road we found the majestic Victorian Guildhall, a building worthy of a major town on the Great North Road, with a statue of Isaac Newton outside, and a bustling local writers’ fair inside.  I was warming to Grantham already, sensing a certain self-respect that did not need to give itself airs (or maybe a down-to-earth-ness, appropriately enough for Newton’s home patch).  But there was no time to linger, for there was business to attend to.  Our plan was not to head straight for the church, but to hare up Hall’s Hill, the rise bounding the town to the east, in order to admire the great steeple from afar.  Hindered only by a bush full of angry wasps, which we doubled back to avoid, we climbed up high enough to be able to look back down on the town, and watch the sunlight and shadow cascading over it, and the fast trains hurtling through in the middle distance.

The view westwards from Hall’s Hill, 3rd November, 2018.

There in the autumn noon stood the tower that has been the glory of this broad, shallow valley of the young Witham since about the year 1320.  We were looking at a sight instantly recognisable, by this one essential feature, to twenty generations before us.  Briefly this was England’s highest steeple, until within ten years Salisbury Cathedral’s spire overtook it.  The two projects were not in fact unconnected, as Julian Flannery explains in his peerless Fifty English Steeples (Thames & Hudson, 2016), because Grantham actually belonged to Salisbury diocese: clearly one spire was not enough!  In any case, according to Flannery’s comprehensive theodolite surveys, St. Wulfram’s remains England’s fifth highest surviving medieval steeple after Salisbury and Norwich Cathedrals, the fellow Lincolnshire steeple of St. James’ in Louth, and St. Michael’s in Coventry (that is, the ‘old’ Coventry Cathedral).  It is worth mentioning in passing that three of the four highest medieval steeples of English parish churches are to be found in Lincolnshire: Louth amid the dreaming Wolds (287 feet), Grantham in south-western Kesteven (274 feet), and fen-defying Boston (266 feet).  This is to say nothing of Lincoln cathedral, once the tallest building in the world by virtue of its 520-foot central spire.  (Even after this spire collapsed in 1549, and the two others at the west end were taken down in the eighteenth century, Flannery believes that what remains of the central tower ‘may just exceed’ St. Botolph’s at Boston.)

The spire seen from Park Road.

But I am day-dreaming.  St. Wulfram can be put off no longer; it is time to go down the hill, threading through the suburban houses and the park — all almost conspicuously unpretentious, as if the town thinks the tower is showing off enough! —  to see the great church at closer quarters.

The west front.

So this is the steeple before which Ruskin swooned.  Here, as well as anywhere, it is possible to see the glory of the Gothic: the sheer verticality of everything, every little detail doing its bit to add to the upthrust of the whole.  The whole structure is straining towards Heaven, and the wide traceried windows let in Heaven’s light.  Flannery pointed out the one major mistake made by the builders in the staircase at the south-west corner, which was built too far out at the bottom, and which unfortunately, by becoming more pronounced as the tower tapers with height, throws the whole slightly off its symmetry.  Yet this lesson was learned here once and for all; the error was not repeated in any of the later great English towers.

Looking west from the chancel.  The tower stands right over the west door.

Considering the steeple’s emphasis on verticality, there is an interesting contrast waiting inside the church: the enormous and spacious width of its interior.  The two side-aisles are each almost as broad as the nave: John Betjeman even declares that the ‘power of the grand interior is horizontal rather than vertical’ (Best British Churches, Collins, 2011 edition, p. 400).  The church impresses us first by its height, then by its breadth.  In the north wall an alcove is visible where St. Wulfram’s relics are likely to have been displayed.  I wonder what grand processions there have been through this church over the years.  One spectacle that has been recorded for posterity is the visit of the BBC programme ‘Songs of Praise’ in 1980, which, for all sorts of reasons, in texture, language and content, seems caught at a curious, fascinating position, between the old Britain and the new.

We were, I think, about the only visitors at that point on the Saturday afternoon, but there were quite a few townsfolk pottering around.  Chairs and parts of a dismantled stage were being cleared away and loaded into a van after a secular awards ceremony the previous night, and a youngster no more than ten years old was being given a lesson on the mightly organ.  (I hope he will one day support a mighty surge of singing, as in Songs of Praise above!)  I bought a tea-towel showing the great spire (it has to be a particularly large tea-towel to fit the tower in) and we took our leave.

From the south-west.

This being a non-party-political blog, no party-political allegiance should be read into the detour we then made to see the building where, on October 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was born.  This red-brick corner shop is, I think, revealing about her character, even though it is no longer Roberts the greengrocer but a chiropractic clinic.  This must have been, as has often been pointed out, and which seems in common with Grantham in general, an unpretentious but decent place to grow up; plain and unvarnished but dignified and unbowed (and is even raised slightly above the level of the road).  The Methodist church where the Roberts family worshipped is only a few doors down.

Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace, North Parade, Grantham.

It seems arguable that this building goes some way to explain both Margaret Thatcher’s sympathy as a politician for those who worked hard to earn their living, which aided her electoral success, and her apparent lack of sympathy with those who were not capable of doing so, which is generally acknowledged to have precipitated the end of her premiership.  I was also struck by the shop’s position actually right on the old Great North Road, and not far at all from the railway either; she must, as she was growing up, have felt London and the wide world beckoning to her the moment she stepped outside the front door.

Almost directly opposite Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace is one of the most curious Catholic churches I have ever seen.  From outside, St. Mary the Immaculate is a solemn, sober early nineteenth-century neo-classical edifice.  Inside, however, it is completely different: the church seems to have been altogether transformed in the 1960s, so that the altar now faces north, not east, along what must once have been the length of the church, rather than its breadth.  I don’t think I have ever seen a church with an interior differing so dramatically from the exterior.  This surprise certainly competes with the contrast between horizontal and vertical in St. Wulfram’s!

Inside the church of St. Mary the Immaculate, looking north

Daylight began to fade as we drank hot chocolate in Cafe Leo along Westgate, and so the time came to take our leave of this reserved, unshowy town with its ardent steeple, and of the unsung, wide-skied county in which it is set.  But not for long, for another tower further east, that of St. Botolph in Boston, was soon to beckon me back to Lincolnshire.

Postscript: Writing this at Whitsuntide, I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.  Poetically at least, this week is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the journey it records.  It was down this line that Larkin’s train came that ‘sunlit Saturday’.  He would have passed through Grantham, and one of those weddings may well have been solemnised in St. Wulfram’s church.  Truly England is a poem.

Happy Oak Apple Day!

I have been reminded (by the blog ‘Once I was a Clever Boy’, via the British Catholic Blogs list) that today, 29th May, is Oak Apple Day.  (I shouldn’t have forgotten, but all the days are running into each other)…  A happy celebration of Charles II’s Restoration to all readers!

(An Oak Apple, by the way, is a gall, from one particular kind of which iron gall ink was once made).

Under the boughs of a local oak, 29 May 2020.

Three Childhoods

  On whose account, then, of these hundreds
  Ashrill in this playground of anguish,
  Under the yellowish, suburb-smothering noon,
  Of these hundreds at sixes and sevens at ten and eleven,

  Should Heaven be loudest appealed to?

  Luke Salt’s, for example?  Wild-hearted and gleeful of limb,
  Eager to get stuck in
  To some challenge in which to triumph
  And bring out the best in his allies and rivals alike,
  But a boisterous-elbowed boy,
  Blind to his own wayward roughness, so can’t think why
  Teachers all pick on him.
  And what he might do without meaning, though done on purpose,
  Others do back, so he does back back —
  To be punished with shunning and shame.
  And trouble at home he carries in secret to school
  In goblets of anger that always, eventually, spill
  Awfully over, costing him comrades,
  Marring his soul with a dark and deepening stain,
  And laying to waste the Luke Salt who might yet be,
  But whom, if lost, shall we ever regain?

  Or Connie-May Bushell, alight
  With gregarious giggles, and bright with wit,
  A brilliant play-mate aflash with ideas,
  Lively and bookish, but apt to be led astray,
  Whose innocence, if undefended,
  Will soon be ended?
  For what will prevent her, some day not far hence,
  Seeing the world’s ways,
  From trashing her own constitution
  And wholly dismantling her soul,
  Abolishing all the old ways with all her might,
  Shuttering, barring, veiling,
  Uprooting and ridding her whole
  Self of her former self?
  The passionate games will die,
  Sullenness cloud her eye,
  The voice that should sweeten will harden,
  And only a shadow will loiter
  Where light should have lightened the lives of all around.

  Or perhaps Peter Palmer,
  Standing out under the branches still,
  Imagining friendship under the dust-brown leaves,
  Friendship and conversation;
  Given to sniffiness, true, towards most of the rest,
  Vexed by their posturings, irked by their noise
  (The bossy and fussy girls and the mindless boys) —
  But heart set firm on a distant bearing:
  Transcendent good, and to do what is just
  Will endure what he must.

  O Lord, save thy people, and bless thine heritage.
  Govern them, and lift them up for ever.
  O Lord, in thee have they trusted.
  Let them never be confounded.

Happy Ascension Day!

Wishing a very happy feast of the Ascension to all readers!

O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph.
For the LORD most high is terrible; he is a great King over all the earth.
God is gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.
Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King, sing praises.
For God is the King of all the earth: sing ye praises with understanding.
God reigneth over the heathen: God sitteth upon the throne of his holiness.

Psalm 46 (47): 1-2, 5-8, set to stirring music by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

VE Day

Some local decorations

Quite a few houses round about have been impressively decorated with flags and bunting for the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day.  In general, this is not the Victory Day we had envisaged, as we find ourselves engaged in a different kind of war with a new and different enemy.  But now is as good a time as any to recall with gratitude the qualities and sacrifices that won the Second World War for peace and justice against fetters and tyranny.

Here is the address made to the nation by King George VI at 9 p.m. on the 8th May, 1945.  (The full transcript can be read here: <https://www.royal.uk/king-george-vis-ve-day-broadcast>

Now that the murderers are put away

(At cost of the world’s hope), a moment comes,

Not feverish with war-cries, flags and drums,

Not terrible with terror and dismay,

Not beautiful (the lovely hope being dead),

Not hopeful, therefore, but… the time arrives…

[…] 

Man must not make less beauty than the flower.

Youth, given back from slaughter, has an hour.

Lighten us, Life: shine, planet in our east. 

—from ‘A Moment Comes’, by John Masefield (then Poet Laureate): The Times, 8 May 1945, p.7.

Spring, Regardless

When last did silence lie over South London as it has in the past few weeks?  The Seventies?  The Sixties?  The Fifties?  Only the brief ‘stillness of the solemn air’ after heavy snowfall, as in February 2009, seems comparable, but even then I am not sure there was ever a hush so thick as that which now descends on London at night, not just in the street outside, but in all the roads around, and the roads beyond them, for miles and miles and miles.  The slick, insufferable, incessant, suburb-saturating, sempiternal seething of traffic has vanished.  Some reports suggest that the number of cars on the road has gone down by two thirds to its lowest level for sixty years; I could well believe this.  Now, four weeks into the national quarantine, I am noticing the volume of traffic creeping up again, but it is still bearable for now.  Any relief is welcome.

Council notice on the Common.

I am well aware of the suffering wrought by the pandemic, and that I write from well behind the front lines of the great battle against it, and indeed that I am relying largely on others to do the fighting.  All the same, I think it is not unfair to observe the silver linings I described a few weeks ago.  The quietening of London’s madness is one; another is the community spirit that has been the paradoxical fruit of enforced isolation.  Even having to keep our distance from each other has brought about a kind of solidarity: it is sometimes awkward to leap into the road or brambles when meeting someone coming the other way, but most people see the point and even, sometimes, humour in it (“Don’t get yourself stung!” a lady told me when she saw that I had leapt off the path into some shallow brambles to let her pass).  Children have decorated windows and pavements with innocent rainbows, and on my daily constitutionals I am exchanging friendly greetings with strangers in a manner completely at odds with London’s usual way of doing things.  

Then there is the weekly eight o’clock round of applause for doctors and nurses, which has been kept up vigorously in our street.  A friend reports that the clapping in his village at the fringes of London is lessening every week, but round near me (much further in) I am sure it is growing, if anything.  The neighbours add to the clamour by hammering on pots and pans, or by thumping their wheelie bins, while passing cars sound their horns.  Then after a minute or so, we down tools, wave to each other or call in greeting across the street, and withdraw.  Some might scoff at this, but I feel this is just the sort of custom that many parts of Britain, mine included, have long lacked.

It occurs to me that this pandemic may well cement the National Health Service into place as the established religion of Britain.  This is entirely understandable: our debt to doctors and nurses is now partly due in a currency other than that in which we pay our taxes.  But it may cause problems in the future if, as tends to happen with any large institution, the NHS comes to need reform of some sort, and public feeling produces misplaced resistance, legitimate changes being mistaken for undue interference.  On the other hand, the strength of public faith in the NHS will also serve as protection against any short-sighted erosion or thinning out of its services by its overseers.  Maybe, though, we will soon have worse to worry about than either of these problems.  (And I would also observe quietly that there are some needs which even the NHS cannot be expected to answer.)

Local pavement decoration

Daily walks over the now-well-worn paths of the Common have also given me the chance to see spring’s great leafburst in far more detail than usual.  In previous years, I put its seeming to happen overnight down to my lack of observation.  But now, regular visits in quick succession have shown me the remarkable proliferation that really does take place over only a two or three days, as if all that life is kept pent up in the earth until it can be contained no longer.

I have not altogether forgotten about the world outside my parish, though.  One gloomy piece of news that has almost been lost amid the coronavirus coverage is the continued collapse of marriage in Britain: the number registered in 2017 was a new record low, and of these the proportion of ceremonies with any religious dimension was also the lowest ever recorded: 22%.  It may sound blunt to say this, but this is the sign of a civilisation that scarcely believes in the future at all, let alone in lasting love.

But there has been cause for good cheer, such as the birthdays of Benedict XVI (ninety-three) and H.M. the Queen (ninety-four).  And Pope Francis has also given an interview here — https://www.thetablet.co.uk/features/2/17845/pope-francis-says-pandemic-can-be-a-place-of-conversion- — with something to hearten and challenge everyone, as is characteristic. For example:

It’s true, a number of governments have taken exemplary measures to defend the population on the basis of clear priorities. But we’re realising that all our thinking, like it or not, has been shaped around the economy. In the world of finance it has seemed normal to sacrifice [people], to practise a politics of the throwaway culture, from the beginning to the end of life. I’m thinking, for example, of pre-natal selection. It’s very unusual these days to meet Down’s Syndrome people on the street; when the tomograph [scan] detects them, they are binned. It’s a culture of euthanasia, either legal or covert, in which the elderly are given medication but only up to a point.

And —

Yet the elderly continue to be our roots. And they must speak to the young. This tension between young and old must always be resolved in the encounter with each other. Because the young person is bud and foliage, but without roots they cannot bear fruit. The elderly are the roots. I would say to them, today: I know you feel death is close, and you are afraid, but look elsewhere, remember your children, and do not stop dreaming. This is what God asks of you: to dream (Joel 3:1). 

What would I say to the young people? Have the courage to look ahead, and to be prophetic.  May the dreams of the old correspond to your prophecies.

 I hope all readers, and their friends and families, are safe and well.

Cardinal Vincent Nichols (Archbishop of Westminster) celebrates Mass for National Health Service workers, carers, the sick and their families, in Westminster Cathedral.  

Photo from https://www.flickr.com/photos/catholicwestminster/49812472648/ (IMG_3880, 23rd April 2020).

Lincolnshire Towers

St. Wulfram’s church, Grantham, 3rd November, 2018.

Of all our counties I suspect few more strongly than Lincolnshire of keeping hidden, somewhere, the last remaining corner of Deep England.  For a start, there is so much of it in which to hide: after North Yorkshire it is the second-largest of the ceremonial counties, while the density of its population is the seventh lowest overall (ranking forty-second of forty-eight).  All that undisturbed, unmotorwayed acreage, almost as wide as mid-Wales, largely spared by industry and development, and unblemished by any major conurbation, in which Deep England might yet linger.  The river Trent, the Humber estuary, the Fens and the Wash, once its arteries of commerce, have come to serve as buffers against the cutting edges of modernity; and even its western, inlandmost parts are only incidentally served by the Great North Road and the East Coast Main Line (which latter never comes within thirty miles of that coast while Lincolnshire has anything to do with it).  It is true that the county has a grittier side — Scunthorpe steelworks, the port of Grimsby with its face set like flint against the North Sea, or the austerely dead-flat southern Fens — but its heart, the landscape of the Wolds or south Kesteven, has an otherworldly softness, even a tameness, about it.  That homeliness is matched by the place-names, among which even those of Danish derivation retain only a slight angularity: Willoughby… Hagworthingham… Scamblesby… Then there are all the old railway stations whose names appear in Flanders and Swann’s song ‘The Slow Train’, hinting at the heavy blow struck here by the Beeching Axe: Mumby Road, Dogdyke, Tumby Woodhouse.  Even the name of the county, with its buttery consonants, has a welcoming warmth to it.  And consider Bag Enderby in the light of Bag End, the name of Bilbo Baggins’ home in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  If in these parts the mythical Shire can shimmer just beneath the surface, then why not very Deep England itself?

It is worth noting, too, that many Yellow-Bellies themselves — as Lincolnshire people are called — can fairly be said to be in sympathy with the ideals of Deep England. One of the most famous, indeed the son of a rector of Bag Enderby, and born nearby at Somersby, was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose verses tell of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and vanished Lyonesse, and of many things loved and lost.  Or there is the late Roger Scruton, arguably the most articulate defender of Deep England in the past forty years, who began life in the tiny hamlet of Buslingthorpe near Market Rasen.  I concede, however, that Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe) and Margaret Thatcher (Grantham) are harder to square with this list…

In any case, Lincolnshire has form where the preservation of Deep England is concerned.  The March of Progress always seems to be missing Lincs: is it too much to hope to find something that it has left alone altogether?  Not necessarily, is Lincolnshire’s murmured answer.  I think of Ruddock’s, the old-fashioned stationers and bookshop in Lincoln’s High Street, to which I paid tribute here at the time of its sad demise in 2017.  Or the quirky Bubble Car Museum near Boston.  And Lincolnshire sausages of course, the glorious centrepiece of any Full Deep English Breakfast.  Then there is another, less tangible but momentous example: whereas, in more urbanised parts of the country, who knows how many traditional folk-songs had been forgotten by the end of the nineteenth century, in Lincolnshire some were still remembered.  Here the last folk-singers lived just late enough to coincide with the earliest recording equipment and the Edwardian folk-song revival which saved so many tunes from extinction.  It was in the north of the county that the composer Percy Grainger discovered, and duly recorded and transcribed, such beautiful melodies as ‘Brigg Fair’ or ‘Rufford Park Poachers’.  That we can hear the voice of Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, a man born in 1832, singing the songs of his youth, is cause to be thankful not only for Grainger and the singers who sang for him, but for the county which had preserved that folk-memory for so long.  Those songs are not only artefacts of the past, but to many ears some of its profoundest and most vivid evocations: this is borne out by the misty and chromatic arrangements that many composers made of them, Grainger’s own ‘Lincolnshire Posy’ being an example.*  Things linger in Lincolnshire: the old is slow to fade, and the new takes time to set in.  As I was once told by the guide on a rooftop tour of Lincoln Cathedral: "When the cranes go up in Lincoln, you know there’s a recession on the way."

This is not simply happenstance, either.  The county has a definite streak of rebelliousness, and its people stick by their principles.  I count very much in their favour the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which in turn sparked off the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most serious popular opposition to confront Henry VIII; also the Lincolnshire Martyrs, who include two canonised saints.  The knowledge that Henry VIII hated Lincolnshire, declaring it ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’, only makes me fonder of it still.  Less clear-cut morally is the tradition (if that’s the word) of poaching, which does, it must be said, have in its defence the injustice of the eighteenth-century enclosures of common land by wealthy land-owners.  The song ‘Rufford Park Poachers’, as sung by Joseph Taylor, with its pleasingly defiant declaration —

A buck or doe, believe it so,
A pheasant or an hare,
Were put on earth for everyone
Quite equal for to share […]

— captures the spirit, as does the more famous ditty ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ (apparently a favourite of George IV; presumably it was not his hares that were being filched!).  Those landowners had come to see the land merely as an asset or a useful resource, whereas for the poachers and ordinary folk it was simply home, and home for their minds and spirits as much as for their empty stomachs.  To this day, it is not Lincolnshire’s way to follow the herd or pay heed to fashion overmuch, and this tendency to dig in heels, combined with the fondness for old things, creates conditions highly favourable, I would say, to the secret abiding of Deep England.

For it is not altogether unthinkingly that Deep England drowses green and gold in the haze of the afternoon.  I like to believe that those who dwell in that lost land are awake and alive to truth and beauty, pondering great thoughts and bold deeds over another hearty round of ale.  The proof that such folk did once live in Lincolnshire —  if they do not live there still — is plain to see in the heirlooms they left us, which stand amid the low rises and shallow hollows of this gentle county, startling us with their beauty: I mean the towers, the great audacious medieval church towers, with their youthful exuberance, their sheer verticality, which everywhere point heavenwards.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral, 20 March 2014.  With its original spire, it once stood at 520 feet; without, it is now 271 feet high.

There is of course Lincoln Cathedral — in John Ruskin’s estimation ‘out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have’ — which, when it still had its spires, was the tallest building in the world from 1311 to 1548.  The highest spire, 520 feet tall, crowned a county that never naturally rises higher than 551 feet above sea level.  But these are not Lincolnshire’s only towers.  The relative prosperity of this region in the Middle Ages, as well as its ready access to the raw material of the Great Limestone Belt (which stretches south-west from Lincolnshire’s Kesteven through Rutland, Northamptonshire and the Cotswolds, all the way to Somerset), provided conditions favourable to the building of great towers by any self-respecting town.  So it is that Lincolnshire came to possess some of England’s greatest treasures.  At Louth it boasts the tallest medieval parish church tower in England, St James’s, whose spire stands at 287 feet.  St. Botolph’s at Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’) has the tallest church tower to its roof: instead of tapering to a spire, the masonry shoots straight upwards to a height of 266 feet.  The spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram, 274 feet high, sweeps into sight at 105mph when beheld, sudden, serene, from express trains on the East Coast Main line.  And hundreds of other towers, less lofty but all distinctive, all dignified, lay claim to their segment of the wide Lincolnshire sky, each raised up in intercession for its parish and all souls there dwelling.**  That is because the folk of these parts in the Middle Ages committed their wool-wealth to the dressing of their homeland for Heaven, ornamenting this lowest-lying of counties with ardent upliftings of passionate stone.

As Julian Flannery says so movingly in ‘Fifty English Steeples’, an epic volume of detailed architectural surveys of medieval church towers, and one of the most treasured books on my shelves, 

England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth [church tower in September 1515] and the arrival of the English Reformation.  The pre-industrial landscape was dominated by the steeples of 17 cathedrals, 900 monasteries and 9,000 churches.  The spire of Lincoln Cathedral was the highest man-made structure the world had ever seen, and the construction of the great chapels at Westminster, Windsor and Cambridge had reached its magnificent conclusion.  Within a generation the monasteries had been dissolved, church-building had ceased, Lincoln spire had fallen, and medieval England had passed into history.  [p. 9]

Yet, for all the reasons above described, I have my suspicions that it is in Lincolnshire that the lost beauty he describes has lingered longest, and in particular in Lincolnshire’s towers that it survives most fiercely.  In a series of articles to come, I hope to describe what I found when I went to see some of them for myself.

St. Botolph’s church, Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’), under scaffolding on the 2nd February, 2019.  The tower is 266 feet high.

* Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy was used as the incidental music for John Betjeman’s 1964 BBC film Branch Line.
** One other Lincolnshire tower, that of the parish church of Deeping St Nicholas, photographed from the Peterborough-Spalding line on the 20th March 2014, illustrates the title banner of this blog.