Category: England (Page 3 of 3)

Shrewsbury Abbey – 12 July 2011

July 14, 2011 / eric / 5 Comments

Several years ago a woman named Edith Mary Pargeter began writing a series of murder mysteries set in the Middle Ages under the pseudonym of Ellis Peters. The “detective” protagonist of these mysteries was a monk named Cadfael. When dramatized by the BBC the actor Derek Jacobi played Brother Cadfael. Brother Cadfael’s monastic community was Shrewsbury Abbey, which is a real place. The abbey church of Shrewsbury Abbey still stands and is a functioning congregation of the Church of England. I visited the Abbey Church the morning of 12 July 2011.

Initially a small Saxon church, the Church of Saints Peter and Paul which was founded by Roger de Montgomery, a relative of William the Conqueror in 1083. It subsequently became a Benedictine Abbey and during the following 450 or so years it grew to become one of the most important and influential abbeys in England. In 1147, the relics of a Welsh Saint, Winefride, were brought to the Abbey and his shrine became an important place of pilgrimage. In 1283, the first English Parliament in which the Commons had a legal share took place in the Abbey Chapter House, and in 1398 Richard II summoned the Great Parliament in the Abbey. The Abbey was surrendered to the Crown in January of 1540 when Henry VIII disestablished the monasteries. Although much was destroyed, the nave continued to serve, as it does today, as the place of worship for the Parish of the Holy Cross.

In the nineteenth century plans for restoration of the Abbey were drawn up, but financial constraints compelled the building of only part of the plan; everything to the east of the pulpit and lectern are the work of the Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson, best known for designing Truro Cathedral; his work dates from 1886. The Pearson plans were put on hold and never completed because of the intervention of World War I.

Here are some pictures of the church:

This is the façade of the church seen from the small car park for the church staff:

Facade of Shrewsbury Abbey Church

This is the side of the church along which a major highway now runs (in the city of Shrewsbury this street is called Abbey Foregate, but it is national highway A5191 with lots of traffic). This would have been the side on which the cloister, dormitory, and other living spaces of the monastic community were built; you can see the ragged edges where the broken-down walls once adjoined the structure. The building is made of a red sand-stone native to the Shropshire area.

The interior of the church is quite large and spacious and, despite the dark stone from which it is built, natural light from the clerestory windows makes it quite bright. A very handsome painted reredos in the chancel (with a much gilt) fairly glows, and below it the altar is draped with a heavily embroidered frontal:

Nave of Shrewsbury Abbey Church

Reredos of Shrewsbury Abbey Church

Altar Frontal, Shrewsbury Abbey Church

Around the side aisles of the church are tombs, such as these. The first picture is the tomb of a medieval priest; the second, of an Elizabethan couple.

Medieval Tomb, Shrewsbury Abbey Church

Elizabethan Tomb, Shrewsbury Abbey Church

There are numerous stained glass windows, old and new, such as these two. The first dates from the Middle Ages and shows the Adoration of the Magi; the second is of quite recent vintage and celebrates the Brother Cadfael series!

Adoration of the Magi Window, Shrewsbury Abbey Church

Brother Cadfael Window, Shrewsbury Abbey Church

The ladies of Shrewsbury Abbey church were quite gracious when I visited. They have a small shop set up just inside the entrance to the church and a small coffee and tea bar at the rear of the left aisle. It was quite astonishing and rather funny to see a kitchen sink and countertop with modern appliances set up right next to an Elizabethan tomb, but this sort of “repurposing” is something the church needs to do and needs to do more frequently!

As I was about to leave, one of the ladies asked where I was from. I said, “Near Cleveland in the state of Ohio.” “Of course, you’re from America,” she said, “you such a lovely accent!” I nearly burst out laughing … I thanked her and went on my way, hoping to see a neolithic ring fort at Old Oswestry about an hour away. Unfortunately, road construction, indecipherable signage, and a GPS error made that impossible.

Visiting Wilmslow

July 12, 2011 / eric / 0 Comments

I’ve driven from Hay-on-Wye to Wilmslow (near Manchester) to visit friend Sally M. She’s taken me on a whirlwind tour of the area focusing on the two churches of the Parish, St. Bartholomew’s and St. Anne’s. Both lovely church facilities. Take a look at their website, which includes a virtual tour of the older church (St. Bartholomew’s).

One the way, I stopped in Shrewsbury and saw the Abbey, then drove on to Oswestry where I had planned to visit the neolithic round fort at Old Oswestry, but somehow got lost and never made it.

Now I’m here for my last night in England (tomorrow I’ll be back in Scotland and the next day off to Ireland). More later….

Neolithic Britain – 9 July 2011

July 10, 2011 / eric / 0 Comments

Today, 9 July 2011, I walked the hills of southeastern England visiting two fascinating sites that may date back as many as 5,000 years!

First I visited the village of Uffington, Oxfordshire, and the hill south of town on which one finds a massive depiction in white chalk of a horse. I tried to take a picture of it, but from ground level that is very difficult to do and (on this day) the site was crawling with several hundred early elementary school students on school outings. So here’s a picture from Wikicommons:

The Uffington White Horse from the Air

I walked up to the area where the head of the horse is seen in this picture. It was an overcast and hazy but warm day – a good thing because it was also very breezy. It was about a mile or so walk up the hill from the car park via the Ridge Path, which took me through the Uffington Castle, which isn’t what you think it is at all … not a castle in the medieval sense. Uffington Castle is all that remains of an early Iron Age hill fort. It is composed of two circular earth berms (with a circular ditch between them) surrounding about 32,000 square meters (nearly 8 acres). There is an entrance in the eastern portion, near the White Horse and another at the south (through which I entered). An entrance in the western side was apparently blocked up a few centuries after it was built. I was able to take a picture of the “castle” (although it doesn’t look like much). This picture is taken from the eastern entrance of the southeastern quadrant; the southern entrance can be seen at the right of the picture.

Uffington Castle, Oxfordshire, UK

As you can see, the White Horse is a highly stylised prehistoric hill figure, 110 m long (374 feet), formed from deep trenches filled with crushed white chalk. The figure is believed, and scientific tests have shown it, to date back some 3,000 years, to the Bronze Age. The purposes of its creators is completely unknown. It is not of Celtic origin, but G.K. Chesterton used it as the setting for part of his Catholic allegorical and poetic retelling of the story of the Saxon king Alfred the Great, who defeated the invading Danes in the Battle of Ethandun in 878, which is entitled The Ballad of the White Horse.

Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.

Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.

Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.

For the White Horse knew England
When there was none to know;
He saw the first oar break or bend,
He saw heaven fall and the world end,
O God, how long ago.

As retold by Chesterton, Alfred and his Saxons set out from the White Horse and Alfred gathers there three great chieftains, Mark a Roman, Eldred the Franklin who is a Saxon, and Colan who is a Celt. In describing Colan, Chesterton includes these priceless lines:

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.

After visiting the Uffington site, I went to Avebury to see the largest “henge” in Britain (possibly the largest man-made earthwork of its kind in all of Europe). A henge (the word is derived from Stonehenge and was coined in the mid-20th Century) is an earthen berm circular with an interior circular ditch. Because the ditch is on the inside, not the outside, of the berm, henges are not considered to be defensive fortifications. One scholar, however, has suggested that they are defensive in that he believes they were built to contain something and protect those outside from what was inside – and what was inside was divine energy. The Avebury henge contains many standing stones that are laid out in peculiar formations, some circles, some straight lines, some curving formations not forming full circles. Here are some photos of the standing stones.

Standing Stones near World Heritage Center Shop, Avebury, UK

Stone Circle portion within the Avebury Henge

This is a map (from Wikimedia) showing the Avebury henge and the position of the standing stones (and theoretical stones completing the circles). It does not show the Avebury village buildings which have been built within the henge. The henge has a circumference of about 3/4 of a mile.

Map of Avebury Henge (non-free material from Wikimedia)

I am intrigued by the idea that because the ditch and bank face inward, in the opposite order that they would be placed in a defensive ring fort, something “dangerous” or “powerful” was understood to be inside the enclosure. The proposal is that henges were designed mainly to enclose ceremonial sites seen as “ritually charged” and therefore dangerous to people, that whatever took place inside the enclosures was intended to be separate from the outside. In other words, the henge may have been a means by which neolithic society set aside “sacred space” in much the same way that modern human beings do with churches, mosques, temples, and so forth.

The hymn An Aluinn Dún (The Heavenly Habitation), which was set out in an earlier post, is about sacred space (heaven, particularly). The Celts and the Gaels have a special sense about sacred places; they marked them, but did not attempt to set them off or guard against them in the way henges seem to do. In fact, holy caves and holy wells were understood to be places of refreshment, “thin places” between our world and the spiritual realm, not something to be feared, but something to enjoy, somewhere to grow closer to God.

St. Alban’s Cathedral

July 9, 2011 / eric / 1 Comment

The other cathedral church I visited on 8 July 2011 was that in the town of St. Albans. It might not actually be a town. British law makes distinctions between hamlets, villages, towns, and cities – and perhaps other urban designations (I don’t really know). There are also parishes (of two types, ecclesiastical and legal), boroughs, and counties. Each of these legal geographies has its own council or other form of government, and their interactions (amongst themselves and between them and the national government) are the stuff of much news commentary. In any event, there is a place called St. Albans and I’ll call it a town whether it legally is one or not.

St. Albans was founded by the Romans who called it Verulamium. The town now has a really lovely public park call Verulamium Park and parts of the old Roman town’s wall are on display there. There are also lovely rolling green hills, huge willows and other shade trees, and a delightful pond which is the home of swans, geese, and ducks who are regularly fed by the citizenry. Here are a couple of pictures of the park (including the wall):

Pond at Verulamium Park, St. Albans

Roman Wall, Verulamium Park, St. Albans

St. Albans Cathedral seen through the Roman Wall, Verulamium Park

The cathedral is dedicated to, and the town gets its current name from, St. Alban, first martyr of Britain. The story is that Alban was a pagan Roman soldier. According to James Kiefer’s hagiography, “he gave shelter to a Christian priest who was fleeing from arrest, and in the next few days the two talked at length, and Alban became a Christian. When officers came in search of the priest, Alban met them, dressed in the priest’s cloak, and they mistook him for the priest and arrested him. He refused to renounce his new faith, and was beheaded. He thus became the first Christian martyr in Britain. The second was the executioner who was to kill him, but who heard his testimony and was so impressed that he became a Christian on the spot, and refused to kill Alban. The third was the priest, who when he learned that Alban had been arrested in his place, hurried to the court in the hope of saving Alban by turning himself in. The place of their deaths is near the site of St. Alban’s Cathedral today.”

Front porch, Cathedral Church of St. Alban, St. Albans, UK

The shrine of St. Alban is inside the cathedral. It forms a separate chapel behind the “screen” or reredos behind the high altar (and before the Lady Chapel which takes up what an American church member would think of as the “chancel” area of the building). While I was photographing the shrine, one of the cathedral guides came up and engaged me in conversation. In the course of our discourse she said, “We have a bone you know?” – “I thought the saint’s whole body was here!” – “Oh, no! The bones were taken away when Henry the Eighth abolished the monasteries! Most of his bones were taken to the continent and an awful lot of them were taken to the cathedral in Cologne. A few years ago the Bishop of Cologne visited and he brought us a bone – Alban’s right shoulder bone! Of course, we’re Anglicans so we’re not much on relics … but we said, ‘Thank you very much’ and accepted his bone.” – “Oh… well, where is this bone?” – “It’s in a lovely box under the shroud on the shrine!” So here’s a picture of the shrine … under that red cover somewhere is a “lovely box” contained a shoulder bone, allegedly Alban’s…..

Shrine of St. Alban, St. Albans Cathedral

The reason I visited this particular place, other than it’s Roman history connection (there’s no Celtic connection that I know of), is that I was ordained on the feast of St. Alban (well… the eve, actually, but we used the Propers for St. Alban’s feast), so I consider him the patron of my priesthood.

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral

July 9, 2011 / eric / 2 Comments

On 8 July 2011 I visited two cathedrals, the first of which was St. Edmundsbury Cathedral (which is in the town of Bury St. Edmunds – don’t ask me why the names are differently formatted; even the cathedral guide I spoke with couldn’t tell me). The town and cathedral are named for St. Edmund, King and Martyr, who was king of the East Angles; he was killed by Danish invaders in 869 CE. They had offered him peace on condition that he would rule as their vassal and forbid the practice of the Christian faith. For his refusal, he was tied to a tree and shot with arrows. Around 900 CE, Edmund’s body was brought to Bedericesworth (now called Bury St. Edmunds) and housed in a shrine in what developed into a great Benedictine abbey. That shrine became a great place of pilgrimage and Edmund was the patron saint of England, until St George replaced him.

The Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich was created in 1914, the Church of St James (on the grounds of the Benedictine abbey’s ruins) was designated as the Cathedral. In 2009 the Cathedral changed its dedication to become the Cathedral Church of St James and St Edmund.

Here are a few photos from the cathedral. First, exterior as seen from the gate from the Abbey Gardens. It was a very rainy day when I visited, so I did not go around and take a photo of the front of the cathedral from the High Street.

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral seen from the Abbey Garden gate

The main nave of the church:

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral Interior

The High Altar and then the altar in a side chapel:

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral High Altar

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral side chapel

Finally a couple of pieces of statuary. First, a wood carving of St. Edmund inside the cathedral. There is a larger bronze statue on the grounds, but because of the rain, I wasn’t able to get a picture of it. The second statue is a piece commemorating explorer Bartholomew Gosnold who gave Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, its name. He sailed to the island in 1602. On seeing wild grape vines growing there, he named it for his second child, who died in infancy, and who was named Martha. Martha Gosnold had been christened in St James Church and her body is buried it its churchyard.

Wooden carving of St. Edmund, King and Martyr

Statue commemorating explorer Bartholomew Gosnold

After visiting St. Edmundbury Cathedral, I left the city and drove to the university town of Cambridge to have lunch with friends. Unfortunately, the English roads, English traffic, and English congestion got the better of me and I never made it to the lunch date. I tried … but I can now say, “I have been to Cambridge, where I failed.” Instead of meeting my friends for lunch, I threw up my hands in frustration and drove on to St. Albans where I visited the second cathedral of the day and about which I will write another post later.

Some Pictures

July 8, 2011 / eric / 1 Comment

No great thoughts today (have there been any at all so far?) – just a few pictures.

I’m trying to figure out what to do about Flickr and its upload limit. I may need to figure out how to use MobileMe and make it publicly accessible. In the meantime, some photos here…

First, from Lady Waterford Hall in the Village of Ford, Northumberland. Lady Louisa Waterford founded a school here well before elementary education was compulsory in Britain. She was an amateur painter and also a very religious woman. To make the stories of the Bible come alive for her students she decorated the inside of her classroom with murals of biblical stories for which they and their parents were the models. The project took her 21 years. This is her portrait of “The Boy Jesus” –

The Boy Jesus at Waterford Hall

Next, Whitby Abbey. Whitby is a place important in Celtic Church history for it is here that a synod was held which essentially ended the influence of Celtic Christianity in Britain for several centuries. The first monastery here was founded in 657 CE by King Oswy of Northumbria. An Anglo-Saxon style “double monastery” for men and women, its first abbess was a formidable royal princess named Hilda. She hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664 at which it was decided that the English church would follow the traditions of Rome rather than the Celtic practices. Whitby is also famous as the home of the Anglo-Saxon poet Caedmon, an illiterate cowherd who was transformed into an inspired writer of Christian hymns. The Anglo-Saxon monastery has long since disappeared and is believed to have been in a location closer to the ocean than this 13th Century ruin; this monastery was begun in 1220 CE, like many of the re-established Celtic and Anglo-Saxon sites, by the Benedictines.

Whitby Abbey, N. Yorkshire, UK

Third, a tomb in the Minster at York. I don’t actually know who this bishop is … but I love this non-traditional effigy. Usually these things simply look like the fully-vested stretched out corpse of whomever … but this one, with the bishop reclining, resting his head on his hand, and looking for all the world like a day-dreaming schoolboy who ought to be studying his Bible, struck me as delightfully whimsical.

Bishop's Tomb at York Minster

My friend, the Rev. Michael Bishop, is the vicar of an eight-congregation united benefice in the Church of England. He ministers to the members of these eight congregations, offering worship in seven of the eight every Sunday! One of these is All Saints, Dalbury, Derbyshire, which houses this window – the oldest piece of stained glass in the British Isles. It depicts St. Michael the Archangel. I was particularly taken with it because Michaelmas happens to be my birthday.

St. Michael Window, All Saints, Dalbury, Derbyshire, UK

Lastly – another depiction of St. Michael from a side chapel in Coventry Cathedral. My poor photographic skills and inadequate camera simply cannot convey the grandeur of the Cathedral of St. Michael, Coventry, nor the emotional impact this place has. The original Gothic cathedral was bombed during World War II. After the war, rather than restore the ruins or rebuild on the same site, it was decided that the ruins would be turned into a prayer area and the new cathedral built adjoining it. The new structure, in a style that can only be called “mid-century modern”, was started in 1956 and completed in 1962. It is magnificent! The old cathedral prayer garden is also outstanding.

Chapel at Coventry Cathedral

Traveling Mercies! Please! (Part 2)

July 7, 2011 / eric / 1 Comment

This piece follows up on a description of my day of departure from the states – here.

Suffice to say I got to and through Newark (where I had an awful Mexican supper badly burning the roof of my mouth on an obviously “nuked” chimichanga), and arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. I had pre-booked a rental vehicle from Enterprise Rent-a-Car, but finding the rental agency counters in the Edinburgh airport terminal is a bit of a trick … because they aren’t in the terminal; they’re in a separate building on the other side of the multi-level car park which thus can’t be seen from the terminal. Good planning.

Anyway, I got through immigration and customs with no problems (except a long wait because of some sort of public workers strike and then a computer outage), found the rental agency, got the car and a quick run-down on its features by the agency manager, loaded my things, and took off … only to discover that I’d misunderstood the instructions on how to get out of the parking area, made a wrong turn, and ended up blocking the way for in-coming rental returns. That’s when I discovered that I didn’t know how the put a Vauxhall Meriva five-door runabout into reverse! I put the vehicle in neutral, got out, and pushed it out of the way. Then spent several minutes looking through the owner’s manual and finally figured it out – I’d been pushing down on the gear shift knob (which was the way one got into reverse in my last two manual transmission cars) but learned that the Meriva has a pull-up ring around the gear shift stem. Well, OK, it works. And the car has turned out to be fun to drive.

The Hole of Horcum

After driving it for three days, however, it was time to fuel it up. I pulled into a Tessco petrol station, got out, and couldn’t get the fuel tank door to open. After looking everywhere for a release lever and not finding one, I pulled into a parking place and spent several more minutes with the owners’ manual, fruitlessly this time. I was almost ready to call Enterprise and ask, “How do I get this darned thing open!?” Then a calm voice in my head said, “What about the unlock button on the key fob?” “No,” I said to the voice, “it couldn’t be that easy, could it?” — The unlock function on the key is one of those where you press it once and the driver’s door opens, press it again all of the locks in the car are released. I pressed it twice. The fuel tank door opened! Thank you, calm voice in my head! I swung the car around the pumps and filled up.

American gasoline consumers! Listen up! The cost of petrol in the UK (the lowest grade being 95 octane, by the way) is currently between £1.309 and £1.399 depending on where you are and what station you prefer to patronize. I paid £1.319 per liter, or a total of £56.28 to fill my car with 42.67 liters of gasoline. In American terms, that’s $90.58 for 11.27 gallons – or $8.04 per gallon! Gasoline in Medina, Ohio, the day I left was $3.45 per gallon. We really don’t have anything to complain about! (I’ve since filled up twice again at similar prices.)

Anyway ….

Whitby Abbey

All of these minor annoyances, those set out in the earlier post and those described here, are just that, minor! When I was resting, praying, meditating at the Duddo Stone Circle and again a few days later when I was walking across the grass field at Whitby Abbey and then later that same day listening to the electronic guide commentary at Rievaulx Abbey, it occurred to me how difficult the lives and travels of the Celtic missionaries must have been. These men set out from Ireland not on jet aircraft arrived mere hours later; they sailed across the Irish Sea (not the most hospitable of waters) in small currachs, practically insignificant skin-covered boats. They traveled the countryside (which was wild and untamed, not the neatly farmed landscape of today) by foot, not in comfortable air conditioned vehicles whizzing along at 70 mph! No matter what the inconveniences of modern air travel, no matter how bad airline or airport food may be, no matter what difficulties one may have learning how to pilot a rental car … nothing that I have detailed above amounts to a hill of beans in comparison to the difficulties those Celtic monks must have faced!

Galway City Museum Currach Boat Exhibit

It was the Celtic missionary tradition to send out thirteen men – an abbot and twelve brothers emulating Christ and the Twelve – to find a good location for a new monastic community, settle there, build their caiseal and within it their huts and other buildings, and begin seeking out the local peoples and telling them the Good News of redemption in Jesus Christ. They sailed in tiny boats; they walked across wild terrain shod only in sandals; they carried everything they needed – holy books and vessels, especially. They did the hard work of converting those who had never heard of God or of Jesus. And they did it successfully. They have much to teach us and we have much to learn.

This trip is teaching me about patience; it’s teaching me about letting go of annoyances; it’s teaching me about trusting God. Traveling charms, invocation of God’s protection while abroad, were a common part of the Celtic Christian experience. There are numerous examples of them in Alexander Carmichael’s magisterial collection of Scottish Gaelic folk hymns and poetry called Carmina Gadelica and in Douglas Hyde’s collection of Irish verse entitled Religious Songs of Connacht, from which the lyrics of many of the songs in Dantá Dé are taken. The following is from Hyde’s collection, the Irish and the translation are both from his text. It is not found in Dantá Dé. First, the Irish:

I n-ainm an Athar le buaidh
Agus an Mhic a d’fhulaing an phian
Muire ‘s a Mac go raibh liom ar mo thriall.

O a Mhuire cas dam ag an phort
Na leig m’ anam thart
Is mór m’ eagla roimh do Mhac.

I gcumaoin na naomh go raibh muidh (sinn)
Ag éisteacht le guth na n-aingeal
A’s ag moladh Mic Dé le saoghal na saoghal.

And the English rendering by Dr. Hyde:

In the name of the Father, with victory
And of the Son who suffered the pain,
That Mary and her Son may be with me on my travel.

O Mary meet me at the port
Do not let my soul [go] by thee,
Great is my fear at thy Son.

In the communion of the saints may we be,
Listening to the voices of the angels,
And praising the Son of God for ever and ever.

I’ve begun saying this invocation each morning before beginning my drive, thinking of the Celtic and Roman missionaries and the later medieval monks who traveled this way before me.

Connections: Friendship, Stones, and Walls

July 5, 2011 / eric / 1 Comment

I inhabit a world of instant connections, or so I believe. Back home in the States almost anywhere I go I can pull out my laptop, turn it on, find an available WiFi network, link to it with little or no problem, and be instantly connected with the internet. I can check my e-mail, access informational websites, Skype with family and friends – in a word, be connected.

Not so Great Britain. Except for the fact that the housekeeper Clovenfords Country Hotel had to keep unplugging the router to plug in her vacuum cleaner, there was no problem my first lodgings. The next evening, however, I discovered that there is no connection at all on Lindisfarne. Holy Island simply seems unwired. There times my phone couldn’t even send a text message. Now in Whitby, I’m finding that although the B&B where I’m staying advertises “free WiFi”, its router keeps cutting in and out (without the excuse of an interfering house keeper) – good thing its free! I’d be really angry if I was paying for this. (Note: The next day things improved immensely – I actually think the problem was with the ISP because my computer kept showing that I was connected to the router, but the router wasn’t connecting to the internet.)

This matter of “being connected” brings me to the sorts of places I’ve visited the past few days – the Duddo Stone Circle (2200-1400 BCE), Hadrian’s Wall (c. 120 CE), Bede’s Monastery of St. Paul at Jarrow (681 and c. 12th Cent. CE), Lindisfarne Priory (687 and 1150 CE). These are ancient places of varying purposes but all, in a sense, are monuments to human connectedness, our connections to one another and our connections to the divine.

Duddo Stone Circle

No one is quite sure what the Duddo Stone Circle is all about. It may have marked a burial site, but that cannot be proven because Victorian and early 20th Century excavations disturbed any cremation chamber that may have been there. It may have been a religious site of some sort, but who can tell. It is dated to the Bronze Age principally because of its size. Archeologists tell us that the final phase of stone circle building occurred during the early to middle Bronze Age (c.2200–1500 BCE) which saw the construction of small circles like Duddo, probably by family groups or clans rather than the larger population groups need to build the larger circles and henges.

The purpose of stone circles and henges is forever lost to us. They may have been religious; they have been astrological or astronomical observatories of a sort; they have been talismanic. Still, whatever the Duddo Stone Circle’s purpose and whoever its builders, it remains today as a monument to community and cooperation, to the human need to connect that which is greater than the individual. Though they have fallen been stood again over time, there they remain perhaps 4,000 years after their initial placement on that hillside in Northumbria.

Housesteads Fort and Hadrians Wall

Hadrian’s Wall was built between 122 and 128 CE right across the island of Great Britain; it is 73 modern miles long! About 70 percent of this fortification (more than 50 miles) is made of squared stone outer walls with a fill of rubble and clay between them; these walls were 10 feet thick and 20 feet high! The remainder (mainly west of the River Irthing) was made of turf stacked 20 feet thick and 10 feet high. Forts were built every five to ten miles and turrets or guard posts every mile. It was built by the Roman Legions and they did it, including the forts and turrets, in six years! I visited Housesteads Roman Fort near Hexham and was fascinated by the orderliness of its layout and massiveness of the section of the wall to which it is connected. The wall and its forts are monuments to organization and communication, it nothing else, and sections of it are still standing nearly 1900 years later!

Carrawburgh Mithraeum Brocolitia

However, the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall are not simply the remains of a secular, military fortification of massive proportions. There is evidence that Hadrian believed it was his duty by “divine instruction” to build the wall to protect the Roman Empire. Furthermore, along the wall there are worship sites. A goodly number of Rome’s Legionaries were Mithraists, followers of a mystery religion which competed with Christianity in the early centuries and with the Christian Church (after made official by Constantine) eventually wiped out. Along the wall are evidences of Mithraic worship sites called Mithraea. One such Mithraeum is found at Carrawburgh near Housesteads Roman Fort. (For some reason it has been given the Celtic-based name Brocolitia, which probably means “badger hole”.

Lindisfarne Priory

The monastery and the priory were founded by the Celtic missionaries from Ireland at about the same time and renewed five hundred years later. Lindisfarne and Jarrow were re-established as monastic communities by Benedictines from Durham Cathedral in the 12th Century and, if not for the savagery of Henry the Eighth’s disestablishment of the monasteries in the 15th Century, they might still be standing and might still be functional communities today. Like Duddo and Hadrian’s Wall before them, the still-standing ruins of these monasteries are testament to power of human connection and of human desire to connect to that which is greater.

While the Celtic ethos is certainly community-based, as the nature of the Celtic monastic communities of Ireland and those in Britain and Scotland in places like Lindisfarne, Jarrow, and Iona show, the hymns in Dantá Dé do not reflect that. The hymns Ní Ógáin selected are all, for the most part, hymns of individual prayer. However, there is one hymn which refers to God as “King of the friends,” or as Douglas Hyde translated it, “King of friendship.” The notes describe is as a morning hymn and as folk music (ceol na ndaoine, literally “music of the people”) “through L Grattan-Flood, Mus. Doc.” This is the Gaeilge original:

A Rí na gcarad, a Athair an tSlánuightheor’,
Fág in mo sheasamh mé ar maidin drádhachóir;
Déan-sa mo theagasg gan mearbhal, a Shlánuightheoir,
Agus sábháil m’anam ar cheangal an Aidhbheirseor’.

A Rí cruinne, do bheir loinnir ‘sa ngréin go moch,
Dílte troma agus toradh ‘na ndhiaidh go grod,
Innsim Duit-se mo chulpa agus féachaim is glaodhaim Ort,
Agus ná leig tuitim níos fuide bham féin san olc.

And this is a versified translation which Ní Ógáin attributes to Dr. Hyde:

O King of friendship, our Saviour’s Father art Thou;
O keep me erect, until evening shall cool my brow.
O teach and control, lest I unto sin should bow,
And save Thou my soul from the foe who follows me now.

O King of the world, Who lightest the sun’s bright ray,
Who movest the rains that ripen the fruit on the spray;
I look unto Thee, my transgressions before Thee I lay,
O keep me from falling deeper and deeper away.

Friendship, community, connectedness … these are the things that last and those human works which result from them last, as well. God is the King of the Friends, the King of Friendship. If we trust in God and in one another, the things we accomplish will be kept erect like the Standing Stones at Duddo. They will not be inconsistent, like internet connections. They will not fall “deeper and deeper away” but stand like Hadrian’s Wall and the walls of the ancient monasteries, testaments to the power of friendship and of faith.

Blogging on the Road

July 5, 2011 / eric / 0 Comments

There are three problems (probably more, but I’ve identified these) with trying to blog on the road….

(a) Finding an internet connection. This is a major problem. For the first few days of my journey I was at a retreat house on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. Internet connectivity was simply non-existent. Now at a B&B in Whitby, it is inconsistent. I tried setting up to enter a couple of posts when I arrived last evening, but the router kept cutting in and out. It seems more steady this morning, but who knows.

(b) This B&B underscores the second problem. Space in which to work. I have a room about the size of a reasonable walk-in closet in an American suburban home, maybe 7 feet by 11 feet. Into this tiny room are crammed a double bed, two night stands, a straight-back chair, and a shower stall! What was obviously the closet has been converted into a loo and there simply is no closet for luggage or clothing. I’m currently sitting on the chair hunched over the bed on which my laptop rests and bounces about a bit as I type.

(c) And the most telling problem – Time. There is so much I want to see and do that doing it and seeing it all leaves little time to write about it in the same day. I’ve started notes on Hadrian’s Wall, Bede’s abbey at Jarrow, the Angel of the North, getting lost in Newcastle (£2.40 in unnecessary tunnel tolls as a result), and so forth – but finding the time to get them into shape for blog publication is, well, turning out to be almost impossible.

And then there’s the matter of Flickr’s restriction on uploads of photographs – I seem to be taking too many.

So, dear reader (as Miss Manners was wont to address her audience), bear with me. I’ll get back to the blog with descriptions and pictures soon. Today, however, I’m going to tramp around Whitby Abbey and then head back to the north to visit Durham Cathedral, which I decided had to wait after the emotional exhaustion of driving in Newcastle road construction and driving in both directions, paying that toll each way, through a tunnel under the Tyne River).

Summer and Sabbath

June 30, 2011 / eric / 1 Comment

In about two hours I will be headed for Cleveland-Hopkins Airport to get on a flight to Newark and thence to Edinburgh. Checking email, Facebook, etc. before packing up the laptop, I found that a friend forwarded me an email from a United Methodist board of some sort containing two delightful quotations about summer and sabbath. The summer thought is from John Lubbock:

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.”

I had no idea who John Lubbock was, although I now know that I certainly should have. He was a Victoria era banker with many side interests, and the First Baron Avebury. He also was a good friend of Charles Darwin, whose hometown of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, I will be visiting in just under two weeks. Wikipedia has an extensive article about John Lubbock which includes this information:

In 1865 Lubbock published what was possibly the most influential archaeological text book of the 19th century, Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages. He invented the terms Palaeolithic and Neolithic to denote the Old and New Stone Ages respectively. More notably, he introduced a Darwinian view of human nature and development. “What was new was Lubbock’s… insistence that, as a result of natural selection, human groups had become different from each other, not only culturally, but also in their biological capacities to utilize culture.”

Lubbock complained in the preface about Charles Lyell:

“Note.—In his celebrated work on the Antiquity of Man, Sir Charles Lyell has made much use of my earlier articles in the Natural History Review, frequently, indeed, extracting whole sentences verbatim, or nearly so. But as he has in these cases omitted to mention the source from which his quotations were derived, my readers might naturally think that I had taken very unjustifiable liberties with the work of the eminent geologist. A reference to the respective dates will, however, protect me from any such inference. The statement made by Sir Charles Lyell, in a note to page 11 of his work, that my article on the Danish Shell-mounds was published after Ms sheets were written, is an inadvertence, regretted, I have reason to believe, as much by its author as it is by me.” Preface to Pre-historic times.

Lubbock was also an amateur biologist of some distinction, writing books on hymenoptera (Ants, Bees and Wasps: a record of observations on the habits of the social hymenoptera. Kegan Paul, London; New York: Appleton, 1884.), on insect sense organs and development, on the intelligence of animals, and on other natural history topics. He was a member of the famous X Club founded by T.H. Huxley to promote the growth of science in Britain. He discovered that ants were sensitive to the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. The Punch verse of 1882 captured him perfectly:

How doth the Banking Busy Bee
Improve his shining Hours?
By studying on Bank Holidays
Strange insects and Wild Flowers!

Apparently, Mr. Lubbock’s time spent lying on the summer grass was not wasted. I hope that mine spent, in part, walking through the summer hills of Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland will likewise not be a waste of time. And in that vein is the second quotation in my friend’s United Methodist email, a prayer for sabbath:

Sabbath God, in this season of long days and long daylight, we are grateful to be alive. Give us the wisdom to pause from our hectic routines and enjoy the simple things of this time of year. Let us live easily for a time, putting away watches and looking away from clocks, ignoring all the things that need to be moved, fixed or cleaned. Let us lose ourselves in the bounty of the earth you created. May this be a time of rest, refreshment and renewal. May we be calm enough and quiet enough to perceive your presence. Let us not fill all our time with endless activity.

The email says that this is prayer is “based on a prayer composed by Ted Loder in his book, My Heart in My Mouth.” I also didn’t know who Ted Loder is. It turns out he is another blogging clergy person. The profile on his blog says, “The Reverend Dr. Loder is a retired United Methodist minister who served as Senior Pastor for 38 years at Philadelphia, PA’s First United Methodist Church of Germantown (FUMCOG), which became well known around the country for its dynamic worship and preaching as well as its urban involvement and prophetic social action. He was named one of America’s most creative preachers. He has published several books of prayers, sermons and commentary including Guerrillas of Grace and Loaves, Fishes and Leftovers.” The header on his blog reads, “Stay Watchful – God is Sneaky.” I shall have to read this fellow….

As I fold up this laptop, stow it in my backpack, and start loading my bags into the car for the trip to the airport, my prayer is one petition in particular in the Rev. Dr. Loder’s prayer, “May this be a time of rest, refreshment and renewal.” Amen!

Category: England (Page 3 of 3)

Shrewsbury Abbey – 12 July 2011

Visiting Wilmslow

Neolithic Britain – 9 July 2011

St. Alban’s Cathedral

St. Edmundsbury Cathedral

Some Pictures

Traveling Mercies! Please! (Part 2)

Connections: Friendship, Stones, and Walls

Blogging on the Road

Summer and Sabbath

Looking for Something …. ?

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