Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 30 Oct 26

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Bath Abbey

Words

All art can have the power of poetic revelation about the material world - it can reveal the ensoulment of the universe

Hugh Conway Morris

Observations

A Stitch In Time.

I think I'm going to share these photographs with you now rather than delay your gratification and leave them at the end of the page. Here in the ruins of this former monastic infirmary in Peterborough, lies an extraordinary warp and weft of time and place, of home and circumstance, of the past, the present and the future all rolled into one.

Amongst the weathered stone, the remnants of one generation have been folded into the making of another, giving the bones of an ancient building new life.

My journey to this place took only a couple of hours, through the raking light of an autumnal afternoon, where the filigree hid the hunking mass of the cathedral and light gave generously before taking away again in the blink of an eye.

On this particular day, it seemed to have a life of its own, picking out the smallest details before abandoning them to the shadows.

And so I opened my eyes a little wider and followed the light into a world that seemed only half remembered, its shadows having as much to say as the illuminated stone.

I've heard people talk rather lightly of Peterborough, but I'm not convinced. Hovering around its buildings and streets is a sanctity of place that stretches back through the mists of time to Medeshamstede - one of the earliest great monastic houses of Anglo-Saxon England. For me, despite all that has come and gone, something of that presence still lingers here in the shadows.

And I wonder how much of what people think they know of Peterborough might simply melt away as they step through the cathedral doors and stand before the soaring majesty of its nave.

Inside the nave, I have a choice - to follow the designated route of information boards and signs, or to take an illuminated journey, allowing the light to lead me wherever it might fall. I choose the latter, following its fleeting presence through the great arcades and into the choir stalls, where it highlights the plot of a biblical narrative or pricks out the lines of Norman intent.

All around me the building moves between what is revealed and what is withheld.

And then, beyond the drama of a carved scene, the light settles upon two women sitting together with needles in hand, coaxing a pattern into being.

They are making kneelers for the congregation, recreating designs from the 1970s. Beneath this immense architecture, amongst the accumulated ambitions of kings, bishops and builders, are two people engaged in the most modest and generous of human endeavours.

There is something extraordinary in the way an act so small can reach across time, taking something that might otherwise have been lost and folding it back into the continuum of the building's life. Not simply mend and make do, but an act of renewal, a willingness to take what has been handed down and make it useful and beautiful once again.

And in their company I begin to understand something that all the architectural splendour had revealed.

Until now I had been looking at the cathedral as a magnificent accumulation of standing story, marvelling at its survival and imagining the worlds that had passed through it. But these women were showing me how to inhabit the place, how to take the morsels of the past and give them substance in the present.

I suspect their humility must have seemed rather at odds with the joy on my face, for I had come in pursuit of the extraordinary and found myself unexpectedly moved by something beautifully ordinary. The past is all stone and bone and what might have been, whilst the present is all flesh and blood and soft furnishings and what might yet be.

And perhaps there is something in the act of kneeling that brings the whole experience into focus, for kneeling is itself a gesture of humility, a lowering of oneself before something greater. I had arrived with my eyes lifted towards the soaring architecture, dazzled by the generosity of the light, only to find my understanding transformed by the modest movement of two pairs of hands reaching into the absence of what had gone before.

The Welsh have a word, hiraeth, for a longing bound up with absence, with a home or a time that cannot quite be recovered. Perhaps there was something of that feeling in my wanderings through Peterborough, an ache for the lives that had passed through these spaces and the worlds that had slipped beyond my open reach.

Yet for a fleeting moment, two women, with their needles and coloured thread, seemed to close the distance between what had been and what might yet be.

And there, amongst the tent-stitch and infirmary arches, I began to understand that the light had shown me the beauty of what remained, the shadows had suggested the immensity of what was lost, but it was the human act of making, mending and inhabiting that joined the two together. On this day I watched a needle arc through canvas and a window stitched into a medieval arch. The bones of this ancient place were clothed in the ordinary, imperfect and wonderful fabric of human life.

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Hotspots

Peterborough Cathedral - The Ceiling.

The extraordinary painted wooden ceiling of Peterborough Cathedral dates to around 1240 and is the largest surviving ceiling of its kind in Europe. Measuring 62 metres long, it comprises a remarkable arrangement of painted lozenges depicting kings, bishops, saints, musicians and the Seven Liberal Arts.

Among its more curious images are a monkey riding backwards on a goat and a two-faced Janus. The oak boards were imported from northern Germany.

Despite centuries of alteration, repainting and even fire, this extraordinary survival retains much of its original medieval character and decoration.

The Textile

After eight years and more than 1.5 million stitches, volunteers at Peterborough Cathedral completed an extraordinary needlepoint recreation of its thirteenth-century painted nave ceiling in September. Measuring nearly four metres long, the embroidery involved 30 regular volunteers working on canvas with 18 threads per inch, depicting medieval figures, creatures and symbolism.

Frustratingly it isn't on display yet - but from the description that the ladies sewing the kneelers gave me - I can't wait to see it.

The Infirmary

✨ 🪎 The remains of the infirmary in the precinct at Peterborough Cathedral has been added to my Treasure Hoard Gazetteer. Check it out, and the other treasures I have come across in my career, here: 👇