Welcome!
Thanks for coming along
Kind words about the Genius Loci Digest
To receive your Digest is to take a long drink from a cool stream on a hot day. Your beautiful word paintings take me to places I'd forgotten. Thank you. Chris
Coming next week: Dropping through the boss at Beverley Minster
Filming my journey through the boss and into the tower crossing.
⚡️ View the latest digest and the full archive here.
📐 My Goals ℹ️ Donations Page & Status 📸 MPP Status 🛍️Shop
Green Man (Foliate Head) York Minster
‘Can architecture become like music, and form the bridge between matter and spirit, revealing the “rare glimpses into the soul of things?"
Hugh Conway Morris
Not open for sightseeing.
I’m travelling down the M40 feeling threadbare. The months behind me have been a touch hurried and crowded with activity, so I decide to do what I’ve done so many times before: pull off the M40 and head to a church at Billesley. I need somewhere empty enough to let the noise dissipate.
Before I reach it, I draw into a lay-by to check the opening times. My device offers an AI-generated summary that shows a rating for the church and then words from a blog, the snippet reading: “…not open for sightseeing, until...” And it is there, in that half-sentence, that the thought strikes me: how detached we have become, how places and objects and things are drawn into the language of commodity: the traveller cast as a consumer: one who sees what has already been designated as a sight.
Maybe it comes down to the way we have learnt to look at the world: through ratings and reviews, through whether somewhere is “Instagrammable.” Nuance is pressed flat into a system of stars. Even mountains and valleys are scored on Google Maps, while churches like All Saints' at Billesley do not warrant a mention in Simon Jenkins’ Thousand Best. And I think, ruefully, in getting his book how much are we missing out? What falls away when only the ranked and the rated rise to the surface? It begins to feel as though these systems are not just cataloguing the world but curating us into rank and file.
Gabriel Zuchtriegel, Director General of Pompeii, calls it “collector syndrome” - the urge to amass star-rated experiences without ever lowering the camera from in front of the face. I make no judgement; I am guilty of it too. Yet a ripple of unease remains. What if this way of seeing became the only one? What if all our encounters with the world were reduced to transactions - and what would that mean, not only for the places themselves, but for how individuals and communities relate to one another? Who decides what is seen, and how do those choices shape the world when the influence of our devices is so pervasive? And what, in the end, does it do to our own inner lives?
This Digest, I like to think, is a countermeasure - a way of drawing out the places and ideas that fall between the gaps, that live in the lapses and silences, yet still have something to say about who we are and the values that we hold.
My thoughts are cast even sharper in the light of what my destination means to me - a place that is more than an entry in a guide or a search result, more than something to be consumed and catalogued. A place that isn’t a sight to be seen- a place that feels so comfortingly present in its designated absence.
Eventually, I pull up outside All Saints’, Billesley in Warwickshire and, as I walk through the porch and into the nave, I look into the transept with its now familiar oculus and see the stones fixed against the wall. They are, to me, a kind of holy grail.
It seems this church lies beyond the lens of our blinkered world. Yet I cannot forget that there was a younger, desperate man who once came here in wracks of anxiety, uncertain where his fragile vocation might lead, or what he might find within these walls. He entered not knowing how utterly his perception of himself, and of the world, would be altered - how the light raking the stone would steady him, and how this place would begin to teach him how to see.
Cradled within the south transept are two stone carvings.
They are from earlier builds of the church on this site. One carved piece shows the form of a man being chased by an open-mouthed serpent-dragon. The floor below the tympanum holds a second carving, likely made by an Anglo-Saxon hand.
Back then, I remember watching the Saxon carving for over an hour as the sun shifted, its surface unlocked by light - a crow’s face giving way to a vine-pierced heart, a cross emerging from shadow, the stone glittering like sugared crystal. It felt like a communion with the carver across the centuries, as if the stone itself carried the story forward.
My experience with this place put a wedge between myself and the present with its attention seeking technologies. It relinquished me from sensor and chip and set me up as blood and bone and mist and air.
It wasn’t just a connection to the Anglo-Saxon mason. What I found, in Billesley and in other churches like it, is an ocean of generations coming to shore through the monuments, inscriptions and carvings; the rood, encaustic and vaulting - all washed up like driftwood. This is why buildings like this comfort me - for within their walls is a kind of eternity. In the fabric, the past is forever contained within the living present.
And now I find myself back in the living present, a little worn, yet drawing again on the energy of this place. I am relieved at how unInstagrammable it is; and so I do the most unInstagrammable thing of all: I set my device aside, pull up a chair, and take out my watercolours. Blake’s words rise to mind: “…to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.” Even here, in this half-forgotten place, eternity is glimpsed in a shaft of light upon hand-tooled stone - in a space that once steadied a desperate man, and steadies him still.
I put my heart and soul into the Genius Loci Digest and it takes a day a week to produce. With your support, I’m able to keep this digest free and public facing. 📸🏛🚐
All Saints', Billesley, Warwickshire.
Tucked away at the end of a lane, and of C12th origin, most of the church was re-built in 1692 - so we have a charming mix of the Gothic and the Classical. Other than being adjacent to a farm and the manor house (now a hotel) - the church is isolated within a copse.
A field to the south of the church reveals the lumps and bumps of the former medieval village of Billesley which hasn't survived.
Intriguingly recent field work has revealed extensive Roman settlement here - perhaps a farm.
I parked on the lane that leads directly to the church. I couldn't find any restrictions to parking here - but best to check if you visit. I left a note on my windscreen saying I was in the church. I imagine it is possible to park at the Manor House Hotel with permission.
Andy Marshall
Churches Conservation Trust
For Members - a 360 view of the church and the abandoned village at Billesley
Viewable on any device
Click to View
Recent Digest Sponsors:
Andy Marshall
Member Powered Photography (MPP) is helping me offer my professional services for free to historic locations in Britain. I've set up an MPP status page which is updated regularly here:
Andy Marshall
Thank You!
Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 16 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
Member discussion