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Serenity above, mortality below—held in equilibrium.
I was first struck by the beauty and craft of the alabaster tomb of Alice Chaucer—granddaughter of Geoffrey—in St Mary’s, Ewelme. But as my eyes moved down across the carving, I was grounded by an encaged cadaver beneath.
Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
Looked at clouds that way
But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
Joni Mitchell. Both Sides Now.
Equilibrium
I’ve got St. John the Baptist, Burford to myself – the caretaker has given me access, shown me the fire exit, and locked me in. It’s first light and the first time I have seen the church stripped of modern lighting. Natural light ripples through the nave, is shrouded by the heavy Romanesque crossing, and then exalted by the chancel.
My work today is to photograph the Tanfield Monument of 1628. For me, this monument is one of the finest in the country – containing the effigies of Sir Lawrence Tanfield and his wife Elizabeth. The tomb of alabaster and black marble rises towards a canopy dotted with cherubs and cornered by angelic hosts. They both lie in heavenly repose, bounded by depictions of their daughter, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, and eldest grandson, Lucius Cary, second Lord Falkland.
It has to be seen.
I finish the photography and stop to absorb the atmosphere. I move around to the side and notice the details – the feet, the hands, the family crests...
...and then I look down. It’s hard to see, because the chapel walls press tightly against the monument, but there’s a cavity beneath. I squat beside the monument and there it is: I’m face to face with a cadaver.
I feel a jolt, a sudden shift of perspective. The tension between the refined above and the stark reality beneath is palpable. Hidden in plain sight is a narrative on our own mortality – a memento mori.
If there’s one aspect behind the power of the buildings and places I’m drawn to, it is the stories captured within them. By and large, it’s not the surface narratives I’m interested in, but the sub-narratives that flow like crystal-clear waters beneath a mountain stream. The surface narrative often obscures these deeper, almost hidden stories that reflect what it is to be human.
When I studied English Literature and History, we were taught to strip narratives down to their hidden meanings, revealing society’s hopes and fears. Thus, for example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein emerged not as a Hollywood horror tale, but as a warning born from the fears of revolutionary upheaval – a caution to the middle classes about the kind of monster they might create if they didn’t change course.
Sir Lawrence and Lady Tanfield were known as cruel landlords, caught in the politics of the day – bullish, arrogant, unyielding. But hidden behind this narrative, captured like a fly in amber within the monument, is a meditation on our dual nature.
Standing within the Tanfield aisle feels like being suspended between two worlds. The alabaster effigies lie in serene repose above - poised, composed, eternal. Beneath, the cadaver curls into itself - bones clenched. It is more than a stark reminder of mortality, but a reckoning - not just with death, but with the contradictions we carry.
The monument is a kind of fulcrum - a physical meditation on the human condition, where hope and hubris, vanity and transcendence, all gather into form. In the stillness, I feel both the balance and the friction. The cherubs above strain upward, while the skeleton below anchors the whole ensemble to the ground.
It’s here - in this poised tension - that the spirit of the place emerges. I think of Terry Pratchett’s phrase: the falling angel meets the rising ape. Opposing forces in harmonious relationship. Here is a parable in stone.
Every society produces hidden messages through the culture they create. Today, a cultural historian might interpret the combined glut of zombie films as a polemic on the tools of modernity sleepwalking people into uniformity and disenchantment.
It is, it seems, human nature to absorb truth at a tangent rather than be explicitly told. Perhaps place, myth, art and fiction are the only methods we can really absorb and find ways of responding to the truths around us.
We can’t be told, we have to feel it - even when it’s blatantly staring us in the face.
I’ve written over 100,000 words in the digest trying to find what it is about certain places that really engage me. What if the spirit of place isn't found solely in the golden stain of age, but in their equilibrium? Neither wholly sacred nor entirely raw, sweet nor sour, but instead delicately poised - soaring and grounded, earthly and divine.
Sat here, in the silence, next to the cadaver at Burford, I feel like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, after his long, bewildering search for the meaning of life, the universe and everything - only to be told the answer is 42.
I feel a mix of absurdity and awe - as if the deeper I go, the clearer it becomes that the real answer isn’t a number, but a question hidden in plain sight.
Surely not, I think to myself - could it really be that simple? That the root of so much modern chaos is an imbalance - the ape rising unchecked, all instinct and ambition, while the angel falters, weighed down by disillusion or neglect? Perhaps the message here, hidden in stone and marble, is a call to cultivate equilibrium - to hold fast to moderation, to temper the extremes, and to recover the balance between our base nature and our better selves.
At St. Etheldreda’s in Old Hatfield, the narrative is also told through the stone. Rising from the slab that divides flesh from bone on Robert Cecil’s remarkable cadaver tomb are the four virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and - most notably - Temperance.
And if we look carefully at the Tanfield Monument - they are there as well.
Cadaver tombs, like the Tanfield and Robert Cecil monuments are altars to temperance - the virtue of balancing desire, emotion, and ambition. When we apply the metaphor of the falling angel meeting the rising ape - not in opposition, but reaching towards each other - we begin to see equilibrium as relationship rather than stasis. Movement held in check, desire tempered by humility, mortality cradling transcendence - a necessary counterpoint to the extremes of our times.
Dare I ask it - amidst the noise of modernity, are there similar messages in the here and now?
I begin to search our own culture for the sweet-sour tension between angel and ape.
Slowly they emerge: Betjeman’s ‘chintzy, chintzy cheeriness half dead and half alive’, T. S. Eliot’s dance at the ‘still point of the turning world’, Lady Macbeth's ‘innocent flower’ masking the ‘serpent under’t’, Faustus’ agonised cry - ‘O, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?’
It’s in that final gaze between Kong and Ann Darrow before he falls, Jack and Rose in Titanic before he slips beneath, Francesca Johnson’s hesitant yet yearning stare at Robert Kincaid in Bridges of Madison County. It reverberates through Nick Cave’s Into My Arms and Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb.
These things aren’t being said out loud. We wouldn't listen if they were.
It echoes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel…’, Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, Bob Marley’s Redemption Song, the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, and in Jane Eyre’s declaration - ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.’
Sometimes I feel as if the world is spinning out of control, the dominant narrative unbreakable, impassable, irrevocable.
What my time at Burford has taught me is that, beneath the plastic surface, the world is storied, alive, and full of hope and meaning. All we have to do is to sculpt, build, film, shape, write, paint, sing, dance, photograph - and share it - as if our lives depend on it. It is through the filter of art and myth that we can only get to see and know our true selves beyond the smoke and mirrors of the present.
Perhaps we get an insight into how powerful our story making is when we see authoritarian governments and institutions combatting, negating and censoring the arts. It’s their Achilles’ heel.
In the end, equilibrium isn’t something we solve like a riddle – it’s something we learn to sense: in shadow and stone, in cello suites and films, in pigment and words. That’s why it’s troubling to think that our sensory literacy – the very skills we need to perceive the messages embedded in the world around us – may be at an all-time low. Maybe that's what the zombie films are trying to tell us, because:
’Tis said, that with poetic diction,
The implausible will come to life
And triumph over doubt and strife,
Transmitting through long ages all
The yearnings of the human soul...*
Places like Burford are part of a continuous and profound culture - a living story running deep beneath the surface. The Led Zeppelin, Kong and Darrow, Jane Eyre and Rochester of their day. A thread connecting generations of people tuned into the universe’s hidden order: the pull and push of the atom, the balance between the falling angel and the rising ape.
*Excerpt from Lines on Drinking the First Cup of Russian Samovar - Conway Morris/ The Architecture of the Poetic Universe.
I know these are difficult times, but if my work as an artist has resonated with you – through words, photographs or drawings – and you’re in a position to support it, I’d be deeply grateful.
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St. John the Baptist, Burford.
This is an exemplary church but try and visit out of season, first thing after it opens.
Get into Burford a touch before that and visit The Bakery on the Hill (opens at 0830).
Inside the church after looking up at the glorious vaulting in the porch go straight to the Tanfield Monument in the north aisle, through the chancel. It's best experienced on your own.
Then walk to beneath the crossing to get a sense of one of its earliest phases. It's hard to believe that the filigree spire at Burford is held by a muscular Romanesque.
Then head over to The St. Thomas Chapel and look to the north on the wall outside the chapel. Here is, perhaps a survival from pre Christian times - a stone carving (called the Epona Stone - after the pagan horse goddess) within the wall.
Look east from the same vantage point and take in the remarkable survival of wallpaint in the south transept. It surrounds a stained glass window by Christopher Whall.
Head towards the font in the north aisle and look at the lead along its rim. The graffiti includes the words: 'Anthony Sedley 1649 prisner.' Sedley was a Leveller mutineer from Cromwell's army and was imprisoned in the church for three days. On the 17th May the prisoners, including Sedley, were forced to watch their leaders being shot against the churchyard wall from the roof of the Lady Chapel.
If you walk along the aisle to the north, you will come across one of my favourite monuments. It's such a remarkable design that might be mistaken for Art Deco - but it was erected in 1577 by Edmund Harman eight years before his death. Harman was a principal in the court of Henry VIII and was granted the lease of Burford Priory after the dissolution of the monasteries. It is said to be the earliest depiction of inhabitants of the New World in Britain.
Here's a little secret. Once you've finished visiting the church - head over to the award winning Warwick Hall opposite the church. There's a lovely cafe.
If you'd like a pub lunch - avoid the one's on the high street during busy times and seek out the Lamb Inn on (wait for it) Sheep Street. On a really busy day - I managed to get some respite and even had enough time to sketch it:
✨ Members can see a wonderfullly detailed 360 VR of the Tanfield Monument here (viewable on any device):
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✨ Members can walk along The Hill with me at Burford here:
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From my Journal:
Finding graffiti at Burford
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St. John the Baptist, Burford was photographed using Member Powered Photography. Thank you to all members for making this possible.
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:
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 14 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
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