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"Pilgrimages can be seen...as both physical and metaphysical journeys. The same tracks follow the same routes through a planet that is ever in flux, providing refuges for contemplation in the midst of a frantic and confusing world. Our ancestors trod these paths, leaving their fretful and hopeful dreams in the monuments they built across the landscape; the standing stones, ornate cathedrals, secret hermitages and holy caves, all of them speak of a hunger for pardon, for immortality, for otherness, for beauty and a release from fear. They are physical manifestations of enduring human desires."
Mary Colwell, The Gathering Place.
The Visitor
Right now, stood where I am on the worn stone steps looking down into the darkness of the crypt at St. Mary, Lastingham in Yorkshire, you could say that this is the loneliest place on earth. Each breath I take creates an upward coiling helix towards the arcading, lit by a cold light that pierces the gloom from the east. It’s as if something or somebody is trying to direct my gaze upwards towards the loftiness of the vaulting in the nave of the church, instead of the dimly lit void beneath me.
But the sense of mystery overwhelms me and I descend carefully into the vault, taking the stairs slowly and deliberately. I can feel the texture of the stone beneath the soles of my shoes. When I see the space for the first time, as if by some kind of enchantment, the worn curvature of the step is converted into a wondrous and wider sense of the curvature of time.
In that moment, stood next to an ancient dragon door, perched on the edge of a pocket of air that has been held within these walls for almost a thousand years, I am overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of connection.
It has taken a particularly complex set of actions to make this space: create a defining purpose; tug up some stones from the earth beneath and carve and shape them; place them so that light is muted and mystery is created; cover it over and conjure a descent. Stir in a millennium of continuous presence and, along the way, add in the relics and remnants that you cherish. Maintain its purpose beyond the ideologies of the day. Ensure the presence of the present’s absence.
This place - the journey to it, the aura, the echoes, the muted light, the Saxon remnants and the Romanesque - has lifted my anxious self into a wider and more rooted sense of the world. And perhaps it’s this mix of things that explains what this agnostic does next.
I walk towards the kneeler in the centre of the crypt and kneel. It’s an act that feels like completing a loop, plugging a void, igniting a spark. I feel as if I’ve been given a backstage pass to the divine without having to think of it as a god or a belief, but as a way of touching the sacred that dwells inside.
Dante calls it the love that moves the Sun and the other stars. Author, Katherine May, in her book Enchantment, says:
“It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting the earth, and that there is a potency trapped in the interconnection, a tingle on the border of perception. It is the forgotten seam in our geology, the elusive particle that binds our unstable matter: the ability to sense magic in the everyday, to channel it through our minds and bodies, to be sustained by it.”
The act of kneeling disarms me. I feel like weeping at the state we find ourselves in, and so I pray for the world and everybody in it. I think of the people I sorely miss who are no longer with us. I think of my loved ones, and I think of how precious this life is.
And then, after this momentary journey into the ether, my mind is snapped back into focus by the slamming of a door above me. Somebody has entered the church. The moment feels incomplete - dislocated. I feel annoyed, exposed, awkward - this hunking brute curled over the kneeler, sausage fingers glued together. I don’t want to be caught like this, so I push my folded gait upwards and stand and listen. Footsteps move above me and behind me, but definitely towards me. They’ll be here soon, I think. They’ll come down, and there will be an alien moment of embarrassment.
I stand and wait for several minutes, but nobody comes. The silence settles and so I kneel again and bring my thoughts to a conclusion amidst an overwhelming sense of release and catharsis.
When I walk back up into the nave, the visitor is there at the top of the steps, sat in a chair - as if he knew of the tenderness that was taking place beneath and was unable to enter in upon it.
We exchange pleasantries. He tells me he’s booked into the pub opposite for lunch. I tell him that I’m a photographer and that I’m photographing the crypt. He has a curiosity that is engaging, so I show him a capital with delightful patterns and we talk about the wonder of it.
Then he heads down into the crypt and, while he walks below, I’m left in the nave, trying to hold onto the tremor of the moment.
Stood in the nave, the air feels different now - thinner, more permeable - as if the visitor’s arrival has cut the stillness I carried up from the crypt. I walk a little, letting my eyes settle on the familiar shapes of the church, searching for something to move the experience forward rather than let it collapse back into the everyday.
And then, on the aisle wall, through the arcading, I chance upon some words from Hebrews - a line that surfaces at exactly the right moment, gathering the potency of the crypt and drawing it back up into the world above.
I resolve to carry those words with me - beyond this moment, and beyond my time in the crypt. It is the invested ingredients of this place that have helped me realise how completely human it is to kneel, to pause, to wish and hope, to focus with intention, to reflect inwardly.
And as their meaning settles, it arrives like a roar in the silence of the nave - the recognition that the sacred isn’t something distant or exclusive, but something woven through all of us, revealed in the way we greet the world and one another. It reminds me that the extraordinary is so often folded inside the ordinary.
And perhaps the world might feel a little kinder if we grasped that the divine lives in each and every one of us - that places like this simply draw our attention back to what we already carry. For it can be found just as surely in small, unguarded things: a woody knoll, a shaft of light, the arc of a curlew - but most of all in the moments where lives meet, however briefly, in an unexpected kindness or a shared glance, in the holiness of an encounter and the presence of a stranger.
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Andy your work is becoming wonderful, remarkable. A so-called breakdown has been milled into its constituent parts, becoming profound construction: through perception, architecture, the lens and the pen. In your Repton crypt essay a deep description of our social anxiety - and our reason to be....
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Next Week: St. Mary's, Lastingham, the church, the pub and the ancient landscape.
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 16 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
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