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😯 ✨St John’s Court in Malmesbury: a 17th-century almshouse wrapped around a stunning 12th-century doorway from a former chapel. One of the most characterful gables in the country.
'My guesses were all I had and they were obvious - geology and architecture; but that is how somewhere looks, not feels, and as any descriptive writer knows, ignoring all the senses other than sight leads to a poor portrait of a place.'
Alice Maddicott, Tender Maps
The Prayer of Place
One of the most enduring things I’ve learned on my journey through place and time is just how deeply locations like Lastingham can touch us - regardless of colour, faith or belief.
After last week’s post on the crypt at Lastingham, I received a remarkable spectrum of reflections - some from people who had been there themselves, others from those who simply felt moved by the words. Each response was different in tone and experience, yet all circled the same feeling of being touched by the place.
On social media, David said: “It is one of the most powerful seats of faith in the world…” and @Sonatasipz wrote: “That aura, those echoes – the muted light is transporting. What a space to feel rooted in history. I’d love to make that journey myself; you’ve stirred the opera lover and architectural dreamer in me.”
Anne, via email, said that she felt a powerful presence when she visited the crypt: “I had an intense feeling that the place was doing the praying and I was just there, allowing the prayer of the place to permeate me. I felt I'd done years of praying in a few minutes. It is a very powerful place for good.”
Many people weren’t only responding to the crypt itself, but to the whole encounter with Lastingham - the landscape, the atmosphere, the sense of being drawn in by something older than the building.
The pique of my own experience didn’t start with the building, but with the approach to it - through a spellbound geography that felt as though it was being folded into the interior. And perhaps that feeling comes from something much older at work in the landscape itself.
It’s as if the land held a sanctity that long preceded our arrival. As though the earth, during its infancy, carved out a fold where the village would settle - a hollow aligned with the realms of Fibonacci, drawn from the same geometry that threads through constellations, mountains, trees, and living things.
Over generations, hill and vale laid down patterns of passage: field systems, walls, copses and tracks. All these lines, visible and invisible, converged upon the village, and in turn the church, and in turn the crypt, the volute, the particle of dust.
The building has become an architectural answer to the land’s slow, accumulative questioning.
And because the land has shaped this place so thoroughly, it has also shaped everyone who walks through it. It has known countless versions of ourselves: mothers, monks, pilgrims, artisans, farmers, wanderers, the prejudiced and the conspirators, the saintly, the atheists, the believers, and those seeking a moment’s stillness.
And so today, because of this long inheritance, it is as if the place carries a latent agency - allowing us to briefly set down the weariness of the roles we take on, what’s expected of us and what we expect of others, and to see things again with a beginner’s mind. At Lastingham, the accumulated knowing carries its own kind of wisdom and atmosphere.
Alice Maddison, in Tender Maps, writes that being open to atmosphere is key to creativity - that a place’s personality is mapped through our feelings, and that we create it tenderly together.
Tender maps, the prayer of place, the genius loci, ways of being - the sense of feeling connected but set apart - something intangible that proffers up the long view, chamfers off our differences, deepens understanding, and gifts us with communion and clarity.
For me, I’ve come to realise that places like Lastingham aren’t a ‘single box into which we cram all the contradictions and paradoxes of reality’*, but part of a cosmos of other overlapping worlds that help us navigate the complexity of the present.
In the journey from moor to crypt, from macrocosm to microcosm, the land gathers the wider story; the crypt concentrates it. And somewhere between the two, I’m reminded that we are not separate from the places we walk through - we are shaped by them, held by them, and occasionally, at places like Lastingham - forged over time into a still point in the turning world - prayed for by them.
*James Bridle - Ways of Being.
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Lastingham (Pure Scroll)
Nestled at the southern edge of the North York Moors, Lastingham began in the 7th century when St Cedd (brother of St. Chad) founded a monastery on land donated by the King of Deira.
The monastery later yielded to Norman-era monastic ambitions in 1078, but the monks departed within a decade, leaving behind what became St Mary’s Church, Lastingham with its remarkable crypt.
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The Church
A visual descent into the crypt...
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Andy Marshall
I travelled from Llandaff Cathedral through the heart of Wales to a place of pilgrimage at St. Melangell's shrine. I had booked into the shepherd's hut at the shrine centre. My aim was to get a little time to work on a chapter on my book.
This really is a magical place - more realm, than place. Because of its location - at the head of a glacial valley, surrounded by hills full of pine and conifer - it has the atmosphere of the Swiss Alps.
I walk up to the door that says ‘crypt’ and it looks as though it’s locked. I look around, there’s nobody here to ask - so I lift the sneck and it opens. I negotiate a set of worn steps down into the crypt. Without any expectation of what awaits, I start to dust off a cobweb caught on the arm of my coat from the wall. Then I look up and see the crypt for the first time.
The weight of history here is a press. I am so taken in by what I see that I sit down on the cold slab to absorb it. This is a place that has held fast in the eddying tides and swells of chaotic times.
For Members Only - Remarkable VR's of Lastingham Exterior and the Crypt
They really are immersive ways of experiencing the atmosphere of place.
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For Members Only -Video: walk with me from the van and into the crypt at Lastingham
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A Drive into Lastingham.
After returning from my visit to the crypt, I drove back into Lastingham and recorded the journey.
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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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