Each week I send out a short, fresh reflection from the road – photographs, sketches, and observations from old places that still have something to teach us. What follows is a moment from those travels.
Ashwell, Hertfordshire
St. Mary's Church.
The medieval inhabitants of Ashwell chose to leave their mark in the material fabric of St. Mary's church.
Of particular impact are the marks left by the plague survivors of the C14th. One latin script reads:
“1350 Miserable, wild, distracted 1350 / The dregs of the mob alone survive to witness.”
Another script records something all too familiar to builders up and down the land:
“The corners are not jointed correctly—I spit.”
The graffiti of St. Mary's, for me, is also significant because it has recorded the rich humus of human interaction throughout the ages, right up until the present day.
As if to express such significance in built-form the spire of the church reads like a huge exclamation mark in the landscape...
Inhabiting the curtilage adjacent to the spire is a structure that I just couldn't stop photographing...
The Lychgate
The lychgate is a thing of vernacular beauty. It is of the C15th, and is of crown post construction carried on ties with arched braces. I photographed it from every angle possible. It lured me in.
What is so appealing about timber framed buildings is the honesty of their construction - not a morsel wasted - everything is structural, has a purpose - and out of that is extruded a kind of sinuous beauty.
And then contagion. After taking a side shot of the gate, I notice another building - short and stock and of c.1500
and the a communal garden that harbours a delightful view of the village.
I feel a little overwhelmed and seek out a butty, but the building that the butty shop is in doesn't help the vernacular viral load.
I walk outside with my Ploughman's bap and lean against some Flemish bond and spot the most divine pargetting on a building on the same row as the butty shop.
Buoyed by the vernaculars, I finish my butty and feel as strong as a lion, and it takes some strange quirk of the quantum universe to tell me so.
The remaining buildings of Ashwell - Pure Scroll (no words)
Readers of the Genius Loci Digest
What stays with readers
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.
From the heritage portfolio
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