I walk down through the nave, drawn towards a doorway that cradles a rarefied luminescence — a mingling of dappled colour from stained glass, the glint of refracted light on metal, and a hint of the golden radiance that spring has blessed us with this year.
These conservators, these minimal interventionists, aren’t simply curators of the paint pot and infill, but also guardians of a rich cultural tapestry that teaches us what it means to be human.
Larkin is telling us to trust our instincts - to see through the rhetoric of the day - a rhetoric that sometimes constructs a reality that is so absurd and yet so real and pervasive at times.
Emerging from beyond the lime wash is a ghost angel. The faint outline of a face and wings. I’m told that the eye emerged first and then the face and that, as the wash wears away, more might be revealed.
And so I find myself, over three days, encapsulated like a fly in amber within the bounds of that gaze.
The chapel was built in the C15th to house the tomb of Richard Beauchamp, the Earl of Warwick.
Andy Marshall's Treasure Hoard Gazetteer.