The church of St. Melangell, Pennant Melangell, lies deep within the bucolic landscape of a glacial valley. Its tower rises from the flat valley floor like an erratic, shaped by history, circumstance, and time.

It holds within its walls something quite unique for these parts - a Romanesque shrine. It was erected as a shrine to St. Melangell, who fled here from Ireland to escape an arranged marriage. While living a solitary life, she saved a hare from a royal hunt, where the animal found sanctuary in her robe. A prince, moved by her actions, granted her land for sanctuary, which is still defined by a wall outside the church. The miracles associated with her shrine earned her sainthood. St. Melangell is the patron saint of hares.

I feel so grateful that on the starkest of winter days, I might negotiate a path to this place between the challenges of the everyday; that through chance and circumstance I might find myself (after lifting the latch) sat next to the material embodiment of all that myth and history in the guise of a Romanesque shrine.

It’s the weight of this place that makes a murmuration of my mind. My thoughts swirl about the nave, out through the gaps between the windows; they spiral about the tower, avoiding the clasp of the valley sides, and then return to flit beneath the floriated capitals of the shrine.

My thoughts find their roost upon a fresh page of my sketchbook on my lap and, whilst I sketch in the lines of the shrine, I try not to think about how its colour, shape, and purpose might unfold.

I sit with my eyes wide open, and try not to blink. It’s as if the accumulation of light over time might add clarity to the details on the shrine. The last of the light is coming from the limewash that piques the undercutting to the arcade. I look down at my paint box - I can see the contours of the half-pans but not the colours within.

I have to stop.

And in that moment, in the darkness, I'm struck by how an ordinary bloke, through the power of place, can experience extraordinary things like this.

This space, with its textures drained, the contre-jour, the purplest of chiaroscuro, has passed the baton on to my imagination. I hover between the material and the intangible: this history, this shrine, this valley, this sketch are conduits to the ephemeral - making a sanctuary of the here and now by thinning out the boundary between heaven and earth.

*Michael Ventura The Age of Endarkenment.

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