Nick Page

I’ve been doing more work on the chapter about Odda’s Chapel. Deerhurst lies in floodplain fields on the banks of the River Severn.

There are two Saxon churches here. One is St Mary’s, a former monastic church, but the one I’ve been thinking about this week is a simple little building, a private chapel – Odda’s Chapel – which was lost and then found.

We know from the dedication plaque who built it and why. The inscription reads:

Odda, dux, ordered this royal hall to be constructed and dedicated in honour of the Holy Trinity for the soul of his brother Ælfric which left the body in this place. Bishop Ealdred dedicated it the second of the Ides of April in the fourteenth year of the reign of Edward, King of the English.

That date translates to 12 April, 1056. The king mentioned is Edward the Confessor. Duke Odda was a nobleman who later became a monk and died later the same year. But his brother, Aelfric died in 1053.

What’s amazing is that this simple chapel, was lost for centuries. In the seventeenth century it was covered by a timber-framed building and disappeared into the fabric of a ‘rambling picturesque farmhouse’ called Abbots Court. It was an Elizabethan chapel conversion. They used the nave for a kitchen, and put a floor in the chancel and used it as a bedroom.

It was only rediscovered in the late nineteenth century. They removed the surrounding fabric to reveal a perfect Saxon chapel, tall, dark, narrow-windowed. Stepping into it feels like going back in time. It feels as though the past has merely been hibernating, waiting for someone to cross the threshold and wake it from its slumber.

Writing some fifty years after the chapel was built, the chronicler John of Worcester described Odda as ‘a lover of churches, restorer of the poor, defender of widows and orphans, helper of the oppressed, guardian of chastity’. That’s not a bad way to be remembered. And memory is what this place is about. Odda built it because he didn’t want his dead brother to be forgotten.

We all do things to try to keep the memory of loved ones alive. Mostly it’s futile. A few generations on and the names are forgotten. One day I will be nothing more than a name in a library catalogue. A list of unread books, I expect.

But sometimes someone manages to cheat the system. Odda did it. His chapel was hidden in plain sight for centuries. And then it was revealed. And so we remember him. And his brother.

Sort of gives you hope, really.

Almost all of us will be forgotten.

But not Odda. And not his brother.

I’ve been working on a bit about the beautiful little church of St Gregory’s Minster in Kirkdale, N. Yorkshire.

Situated at the bottom of a valley, with a beck running around the churchyard, this building dates from around 1060. We know that, because the man who rebuilt it, Orm Gamalson, had a sundial made which you can still see in the porch.

The inscription is in Old English and reads: ‘Orm Gamal’s son bought St. Gregory’s minster when it was all broken down and ruined, and he had it built anew from the ground for Christ and St. Gregory in the days of King Edward and of Earl Tostig.’

Above the dial it says, ‘This is the day’s sun-marker at every time.’ And directly below is the maker’s name: ‘Hawarth made me and Brand, priests.’

This is the original west door of the church.

The piece I’ve been trying to write is not just about the sundial, but also about time itself: how the Christian worldview shaped our view of time as a linear progression. And also how time changes all of us. At one time the Vikings probably destroyed this place. But here you have Orm Gamalson, a man of Viking descent, rebuilding the church, and leaving an inscription, not in runes, but in English. People change. Just give it time.

Justine Toh: The world is burning. Who can convince the comfortable classes of the radical sacrifices needed?

From the Guardian, an article on the importance of Simone Weil and how her example could help us all to live a more sacrificial life. It’s a well-written article, which strangely manages to almost entirely avoid mentioning her faith. It’s written by someone from the Centre for Public Christianity, so it’s a bit surprising that it doesn’t make Weil’s faith a bit more… er… public.

Sam Kriss, The internet is already over

Not sure I entirely agree, but the power of the writing is irresistible at times. Like this nugget:

Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine. Make the motions, chant its dusty liturgy. The newest apps even literalise this: everyone has to post a selfie at exactly the same time, an inaudible call to prayer ringing out across the world. Recently, at a bar, I saw the room go bright as half the patrons suddenly started posing with their negronis. This is called being real.

And last week another on my ‘must do’ train trip lists: the train from Fort William to Mallaig. Starting early on a misty, cloudy morning and travelling through into bright sunlight.

This, I think, is the most beautiful trainline I have ever travelled. It runs through mountain passes, across wide river valleys, along the side of lochs and eventually along the coast to the small port of Mallaig.¹ Utterly stunning.

The beauty was so overwhelming it felt almost physical. For the first time I understood the phrase ‘achingly beautiful’. When you see these places, from the train, or out on the boat around the bay, there’s a sense of longing and even sadness.

Why is it that beauty sometimes makes us sad? One of the standard answers is to do with its transient nature: the idea that it is evanescent, it will pass away. But I don’t think that can be the case here. Ben Nevis, after all, has been around a fair old time and will continue to do so.

I wonder if it’s something to do with a sense of exile. We can look but we cant touch. I see it through the train window but I can never really live in that perfection. Not in this life, anyway. We are – currently – exiled from Eden, and in the words of Saint Joni, we all want to ‘to get ourselves back to the garden.’²

A few days ago we made a trip on the Settle to Carlisle railway line, a journey I’ve been wanting to travel on for years. It doesn’t disappoint, taking you across the famous Ribblehead viaduct and through some glorious North Yorkshire and Cumberland countryside.

The station at Settle, like many others along the way, was almost like a stage set; a perfect vintage station, painted cream and black-cherry crimson. And in the background, the glorious dales. It’s like being on a model railway set.

Nothing, for me, evokes such a strong sense of nostalgia as an old-fashioned railway station. And it made me wonder whether nostalgia is necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that nostalgia is often a longing for an imagined past, not the way things were, but the way we imagined them to be. In this case, we imagine a world of porters and tea-rooms, of steam trains and station-masters. Rationally, there’s nothing to say that the railway of the past was functionally better than it is today. (Although it would have to go some to be worse.) But our imaginations tend to filter out the bad bits. So nostalgia becomes a kind of escapism, a refusal to accept change. Nostalgia not for the way things were, but for the way we want them to be.

But what if nostalgia had its uses? It all depends on what you are nostalgic about, I suppose, but might it not be possible that this longing alerts us to something that we have lost? Architecturally, at least, these buildings have a scale, a beauty and harmony that you don’t find very often today. They are made with natural materials, sympathetic to the surroundings. Modern railway stations are brutally functional, all glass, steel and concrete. They lack a sense of humanity and community. They privilege function over form. Or maybe they forget that beauty, too, has a function.

Nostalgia, then, could be a useful tool for architects and planners. Instead of viewing it solely as a reactionary longing for the past, they could look at it as an indicator of what is missing in contemporary life. It might be wishful thinking, but surely it is always helpful to know what people are wishing for.

• The Settle-Carlisle Railway Development Company
• Settle-Carlisle Wikipedia page

I’ve been writing a chapter on the wonderful micro-cathedral of St Michael with St Mary, Melbourne, Derbyshire. It’s like they took Durham Cathedral and miniaturised it.

And also revising a chapter on the very ancient church of St Martin, Canterbury. And I paid a visit to Southwark Cathedral.

I’m currently writing – or trying to write – a book about old British churches. Who built them, how they built them and why people should go and see them.

This week I finished chapters on three churches: Earls Barton with its amazing tower, and the two churches in Deerhurst, Gloucestershire, St Mary’s and Odda’s Chapel.

The problem I have is that it’s hard to find the words to do them justice.

Odda’s Chapel, Deerhurst, Gloucestershire. Built 1056.

All Saints Church, Earls Barton, Northamptonshire. The tower dates from the late tenth century.

Well, I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Nick Page and I’m a writer based in Oxfordshire, England. I’ve written quite a lot of books.

I’m here for a number of reasons.

First, for some time I’ve been disinvesting in the mainstream social media. I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and I gave up Twitter before it was fashionable. (Heavily influenced by Jaron Lanier.)

Second, for a writer and podcaster it helps to have some form of online presence. And there are things I would like to share – updates about the work, interesting bits on the internet, books I like – all the things which actually made the web wonderful in the first place.

Third, I like simplicity. When you write books for a living, you don’t want to have to craft essays for the web.

So this seems a good place to turn to. I could do this kind of thing through my website, but even Wordpress seems to be more high-maintenance these days. I’m also on Mastodon, but a lot of people aren’t.

So here I am.