A Tuscan tower

While in lockdown my thoughts turned to travel. Being unable to go anywhere other than my immediate neighbourhood when doing my permitted daily exercise or running errands for people who can’t get out of their homes, I found myself looking at photos from old trips. I never did get around to writing about trips abroad over the last couple of years, which is not good for someone who once aspired to be a travel writer! Now seems as good a time as any to remedy that.

In late April of last year, we went to Montepulciano – a lovely old hilltop town in southern Tuscany. The house we rented out was actually in the old town itself, located in the narrow streets that are a short walk downhill from the central piazza. 

There were some lovely wine bars within very easy walking distance from our front door which was a great way to try the local wines, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and Rosso di Montepulciano – the main difference being that the former must be aged in a barrel for three years while the latter only has to be aged for one year (rather like the difference between Brunello di Montalcino and Rosso di Montalcino). On warm days, these wine bars are very useful as they often make use of the cellars where the temperature is much cooler, as if we needed an excuse for visiting them! 

Neither of the Montepulciano wines, of course, are to be confused with Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, a wine with which I am very familiar thanks to it having been included in the ‘two bottles for a fiver’ deal that used to be a major reason for shopping in the small grocery that Allison and I used to live above.

The high point of Montepulciano – the wine aside – is Piazza Grande, the central square/piazza on which are to be found the cathedral and the town hall. The cathedral – the duomo – is striking for its unfinished façade which makes it look very different from most Italian churches and cathedrals (inside, the must-see thing that the guidebooks all mention is an ornate triptych behind the altar, although when I had a look inside there was merely a screen showing what I presume to be a representation of said ornate triptych which was presumably covering up some restoration work).

Both the cathedral and the town hall have bell towers, and this interested me a lot because I am always interested in the prospect of climbing towers. The cathedral’s bell tower, alas, is not open to the public. However, you can walk up the tower of the nearby Palazzo Communale, the medieval town hall which still performs its original function! It looked slightly familiar, which I found odd given that I’d never been to Montepulciano before, but then I realised that that’s because it looks like the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

For five euros I jumped at the chance. Funnily enough, none of my travelling-companions – Allison, my parents and my mother-in-law – fancied coming along too. My guidebook (Lonely Planet’s Florence & Tuscany) stated that there were “67 narrow stairs” following which I could enjoy “extraordinary views” of the town and the surrounding countryside.

What the guidebook hadn’t mentioned was that in order to get to the narrow stairs I had to go through the council offices – up the main staircase and through what looked like the civic archives! Quite what the people who work for the council make of this I do not know (the way to the tower clearly goes right past someone’s desk) but I guess they must be used to it, or maybe not as I did not encounter anyone else on this particular tower adventure.

These stairs led onto the main roof, from which I could look out over the Piazza Grande, and from there I could access the tower itself with its narrow wooden steps leading up to the big bell.

Fantastic! The views from the top are truly stunning; from there, tiled rooftops of Montepulciano simply fall away down the hill, and on a clear day there are wide views of the southern Tuscan countryside to be had. Lucky me, with a tower to myself and clear blue skies...

The cathedral bell tower opposite (slightly lower than my new look-out point, I smugly noted while wondering what this said about relations between the church and the civic authorities) had what appeared to be a couple of plastic chairs which led me to wonder who might be able to access and use these – junior priests sneaking off for a smoke-break was my guess, although they could have been using the tower as a means of getting away from the numbers for more spiritual purposes.

Back down, it was time, I felt, for something red and refreshing in one of those wine bars...

The cathedral in Britain's smallest city

To Pembrokeshire, where the smallest city in Britain can be located. There are villages that are bigger in terms of population (it has around 1,800 inhabitants), but this place can claim to be a city because it has a cathedral. That’s not always the case, by the way; Southwark has a cathedral but it’s a London borough (not a city), and Derby had a cathedral for fifty years before it was given city status. And the city I’m talking about hasn’t always been a city – it became one in the early 1540s, when Henry VIII founded six new dioceses in England Wales, issuing some letters patent as he did so declaring every town that had a cathedral to be a city. Then it lost its city status in 1888 when the link between cities and cathedrals was abolished, but it was given said status back in 1994 at the request of the Queen (who conferred the letters patent in person in a ceremony in the cathedral in 1995).  

I am talking, of course, about St Davids (which in this context could refer to the city, the cathedral or indeed the diocese; the apostrophe would appear to be optional). The cathedral is the last resting-place of the saint that bears its name – Dewi Sant, as he’s referred to in Welsh (the Welsh name for ‘his’ city is Tyddewi, which literally means ‘David’s house’). The only one of the Home Nations patron saints to have been from the country of which he is the saint, St David was born in or around the year 500, just to the south of what’s now St Davids but which apparently used to be called Mynyw or Menevia. His mother was St Non (a nun), and the priest who baptised him may have been St Eilw (in English, St Elvis). A holy man who appears to have lived mainly on a diet of bread, water and leeks, he founded several monastic communities during the Dark Ages – a time when escaping from the troubles of a troubled world was all the rage throughout Christendom, as witness St Anthony going out into the desert in Egypt, St Benedict setting out his monastic rules in Italy and numerous holy people making their way to Cornwall. St David attracted a reputation that spread beyond Wales for ascetism (he had his follower renounce personal property to the point where referring to a book as ‘my book’ was forbidden) and preaching. His most famous miracle occurred when he preached at the Synod of Brefi (later renamed Llandewi Brefi in his honour) – everyone wanted to hear him but hardly anyone could see him, so the ground rose up underneath him so that they all could (more than one historian has been moved to comment that, as miracles go, the creation of a new hill in Wales is a bit on the superfluous side). He was declared to be a bishop by popular acclaim. He died on 1^st March, a date to be forever after commemorated as St David’s Day.

In the city that bears his name, and which started out as the settlement surrounding the first monastic community that he founded, the focal point is of course the cathedral which lies in the valley of the River Alun. Said monastic community was renowned for its men of learning – Asser, one Alfred the Great’s key advisors, was originally a monk at St Davids, and the twelfth-century chronicler Gerald of Wales is also associated with the place (an archdeacon, he hoped to be the Bishop of St Davids, like his uncle before him, but he never achieved that aim; tellingly, his statue in the cathedral has a mitre at his feet, not on his head).

Much of the current building dates back to the twelfth century, and it’s made of grey and purple-ish sandstone which was quarried locally. For some reason it has a distinct slope, east to west, which I have not encountered in any other cathedral I’ve ever visited. It was an important place of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages – two Kings of England, William the Conqueror and Henry II, came to pay their respects and the Pope at one point declared that two pilgrimages to St Davids served as the equivalent of one pilgrimage to Rome.

Although the shrine to St David was done away with during the Reformation, in recent years it has been restored – it was rededicated in 2012 (on 1^st March, of course) and to be honest I can think of no other saintly shrine in Britain. Not in an Anglican place of worship at any rate, St David’s Cathedral and the diocese that goes with it being Church in Wales (the C of E having been disestablished in Wales in 1920).

Also buried in the cathedral are a few notable men from Welsh history. From the twelfth century, there are the afore-mentioned Gerald of Wales and the Lord Rhys, ruler of much of south Wales (although he was a prince and his name was Rhys ap Gruffydd, he’s always called the Lord Rhys, always with the definitive article); well, there are in any rate two effigies in the south choir aisle that claim to be the effigies of those two. Close to St David’s shrine is the tomb of Edmund Tudor, the half-brother of Henry VI (same mother) and the father of Henry VII who died in 1456, before the birth of his son (who was born the following year in Pembroke Castle).

I rather like St David’s Cathedral, which has an unfussed air when compared to a few other cathedrals I could mention. Perhaps the fact that it’s located in a valley, and is therefore not a prominent landmark on the skyline, might have something to do with it. Maybe it’s the rather plain-looking west front, or the wooden ceiling over the nave that, but for its size, looks more like the ceiling of a parish church than that of a cathedral.

Or it could be the fact that you don’t really see the cathedral until after you’ve walked through the gatehouse, when it and the picturesque ruins of the Bishop’s Palace are laid out before and below you (the Bishops of St David’s haven’t actually lived in St Davids since the sixteenth century; maybe that explains it!). When you enter, there’s no cash-desk confronting you – just a friendly person, sporting a cassock and a dog-collar more often than not, ready with a leaflet, an answer to any questions you may have and very little by way of the hard sell concerning ‘voluntary’ donations.

There is, I’ve found, invariably something interesting going on in St Davids. The last time I was there, it happened to be on Ascension Day which is the day when the cathedral plays host to an activity day for all of the local primary schools. At the moment, all of the lamp-posts and bollards of the city are sporting colourful knitwear, as is the market cross and quite a few of the railings and benches. This, I am reliably informed, is to commemorate the Cathedral Festival, an annual music festival that’s taking place there at the moment (as it does during the May half-term week every year).

Also sporting a distinctly knitted appearance is the altar-cloth in the cathedral’s Chapel of St Nicholas (behind and to the left of the high altar); I think it looks great, and wouldn’t it be fantastic if such a style caught on?

Looking out over Oxford

To Oxford, the city of the dreaming spires – so-called because of the number of religious establishments in said city. Each college has its own chapel, you see, and there are some churches as well. Funnily enough, one of the churches is designated as the university’s church, even though the colleges have chapels – one of which, the one at Christ Church, doubles up as Oxford’s cathedral. That makes for a lot of spires.

It was to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, located on the High Street, that I went. There has been a church on that site since Anglo-Saxon times, and in the early days of Oxford University it became an important building, being used for lectures and as a meeting-place for the university authorities, as well as having an upstairs room used as the university’s first library. In the 1550s, it was the location for the trial of the Oxford Martyrs – bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley and archbishop Thomas Cranmer, leading figures in the Reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI who found themselves on the wrong side when Henry’s daughter Mary became queen. Her attempts to turn the clock back and make England Catholic again have given her the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’. She had those three churchmen charged with heresy, and – this being the sixteenth century – they were found guilty. Latimer and Ridley were burned at the stake on nearby Broad Street in October 1555, with Cranmer suffering the same fate five months later. The church was also used for the awarding of degrees, until these increasingly rowdy ceremonies met with disapproval by the church authorities in the seventeenth century (which, after the Civil War, resulted in Christopher Wren – who’d studied at Wadham College – being commissioned to build the Sheldonian Theatre; henceforth, graduation ceremonies took place there instead). Samuel Johnson is known to have attended services at St Mary’s while he was a student at Pembroke College. In the nineteenth century, the Oxford Movement – calling for the reinstatement of older Christian traditions in the C of E, eventually becoming Anglo-Catholicism or High Church Anglicanism – was kick-started at St Mary’s by the likes of John Henry Newman and John Keble (while the former ended up going all the way and converting to Roman Catholicism, the latter did not and would eventually have an Oxford college and a church in Mill Hill named after him; I should know, for that is the church I was baptised in).

But it was to the tower that I was drawn. It’s the oldest part of the church, dating back to the late thirteenth century (the main body of the church having been substantially rebuilt in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, while the porch dates back to the 1630s – the statue of the Virgin Mary above it was considered so scandalous that you can still see the bullet-holes from when Cromwell’s soldiers shot at it after they’d captured Oxford during the Civil War). I, of course, wanted to climb the tower for a view of Oxford’s dreaming spires. I like climbing towers. I’d previously looked out over Oxford from the tower of St Michael at the North Gate (the City Church, as opposed to the University Church) and from the Carfax Tower, and I reckoned it made sense to complete the hat-trick by going up St Mary’s too; if nothing else, it is reckoned to be the one with the best view over Oxford.

So I paid my £4 and made my way up the narrow spiral staircase. 

Through a window on the way up, I could see the chapel of Exeter College – a college best known by me and doubtless many others as the college where, in the final episode of Inspector Morse, the titular inspector suffers his fatal collapse after figuring out who the murderer was in his last mystery.

Once out in the open, I was confronted by the statue of a bishop which, funnily enough, I’d seen before – on the cover of an Inspector Morse novel (I forget which one). I’ve not been able to find out which bishop it represents; this being Oxford, it’s not like there’s a shortage of candidates.

Looking out to the north, I had the Radcliffe Camera – as in camera being the Latin for ‘room’, this being the reading-room of the Bodleian Library – before me; Exeter and Brasenose Colleges to the left, All Souls College to the right. 

Interesting one, All Souls. First of all, it has no students. That’s not actually true, of course – it has no undergraduate students, and those graduates and postgraduate students who do get to be at All Souls (they have to take a famously hard exam in order to do so) are Fellows of the college. Not students. It’s also home to one of the more bizarre of Oxford’s many academic traditions – a ceremony which consists of a torchlit parade, led by a man carrying a wooden duck on a pole, which takes place once a century (the last one was in 2001, so it looks like I’ve missed out on that).

Moving to the south side, the view takes in Oriel College (with its statue of Cecil Rhodes) and Christ Church, the college that doesn’t call itself a college and which is unique in being the only higher educational institution in this country that’s also a cathedral. 

That particular quirk goes back to its foundation. Or rather, its second re-foundation. Cardinal Wolsey had wanted to establish a college on the site of a priory which he had suppressed, but was prevented from doing so by his own fall from grace. This led to the suppression of Cardinal College while it was still being built; it was re-founded by Henry VIII as King Henry VIII’s College (that king not being short on modesty) although in 1546 it was re-founded again thanks to a re-organisation of the Church of England which led to the creation of the Diocese of Oxford; henceforth, the college chapel – built on the site of the priory church – would be the Cathedral Church of Christ, with the college attached to it going by the name of Christ Church (not ‘Christ Church College’, for the word ‘college’ does not appear in its title). Charles I stayed there during the Civil War (since he had been kicked out of London when the war started, Oxford became his capital until it fell to the Parliamentarians in 1646). Its clock tower, the Tom Tower, is another Wren creation.

Looking at the tower itself, I noticed that there was some old graffiti carved into the brickwork. 

Not exactly surprising, as there are quite a few old buildings where someone’s taken a knife to the stonework to carve their initials for posterity. ‘AR’ was here in 1676, and ‘WF’ in 1762. Who, I wondered, were these people? Had they come to the church intending to carve their initials in the tower, or just spotted the chance to do so once they’d climbed it and noted that there was no-one else around? Did they wonder if they’d be found out, maybe getting them into trouble with the vicar or the university authorities (assuming, of course, that they were students)? Who knows? I wondered, as I have done before, about the point at which graffiti stops being an act of vandalism and becomes historically significant, as witness, for example, the Parliamentarian soldier who carved his name onto the lead lining of the font in the church at Burford when he was being held prisoner there in 1649 (one for another time, that one).

Satisfied with the view, and by now in need of a cup of tea (for it was although the sun was out, it was a cold and windy day), I made my way back down.

More on Avebury

Writing about Avebury some time ago, I noted that the eighteenth-century antiquarian William Stukeley had theorised that the two stone avenues radiating out from the stone circle had formed a ‘solar serpent’ pattern. He got this idea because the route taken by said avenues (only one of which still partially exists) can be interpreted, and indeed was interpreted by Stukeley, as being representative of the body of a snake, passing through Avebury itself and ending at the head – which took the form of another (smaller) stone circle called The Sanctuary which is located just under two miles from Avebury itself (there are no stones left there, and nowadays their positions are marked by concrete blocks).

I happen to go to Avebury rather a lot, and I’ve found a reference to this notion in an old building in the vicinity of the stones. St James’s church in Avebury dates back to at least the seventh century although the nave of the current building dates back to around 1000, with the aisles, chancel and so on being added later. Rather tellingly, the church itself is located outside the stone circle (after the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, stone circles came to be seen as the work of the devil while many have local legends attached that state that they are people who were turned to stone for dancing or playing music on Sunday), but who knows if any of the masonry that now makes up the church came from smashed-up stones that once formed part of the circle? 

Quite a few old English churches have some special features, and the church at Avebury is no exception. It has a rare example of a medieval rood screen, an installation intended to separate the nave from the chancel; most of these in English churches were done away with during the Reformation, although in the case of the Avebury church it was hidden and later restored. There is also a hagioscope – also known as a squint, a small hole in the interior wall dating back to the fifteenth century, used to ensure that the mass taking place at a side-altar could be synchronised with the mass at the main, central altar (priests back then would have had their backs to the congregation). On the wall under the tower is a Royal coat-of-arms, which all C of E churches were once required to display by law. Quite a few older churches still do; the Avebury one dates back to the reign of George III.

And then there’s the stone font, reckoned to be Norman or perhaps even Saxon, upon which is carved the image of a serpent-like creature being stabbed in the head by a human figure. Perhaps this symbolises the coming of Christianity in the Dark Ages, or perhaps it hints at the notion of the old stone circle being part of a larger, serpent-like structure. Perhaps that’s where Stukeley got the idea from, for although he’s not listed as having been a former vicar of that parish, he was a C of E priest who spent some time in the area, so he must have been aware of what was, and still is, on the font.

Dunwich

To Suffolk, and a chance to take a look at a town that no longer exists.

Well, sort of. Today, Dunwich is a small coastal village with a quiet shingle beach from which you can see Southwold – key landmarks being St Edmund’s church and the lighthouse – to the north and the dome of the Sizewell power station to the south.

There are low cliffs at the back of the beach. It’s part of an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – to all intents and purposes, one level down from a National Park) and has a couple of nature reserves in the vicinity, most notably the birding heaven that is the RSPB’s Minsmere reserve just to the south. The sort of place where a P.D. James murder mystery might take place. As you drive into the village, though, the ruins of a Medieval monastery give an indication that at some point, Dunwich was much bigger than it is today.

Back in the Middle Ages, Dunwich was a thriving port town – one of the most important on the east coast of England. In the Dark Ages it was known as Dummoc and was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. It was considered important enough for the Knights Templar to build one of their churches there (similar in structure to London’s Temple Church, apparently), and several monastic orders had priories there. Recent archaeological discoveries have shown that ship-building was a major local industry.

So what happened? Dunwich has often been described as a town that was lost to the sea, which is partly true as much of the old town now lies beneath the waves as a result of centuries of coastal erosion. Storms also played a part too, though, for much of the damage was done by six big storms – one in 1286 and two more the following year, then another in 1328, another in 1347 and the last in 1362 – which between them destroyed much of the town. Subsequently, it was largely abandoned and as a result sea defences were not maintained – which meant that over time the cliffs were eroded over time, causing the ruins atop them to fall into the sea as the cliffs receded. The last of the Medieval town’s eight churches, All Saints, was abandoned in the eighteenth century and gradually fell into the sea in the early twentieth.

Local legend has it that the bells of the vanished churches can still be heard from the sea on calm nights!

In recent years, Dunwich has attracted much attention from marine archaeologists who have used sonar and acoustic imaging cameras to map the seafloor all around what used to be the town. Ruins were identified, which were subsequently examined by divers. This has made Dunwich the largest underwater medieval site in Europe, while back on land it has also featured on Time Team.

The monastic ruins that survive today do so on account of the fact that Dunwich’s Franciscan priory was built to the west of the town. The ruins of the Greyfriars (so called because the Franciscans wore grey robes) are the last of what remains of Medieval Dunwich.

The priory was closed down in 1538 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries; it was later rebuilt during the eighteenth century but then demolished in the nineteenth, leaving the monastic ruins that we see today. There’s a very nice short circular walk in Dunwich that takes you from the entrance to the car park at the beach, along the top of the cliffs, past the Last Grave (all that’s left of the churchyard of All Saints) and then right past the Greyfriars before you head back to the beach.

Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area!