Postcard from Yorkshire: Fountains Abbey

After seeing Fountains Abbey, an eight hundred and something year old ruin of an Abbey complex, there is an argument that all places of worship should be open to the sky. This not only allows one to glimpse the wonder of God's creation at first hand but, crucially, allows God to keep an eye on those monks who claim to work in his name. Choirboys. Say no more.

The Abbey may be a ruin, but The National Trust manage to keep at least four tea shops fully functioning. These being Yorkshire teashops, they sell cakes. I had a scone roughly the size of a bus, with enough cream on it to clog the arteries of a mammoth. It was truly a thing of wonder, even if I could still feel it lodged in my lower intestine some hours later.

Luckily, the grounds provide plenty of opportunity to walk off the substantial delights of the tea shop. As well as the Abbey, there is a grand house. Not quite a stately home, rather the sort of unpretentious massive pile that wealthy farmers built and which were regularly visited by royalty. With grand houses come grand gardens, and as well as woods and so on, there were formal gardens with straight waterways, polite waterfalls, rustic bridges and, of course, a folly or feature at every turn.


The rich, it would appear, liked only one thing more than building grand houses and grand gardens, and that was building classically inspired mini-temples and castles, essentially vantage points where they could look out over their grand houses and grand gardens and, of course, indulge in a bit of secluded aristocratic rumpy pumpy with visitors. One of the follies, an octagon tower, even had an artificial cave built next to it which functioned as a kitchen allowing the servants to prepare hot food to keep visitors' strength up between bouts of walking and illicit fumblings in the ha-ha. Something suggests that the invention of the thermos flask could not come quickly enough for members of the toiling classes.

The Abbey complex itself is immense and beautiful. Soaring columns and arches make one wonder how on earth the place stays open to the public without being swaddled in yellow and white tape with 'keep out' or at least 'hard hat area' written on it. Rather, the place is a vast adventure playground for children who run around in a perpetual state of over-excitement, while adults ponder if they can pick up a foam sword from the gift shop and dash around the ruins playing knights.


The nearby church is still intact, modern (by comparison, St Mary's is Victorian), small (by comparison) and very beautiful. It's delights include a spiral staircase to the organ lift that would appear to per-date the work of Crick and Watson by some decades, and some particularly colourful stained glass windows. These are made even more remarkable because, due to a fault in the paint, some of the figures are losing their faces.


As a result what would normally be an ordinary pious looking bloke with a beard is a blank space and what was Victorian suddenly looks terribly modern. The windows are very beautiful and, when lit from without by the glorious Yorkshire sun, colourful. As they depict scenes from the bible, and hence are usually pretty gruesome, it occasionally takes one a second or two to realise that the fellow kneeling piously is not surrounded by people holding scones in anticipation of a cream tea, but is in fact about to be martyred. This is usually a process that involves something unpleasant.

Postcard from Winchester - the cathedral

Winchester cathedral, possibly the finest example of a Norman cathedral ever to have a pop song written about it. It's home to quite a lot of distinguished remains. There's the tomb of Jane Austin, with an inscription so genteel that it completely omits to mention that she was a writer. This was because writing books about bonnets and so on was considered an unsuitable job for a woman at the time rather than her other accomplishments being so astonishing that the writing was very much an afterthought. The tomb is visited by three types of people, there are those who come to pay homage to the great writer, there are the Japanese, who appear to have a particular affection for her (just why is not clear, possibly it's the Japanese fascination with manners, or bonnets, or just that somebody some day started the rumour that Japanese people are fascinated with Jane Austin and so you notice them more than most. Everyone in Winchester is too polite to ask.), and there are people who are baffled that somebody who wrote a screenplay for a BBC three parter earlier in the year died without their hearing about it.

The other famous resident is St Swithen. If you want to prey for good weather, this is the tomb for you.

There is another, very famous resident - an Anthony Gormley statue donated by the artist that stands in the crypt. The figure stands holding a bowl and when the crypt floods every year, the water laps at the statue's knees. It's quite an eerie presence, standing alone in an empty (one hopes) crypt. Just what is he considering? Some say he contemplates his soul, others that he is pondering why anyone would build a cathedral on a spring that gushes to life every year when it rains in the hills.

One does the cathedral tourist thing, wandering around with head craned back, trying to take in the details and knowing that there are a thousand masons' marks and features hidden in the gloom or behind a pillar, knowable only to god. Ones wanders round muttering 'how did they do this?', the answer of course lying in either block and tackle, or alien assistance. Prayer may have come into it but a shitload of stone imported from France and a sustaining turnip soup for the workers is probably a better bet.


A special place among the kings and queens and saints and bishops and one lonely crusader is reserved for a statue of William Walker. Essentially, the cathedral was built on a marsh, and a spring. Obviously while the monks excelled at piety they were not the greatest surveyors in the world. So they put down a raft of trees and built the cathedral on those. A few centuries later and the building develops a list. One side of it needs to be underpinned, so they dig down and, the hole floods. How to work underwater? This is the turn of the century, and while the snorkel has been invented, sexy wet suits have not. So, a bloke called William Walker gets on his diving suit and, often working in complete darkness, replaces the rotting foundation with concrete blocks. He literally saved the entire cathedral with his bare hands, which is what the inscription on his memorial says. Not a bad epitaph. Also...straight to heaven!

While the the choir was practicing for the evenings performance. What's the only thing better than beautiful choral music in a cathedral? Free beautiful choral music in a cathedral!

The cathedral itself is one of those huge Norman 'we are here to stay' jobs that dominate the landscape and at the time would have given rise to lots of middle class angst as people sat around discussing how the thing was really not sympathetic with the surrounding landscape or the architecture that it was being built next to, except that when the Normans were building cathedrals there was no middle class, no such thing as angst, people were too busy subsistence farming turnips and dying at age thirty (like some sort of medieval 'Logan's Run') to mutter darkly about planning permission, and any architecture that the Normans didn't like near there cathedral quickly became either kindling or hardcore, depending on its construction.


Finally, one of the best features is the stained glass window. During the Civil War the Roundheads, to show their piety, broke all the windows and decorations in the cathedral. Oddly, this did not result in direct devine retribution, which was put off until the restoration, instead the monks gathered the bits of stained glass and hid them. Then when the restoration came they, er, restored the stained glass window. Except they didn't bother to re-assemble it as it was. Obviously not big jigsaw fans, the result was a marvellous, modernist Picasso style window, centuries ahead of the modernist movement.