Abstract
Distance comes nearer, the heartbeat of the ferry throbs through our boot soles, judder and wash of passage draws island closer; seascape assumes detail. Those white stones grow to cottages and farms, the one road’s shown by worry of a single car, bracken and pine tonsure the one, low hill. Landing’s as if by landing craft’s lower jaw lowered onto concrete slipway with clang and grate, green flaps and overlaps opening a talk of oystercatchers, and half a million weathers. Outlook is other islands; the map unfolds to chapel (ruin), and lighthouse (automatic). Memory is that other chapel with its roof of air, flooring of daisy and turf, its emptied glazing still held by sandstone framing the splintered slate. Saints have long left the liver niches they governed, like the hunter whose grave slab, under an asphalt lid, rests now with carving of the running deer. Knight and wife remain close in the same stone. He bears his sword and shield, she appears to hold an otter. In silence we appear to hear lost worshippers still filing through the narrow doors, gathering among walls now thatched with grass and trefoil, soaked in centuries of psalms. We wait for singing.
Something to support music, a stave to place the pitch of a note, or staff usually wooden, as song out of a wood. Here hazel, with a slight bend in its sound where years grew into a tree, foot shod with metal ferrule, lanyard threaded to rest wrist for poise uphill, like a skier’s stroke. Top rounded to a chestnut burnish for the heel of hand to steady as you come downhill. I take it for first walk up a sunken track carter and rover would have known as a main road. Something of an introduction, an apprentice wood meeting the oak that’s stood five hundred years, the spilt beech that stands on, the hazel shaft picking its way like axe head silvering kindling. Comfort over churned and tractored ground, the change from discipline of rod and staff, no sentence in ease of trees, centuries of symphonies: or staff as in the pub where we order food, each bearing a bowl of full moon in rainwater.
Look up; you find trees seen through medieval glass are blurred to a green haze, as defined by drizzle, and angels in high lights of priory windows are only fractions of wings and haloes, jigsaws reassembled against the sky after Protestant stonings. One pilgrim walks warily, cautious for the concave step, sudden list of slabbed floors pitted with obituaries. He has faith enough to be hesitant in holy places where air is thinner between worlds; footsteps linger among memorials to yeomen, knights, some wives. There are always alternative lights, those furred by weather and the one hoped for, offering safe route among shadows. People in the porch, waiting for a shower to ease, glance at the Norman arch, chiselled to a rainbow. One pilgrim sits; sees sunlight turn it into lightning.
An afterthought; he altered Christmas Day to Next Service at Easter on the hymn board, then pulled the oak door snecked against the season. The guide said sixteenth century, but the legend laid beams and wooden pegs onshore, off longboats; settlement Viking, like the Herdwick flocks. What could be present during all this absence? Hundreds would come, to pause, and read display boards, add names to prayer requests: Diana, both Davids, or comments in the book: Nice church, Quite lovely, or offer weariness: Thanks for this place of sheep and shepherds, helping me to turn back; or standing, seeing Gable framed in yew trees, guy-ropes of water anchor fells in storm sheets, feeling the call of height through gravelled footsteps, from B & B to church, from church to Inn bar, become a strand in passing, sensing verticals, steeped ridge up Kirk Fell, trudged incline to Stye Head, and grounded; climbers’ graves, each seeking shelter within church in-bye penned by yew and granite, victims of Pillar, Nape, among local families. While indoors names in stubborn church biro wait as if something will happen, in response, like fray of prayer flags looped round the climbing barn. Time’s also loosening in the cramponned wind, seeking a firm step like the sole figure, waiting in clamp of prayer, as all the rest are leaving.