Cathedral of the Moor

The Sunday Pilgrimage #7 ... and a pub chinwag with Martin Shaw

Church of St Pancras, Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Devon, England

Welcome back to the English leg of my Sunday Pilgrimage series. This week we have migrated from the flatlands of East Anglia, via the dreaming spires of Oxford, to the very unflat lands of the former Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia - better known today as Devon. We’re on the edge of the great wild mass that is Dartmoor, in the far west of Britain. Dartmoor, by English standards, is a big wild place: it measures exactly 365 square miles, one for each day of the year. It always seems to me like a sleeping animal: a great, snoozing beast curled around the bent trees and stone spires of this rolling old landscape. Sometimes it wakes and turns over, and then strange things happen. My novel Beast was set on the moor; many strange and disturbing things happened in its pages. It still might be my favourite of my books.

But never fear, for we have a local guide with us this week, to shepherd us around the sites of interest and steer us away from the beasts: my old friend Martin Shaw.

The boys are back in town

I’ve known Martin for fifteen years, and we’ve been on some adventures. We’ve travelled and taught together in the heart of New York City, in old cabins in the winter woods of Devon, and in stone towers built by great poets in California and Galway. Martin has lived in these parts for most of his life, and his family have been here for generations. He’s a Devon storyteller, and for years he has run his West Country School of Myth and Story on and around the moor. Today he has offered to take me to his ancestral church in the village of Widecombe-in-the-moor, a settlement which is most famous, if it is famous at all, for giving its name to a well-known English folk song.

The second-best known thing in Widecombe, though, is its church, which is known as the ‘cathedral of the moor.’ You can see why:

That’s one big church for such a tiny place. Compare its tower to that of Iffley, for example, which we visited a few weeks back, and you might get some sense of the scale. The tower of St Pancras Church is 120 feet high, and can be seen for miles around - which is the point. This church was built in the 15th century to serve the communities of the wide array of villages and hamlets scattered around this part of the moor. It’s a huge thing: and, like so many English parish churches, it is a labyrinth of stories, which tell themselves through its architecture, its history and its mythological language.

Martin told me he had wanted to bring me to this church because it is his ‘totem church.’ His aunt, Met Tregonning - a great Devonshire name, that - had a grandfather who was priest here in the 19th century. Martin’s dad, meanwhile, was a preacher in Devon in the 1970s. My childhood featured no churches at all - my atheist father avoided religion at all costs - but Martin’s involved being dragged round a lot of them, and this one seems to have stuck. I can see why. ‘It is the only place in the entire world’, he told me, ‘where I am completely religiously and emotionally situated.’ People, place, prayer, as someone once said.

Here is Martin, situated in front of the altar at which his ancestor once preached:

As well as all that history though, I could see as soon as I entered the church why a storyteller would be drawn to it. The whole place is a giant English fairy tale. The Matter of Britain plays itself out all over the walls, and within them. I can only point out a few of the stories here.

We could start with the rood screen. We came across one of these a few weeks back, at Binham Priory in Norfolk. Rood screens separated the nave from the altar. Above them was the rood loft and ‘great rood’ - a lifesize crucifix, with Christ hanging on it. (You can see a photo of an intact medieval rood screen from Suffolk here.) Taken together, all of this functioned as an iconostasis does in an Orthodox Church to this day: it drew the outline of the sacred space; it hallowed the altar and shielded the mysteries.

A lot of English churches today have only partially-intact rood screens if they have any at all, thanks to our old friends the Reformers. Widecombe still has a beautiful example of a mostly intact screen, though. Here is part of it, with the ancient wood still clearly displaying images of saints and martyrs:

How about a less holy story though - one which involved the Devil himself? It took place on Sunday 21st October 1638, during an afternoon service in the church. There are two versions of the story - the materialist and the spiritual. The boring materialist version is that a huge thunderstorm crashed over Dartmoor that day, and the church in Widecombe was struck by lightning. Over 300 people were in the church at the time: four of them were killed and sixty injured, while the building itself was severely damaged.

But this was no ordinary lightning. Eyewitness accounts told of great balls of fire bursting into the church, ricocheting off the walls and burning worshippers. The minister, though unhurt himself, told of how his wife ‘had her ruff and the linen next her body, and her body, burnt in a very pitiful manner.’ A terrified dog fled from the church and was instantly hurled to his death on the ground outside. What a dog was doing in church in the first place is not recorded.

Boring materialists say that this was one of the first recorded instances of ball lightning, but that’s what they would say. What the locals said at the time was that the Devil had visited the church because he had business with one of its parishioners, who owed him his soul in lieu of a gambling debt. This is obviously a much more interesting version of the events at hand - unless of course it happens to be your soul being collected.

Inside the church today is a series of boards, dating from the time of the incident, recording its effects in poetry:

Perhaps the best stories that Widecombe has to tell, though, can only be found by looking up. This is the church’s waggon vault ceiling, a common design around these parts:

See those little round nobbles that connect the ceiling beams together? Those are roof bosses - a common feature in English churches and cathedrals. Medieval stone and wood carvers used them as an excuse to run wild with mythic imagery - some of it obviously Christian, some of it more mysterious. Widecombe has a huge array of bosses - at least thirty of them - and they portray a wild diversity of images. What I love about them is how ecological they are: many of them are of plants and herbs, such as tormentil, flower of the field, wormwood, ‘mystic rose’, oak, poplar, and - best of all - the Thorn of Aramathea. If you don’t know what that is, seek ye the answer with William Blake. Or perhaps I’ll tell you another time.

One of the bosses features an old friend who we first met in Iffley church: the Green Man:

But what’s that central image, which this church postcard has labelled the ‘Hunt of Venus’? Well, it’s almost as mysterious as the Green Man - and it’s probably more cosmopolitan. It’s an image of three hares, intertwined, apparently chasing each other, their ears locking in a particular pattern. Around here, the image is known as the ‘tinner’s rabbit’, because this was tin-mining territory back in the day. It’s a very common image in this part of Devon: there are 29 hare bosses on 17 churches all over Dartmoor. Here is a very good account of their story, with many excellent images.

But don’t get the idea that this symbol is indigenous to Devon. In fact, it is a global mystery. Identical symbols - three hares, their ears intertwined, apparently chasing each other in a circular pattern - are found in China, India, Turkey, North Africa and all over Europe. The three hares can be seen in mosques, synagogues and churches, and the earliest version has been found in Chinese cave temples dating back to the sixth century. It appears to have spread west along the Silk Road until it got about as far west as it could go - Dartmoor. Here, the hares seem to have done what hares do well: breed, all across the moor. But what they are, what they mean, where they come from - nobody knows. Now they dance perpetually on the ceiling of Widecombe, where the Devil once raged.

‘I thought it was Camelot’, said Martin, of his first visit here as a child. I could see what he meant.

Widecombe is one of those places where, after a while, there is just too much to take in. After I had filled my head and my camera, Martin and I bowed our heads and left. A hundred yards away, in true English style, was a pub that seemed as old as the church and almost as necessary. We retired there to talk, over scampi and ale, about the power and beauty of an English church, the inability of reason to explain it, the power of place, how Orthodoxy might help England and the West to rediscover their Christian roots, and what the hares and the green men are really up to.

We turned out to have so much to talk about, in fact, that we decided to record some of it and share it with you here. If you like, you can join us in the pub, and listen in to our ramblings below, or by clicking here.

Cheers!