Interior
Dust doesn’t settle here but thickens the air like cornflour. The surfaces are wrack, sprinkled insect remains. Lead, glass, dark wood. Wind whistles in a pane, under a door, through this cavernous stone sieve. The drive was long, through Cotswold lanes and villages that felt tired. Muddy ponies, blue plastic cord, vinyl pub signs.
The walls of the nave peel themselves and fall inwards onto the floor. The constellation of furniture in rural churches is so familiar. This church child, Sundays spent in draughty town and rural churches across the country of my childhood, hating or at best day dreaming through each experience and now grown up to find himself regularly (and voluntarily) day tripping back in time 35 years, 1000 years, bearing a well-stamped passport, to these places of confused connection.
The constellation of furniture in rural churches is the answer to the question “what do we do with this?” answered by people who don’t generally let things go, who preserve, conserve, treasure and committee-away responsibility. An ever-shrinking group who I generally don’t want to bump into on my weekend forays to historic churches. Now I go mostly for the history, the slow-down and the silence. Divinity in silence. I encounter God perhaps. If God is a dust mote, a crack in the door. If God is a foliate head, a 40p postcard, a building in decline, the first daffodil of the year, a swinging pub sign, standing stone, the howling wind that cometh or the quiet lime-washed peace of a Sunday chapel waiting silently for a week or two to welcome its next time-traveller.
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St Michael Church, Duntisbourne, Gloucestershire