We do ruins well in this country. Preserved, cared for, discretely showed off, they become things of beauty and a tangible connection to the past that we can all share. Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk was a bit of a surprise on Tuesday, one of the hottest days of the year so far. A surprise because it was a 'that will do' place to break a journey - an opportunity to step out of an air-conditioned car into a hug of hot air and stretch our legs. This amounted to a stroll. Following the maze of shadows cast by the vast sprawling ruins.
What a place! Look up - always - when you visit anywhere. That's where you'll be amazed.
Walk around looking at your feet and all you'll see is grass. And grass is nowhere near as interesting as a communal toilet block for 24, built to straddle a stream where the monks could drop from a height straight into the flowing water. Effortless and silent - being monks, apart from the splash - sewage management.
Henry VIII had a lot to answer for. Falling out with Rome. A serious case of the grass is greener with the next pretty girl than with my wife. And a tantrum to enforce his split with Catholicism which like most tantrums involved a toppling of bricks. Many many bricks; mainly those of monasteries and priories and abbeys and the homes of important Catholics. Why build a priory anyway? Littlest wanted to know. What was it for?
... apart from climbing
It was a good question - what were they for?
Show? - built to amaze, humble and impress your peers. In other words, to express power.
To seize the respect of the papacy? - And grab a piece of its power for yourself.
Taxes? Farming? Income? - from pilgrims and the sick and those with guilty consciences. More donations, increased trade, self-sufficiency, sale of wines and crops led to bigger, better, more imposing sites and increased revenue; and increased power.
Assurance? - that your soul would go to heaven because you had effectively employed an army of persuasive fighters on earth (the monks and prior or abbot) to pray for you.
Poor relief? Charity driven by penance and reparation. And a lust for a purified power.
Suppression of your enemies through public display of your worthiness and wealth. i.e. oppressive power.
A centre for caring and treatment of ills? - many had hospital wings and large medical herb gardens. Your own insurance policy against the rigours of sickness, perhaps. And the gratitude of others treated successfully. So again, it is power.
Record keeping, education and dissemination of your good name (= power) and communication?
Communication ...
Beat me down for being a poor historian and a massive cynic but I suspect faith played only a small part in the motivation behind the building of abbeys and priories. But beating aside, I am happy to acknowledge that they fill me with awe - awe that our ancestors built such incredible structures without the assistance of any power tools, motorised cranes, electrical hydraulic systems or all the glues, alloys, cement mixes that builders take for granted today. And they're still standing. Despite Henry's best efforts. And we have all but lost some of the crafts they took for granted then.
A bit of me wants to write 'Wow!' A bit of me usually exhales Wow! quietly, when confronted with something Wow-worthy, but I usually suppress the urge to write 'Wow!' as it is childish and un- ... what? ... un-literate; un-grammatical. (I suspect both those words are wrong, too - non-literate might be better, but I've just checked and un- is fine with grammatical.) And my children will or would tell you that their mother writes Wow! all the time in texts. So forgive me if I look at ruins and instantly flounder around trying to find the right word and instead blurt out a cliched 'Wow!' But Wow! Wow! Castle Acre Priory.
And Wow! was my response again (I'm consistent, if not very original), when we finally got to the beach and a sandy expanse of East Anglia's finest. All very Lowry-esque except I don't think he painted people at a beach. He should have done - the colours, shapes (my! What varied shapes. Fat, fatter and fattest. And very occasionally, lean and lanky) and poses of the myriad figures and dogs and push-chairs and umbrellas and striped wind-breaks and more dogs, would have been perfect Lowry material. And he'd have done a fine job.
All the dots on the left horizon here are people, sadly I didn't take close-ups. You'll just have to picture the scene from my words.
I am not one to lie in the sun. Being of Scottish extraction, I burn. To counter this I wear a hat. I try to persuade others to wear one, too, but with limited success. For our trip to Norfolk, I found this one at the back of a cupboard.
"A very fetching hat!" I heard someone say - grin on his face, and a lilt in his voice that was difficult to place - somewhere between light sarcasm and the condescension reserved for elderly relatives who are no longer with-it in either the sartorial or mentally agile sense of the term.
'Fetching' - ah! Maybe I should embrace the word after all: Google defines it as attractive, delightful and enchanting! Hah! All of them a surprise - I had no idea it meant that. Reflected onto me and my choice of hat, I'd take all of those. If I thought it genuinely meant. But a bit of me still thinks that what was actually intended was 'fetching' in the sense of the game that is played with a dog, where something is thrown and the dog then retrieves or fetches it back. With each throw it becomes more 'dog-eared' and battered. With each 'fetching' you hope the next throw will lands it up a tree and the dog won't be able to reach it. I suspect this is the type of 'fetching' that was meant.
Italy beckons at the end of the summer. Southern Italy. Very, very hot Italy. Italy that my skin is not going to like. Sun-block and a new hat will be required.
Where does one go to buy a hat that you would want to retrieve rather than let the dog cart about?
Not Wells-next-the-sea. Lots of hats, in lots of touristy shops, but all were definitely dog-fetching hats. Not Italy hats.
I can feel more hat-related blogging on the near horizon. In the next few weeks. Along with end of the day walks that don't involve breakfast ...
Four-legged-friend discovered that something that tasted remarkably like breakfast was at muzzle-height, when we followed the footpath across the field, behind the house. Sun had dried the grain. And the grain had a satisfying crunchiness. And tasted of food/bread/porridge.
He behaved much like a whale, mouth wide open swimming through the crop. Later - the size of his swollen tummy and the explosive, I've-just-eaten-a-ton-more-cereal-than-is-absolutely-necessary-at-breakfast-let-alone-supper-time f**ts ... Wow! Just throw-the-window-open-Wow!
Castle Acre Priory, Castle Acre, Norfolk - English Heritage - well worth a visit.
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