Tuesday 19 October 2010

Dundry church

Here's Dundry church, up on the top of Dundry Hill and appropriately dedicated to St Michael. The tower was built by Bristol's Merchant Venturers 'as a beacon for sailors', as Pevsner says. It would be of doubtful use as a navigation beacon; but it is certainly a landmark, being visible for miles and miles from its high position, a hundred feet up the hill. Pevsner's a bit snooty about the aesthetics of the tower, reckoning that there's too little relation between the four stages and the parapet. As for the Victorian church attached to the tower, that is described simply as 'without merit'.

Fair enough. I suppose that in its way, this is a folly; something intended more to be viewed from Bristol and the Avon than to be worshipped in. An exercise in ostentation rather than piety.

In the foreground is a great block of Dundry stone. The local oolitic limestone was highly-regarded as a building material, and it was widely used; for St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol, and, further afield, in places including Cardiff Castle and Dublin Cathedral. This block in the churchyard was for display purposes, presumably, so that prospective clients could be shown what was on offer, just as the adjacent church was an example of what you could do with it.


I was up at three o'clock, finishing off this picture while listening to God's Revolution on the radio; a really good dramatisation of the English Civil War. Cromwell is busily suppressing the Levellers just at the mo. Familiar stuff if you've read about the French or the Russian revolutions... but it happened here first...






8 comments:

  1. Weren't a lot of churches "An exercise in ostentation rather than piety"? Wasn't that sort of the point of all those high spires and soaring arches?
    I think I like the parapet. It looks like it's wearing a crown.

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  2. Possibly so, though I like to think that sometimes they were built to celebrate the glory of their God... the piety sort of rubs off on the place after enough centuries have passed... but here, the church building itself seems to be almost an afterthought.

    Yes, it is a bit hat-like, isn't it? I wonder if there's a hat pin up there somewhere to stop it blowing away...

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  3. magic stone, cut it like cheese then it hardens up in the air. Don't get stuff like that up north where I am.

    Caroline xxx

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  4. I'm attached to the little Norman Churches that were in the villages around where I was brought up. I remember reading somewhere that the Georgians were fond of pulling anything down that didn't please them aesthetically., especially Norman churches. They didn’t think that fruit was good for children either.

    I don’t listen to the radio like I used to – I have to concentrate on what I’m doing. Years ago I was listening to Germinal in the dark one night and I was trapped in the mine with them – BBC radio drama is the best in the world.

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  5. "An exercise in ostentation rather than piety."

    Indeed...

    but then that puts it in line with a lot of churches and almost all cathedrals, where the prime requirement was to put people in awe of the majesty of the church's wealth and power.

    Lovely piccie, BTW... :-)

    chrissie
    xxxx

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  6. "I'm attached to the little Norman Churches that were in the villages around where I was brought up. "

    Yes, I know what you mean. Where I used to live, we had a little Norman church in the local town. I was married there.

    There was certainly nothing ostentatious about that church. It was just built as a place to shelter out of the wind and rain whilst worshipping.

    chrissie
    xxxx

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  7. I've heard the limestone described like that, Caroline, and it would be nice to have a go at carving some just to experience it, some time. Though I suppose stonemasonry is not the sort of thing you can easily start in the kitchen.

    It was a great shame about the mass renovation of churches, wasn't it,Anji? -Visiting a rare church that escaped the ravages brings home just how much was lost in other places... I've just been listening to 'God's Revolution' on BBC7, a long drama about the Englsih Civil War. It was totally brill, and got me reading up on the Levellers...

    A fair point, Chrissie; I just had this romantic notion, in the days when I wandered around ruins on the Welsh borders, that these places were built to celebrate something higher. But people is people, I guess.

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  8. Doh, I just realised I could listen to BB7 in the computer...

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