In ‘Church Going’, the poem that gives this charming book its title, Philip Larkin talks about ‘one of the crew that tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were… Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique’. Well, Andrew Ziminski is king of the ruin-bibbers, randy for antique churches. He doesn’t just know what a rood-loft is; he’s also repaired loads of them. For 35 years, he has been a church conservator. In his first book, The Stonemason, he brilliantly explained his job. In this sequel, he takes us all round the church, from gravestones to altar cloths, and explains every conceivable aspect of the great parish church.
Guides like this have been done before, but not by someone who actually repairs churches. Ziminski has dug deep into the stone skin of these buildings and can tell you exactly how they were made. He knows the difference between Victorian materials – American pitch-pine roof joists – and the ancient, local oak used for his latest project, the medieval church of St Mary’s, Steeple Ashton, Wiltshire. He is so dedicated to saving churches that he even travels around with a bucket of lime putty to touch up loose sections of tombstones scaled off by frost.
Our churches are under constant siege from the weather. Some grotesques – those creatures on church walls that, unlike gargoyles, don’t disguise spouts – have been subjected to constant saturation and freeze-thaw weathering for 500 winters, progressively losing their detail. Deliciously, they are known as ‘hunky punks’ in Somerset.
Ziminski lives in Somerset but has worked all over the country, so he knows, for example, that the best lych-gates (the covered gateways at the churchyard entrance) are found in Kent. The 17th- and 18th-century gravestones of the Scottish Lowlands have the finest lettering and design.
He finds treasures in the unlikeliest of places. You might think the oldest surviving wooden church in the world would be in a remote corner of the Peloponnese. In fact, it’s the mid-9th century St Andrew in Greensted-juxta-Ongar on the Essex fringes of London. It’s the only Anglo-Saxon timber church that’s still around. You can make out the 51 split logs erected around 1,200 years ago to form the walls of the nave.
Because Ziminski restores gravestones, he knows that the older tombs and most burials can be found on the warmer south side of the church. The north side was where unbaptised infants were buried, often at night, for the ‘cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton’. His staggering knowledge extends to the natural world. In every tomb he has taken apart, he has found inch-long churchyard beetles with protective shells ‘as black as a newly polished shoe’s toecap’, but he never discovers them outside the churchyard boundary. In most old graveyards he sees perfect miniature hillocks constructed by the yellow meadow ants.
I thought I knew my churches, but Ziminski provides non-stop revelations. I’ve never come across Irish bullauns, the deeply worn cylindrical hollows cut into boulders for devotional purposes. The rainwater that fills them is said to have curative qualities. There are 837 bullaun stones in Ireland.
You don’t have to be a ruin-bibber to love this book. Ziminski writes in a light, readable style, pitching expert knowledge at the non-expert. He has an eye for the comedy and vulgarity of life, not least in the 40 Sheela-na-Gigs in Britain. They were first recorded in Ireland as Sighle na gCioch – literally ‘old hag of the breasts’. The Sheela at Kilpeck, Herefordshire, crouches in the birthing position with a knowing smile. A male version crawls along the chancel window at St James’s, Abson, Gloucestershire, with an enormous erection.
Along the way, you’ll learn about the structural engineering of medieval churches. So often what looks to be decorative is really medieval science at work. Buttresses are usually topped by delightful crocketed pinnacles. These are in fact acting as a dead weight, pushing the outward forces of the church wall down into the ground.
All human life – and death – is here. Ziminski is a keen collector of epigraphs. His favourite is on a headstone at Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, to Hannah Twynney, a barmaid, killed, aged 33, by a tiger in a travelling menagerie in 1703. It reads:
In bloom of Life
She’s snatched from hence
She had not room
To make defence;
For Tyger fierce
Took life away
And here she lies
In a bed of Clay,
Until the Resurrection Day.
In The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo wrote that, in the Middle Ages, ‘Men had no great thought that they did not write down in stone’. Amen to that.
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