An M.R. James moment

Bitterly cold day, the temperature about three degrees below freezing. After lunch a drive to the middle of the county, the roads slippery with ice (especially the side roads). Because the landscape had a covering of white snow the light was reflected and refracted so that the afternoon stayed bright until nearly 4pm.

I arrived at the church half expecting the open day to have been cancelled, but when I pushed on the huge fourteenth-century door, black with age, it opened. And inside was a man aged about sixty wearing a brown tweed suit. In the south aisle his wife had set up a little table with urns of hot water and pots of tea - I was immediately offered a cup of tea.

The interior of the building was incredibly cold, so that it hurt my lungs when I breathed in. The man and his wife however were cheerfully impervious to the cold, and commenced an in-depth tour of the church. I suspected that I was the only visitor they had had all afternoon.



Above: my main interest in visiting the building was to see a carved head of a crusader knight that was supposedly brought from the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.



Above: the stone head itself was so unremarkable that it could be anyone. Verbal tradition links it to the crusades. We had a discussion about the topography of the area (famous for its natural springs) and demography.



Above: during the tour the elderly man took me under the tower, used as a lumber room for all sorts of unused items. Set in the wall was a Saxon stone (note the torque-like patterns - golden torques being a symbol of royalty). When the stone had been removed in 1890 a crouching body had been found behind it.

It was an M.R. James moment (and more disturbing for having seen Night Of The Demon on BBC2 last night).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hACZf6YKX3g