By Charlie Hill.
We were eating pierogi and sluicing cherry Slivovic at a friend’s house when we decided to go Champing. Champing is a scheme run by the Churches Conservation Trust that involves staying overnight in disused and deconsecrated churches, and we were attracted both by the creative thinking that informed the initiative – ‘by supporting Champing, you’re also helping to preserve these ancient spaces for the future’ – and the potential for an experience that would surely transcend the average weekend away.
The church we chose was St Cuthberts, which sits in ‘a pretty setting on a bend in the River Wye, looking across to the Herefordshire hills’. We wanted somewhere close enough to Birmingham to make the trip a jaunt not an expedition, but remote enough for the isolation to enhance the venture. It was reassuringly difficult to find. The last mile or so of the journey foxed the satnav and took us up a single-track road to a modern country pile where farmers’ children played on quad bikes. There we parked-up and entered a graveyard enclosed by trees and hedges.
Passing under the entwined branches of two sentinels of yew, we finally saw the church itself. We picked-up the key from a small portaloo, let ourselves in and had a look around our accommodation. It was an imposing interior, a composite of the old – most of the structure was built in the 17th century – and very old – the tower dated back to the 1400’s. Despite this, it was psychically lighter than we’d imagined it might have been, with a disarming tension between the abstract and eternal, and the pragmatic and the here-and-now, between the brow-furrowing substance of a ‘serious house on serious earth’ and the vital quirks of life.
This was underscored by our confusion over the church’s status. In the churchyard, amongst those that were centuries old, we’d seen the gravestone of someone who’d died as recently as 2017, and it was impossible to tell when the place had stopped being used as a regular place of worship and remembrance. There were stained glass windows which looked ancient, another with a distinctly contemporary aesthetic. At one end of the nave was an organ with a songbook open at an arrangement of psalm 23 that might have just been played, at the other a shrine to Prince Philip – consisting of a page from a tabloid tribute, a quote from Elizabeth and two vases of plastic flowers – stood next to marble effigies from the 17th century, sarcophagi in alabaster. Camping chairs and bean bags had been arranged in the aisles, and by the collection box was a pristine laminated A4 sheet of poetry that began:
An enigma,
Diamond encrusted beings,
Fleeing forward to an unknown shore,
I was sure, that we would be, free.The surrounding trees whisper,
Subtly glistening in the morning sun,
They know of more than they say.
A rule of Champing is no hot food, so we went to a pub a couple of miles up the road for something to eat. By the time we got back to St Cuthberts, and arranged our camping chairs in the graveyard, a bucolic dusk had settled over the scene. The shadows of the gravestones and the yew were lengthening while insects flitted in-and-out of patches of cornfield yellow sunlight. Crosses seemed to emerge organically from the mossy earth, birds chirruped. We opened beer and began to chat.
At first, our conversation took an unsurprising route. We sitting in a graveyard on a long summer’s evening, about to spend a night in a church. We were at the age where death and the rituals that engulf it were as central to our navigation of the world as what to have for tea; perhaps more pertinently our recent engagement with them had been both emotionally heightened and compromised by the pandemic. So we chatted about the deaths of loved ones and the funerals we’d been to, we chatted about the process of dying, the intractability of grief. Indeed, it seemed for a while that this was the dialogue to which all champing must lead. Then we heard it.
From somewhere in the trees that separated us from a field of wheat, a cuckoo called. The call was clear and thrilling. It persisted for so long that it passed from feature to accent. And whether it was because of the presence of our Polish friend, or the idiosyncrasies of the interior of the church, or this most evocative of leitmotifs, the conversation moved inexorably from the universal to the particular. Now we were considering 21st century questions, questions about England and what it meant to be English, even as the meaning of those terms flitted like fireflies in a twilight, between the living and the dead: what was unique about the idyll in which we sat? What were the forces that shaped it, and who should pay for its maintenance? What sort of people camp in a place like St Cuthberts? Or build a shrine to Prince Philip? Which of the worlds was more secure in its Englishness, and how might the two be reconciled?
We woke the next morning in camp beds under the lectern’s brass eagle. After breakfast, we decided to go for a Sunday morning stroll along the river that wreathed around the church. As we left the graveyard, a man in khaki shorts came through the gate, cradling the camera that hung from his neck. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he said to himself, and then ‘how old is she?’ Walking down the single track road, we came to a stile. A sign said ‘Public Footpath’, another, handwritten, ‘PRIVATE LAND! KEEP OFF!’ We picked our way across a field, then turned to follow a path that ran alongside the looping Wye, and headed back towards the church.
The path was narrow and took us between rows of crops and a dense thicket of bramble and nettle, cow parsley and hogweed that separated us from the river. Every so often there would be a gap in the greenery and we’d catch a glimpse of the water, but we wanted an unhindered view. Eventually there was an extended stretch where the vegetation thinned-out and we could get to the river’s edge. We set off down a slope of bare earth, towards a shoreline of flat stones and then stopped. The water was flowing at a crawl, and cloudy with shit. There were no insects or birds, nor other signs of life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlie Hill is a writer from Birmingham and the author of two novels, a novella and a handful of poems. His latest book is a memoir, I Don’t Want to go to the Taj Mahal.
