A COUPLE OF weeks ago we revisited Walsingham, the village in Norfolk famed for its shrine and various churches. This time we had a look around the abbey grounds, which are secreted within the heart of the village. The existence of the abbey is semi-miraculous in itself – until you enter its grounds you don’t realise how big they are, comprising some impressive remains within a tranquil rural environment.
I recommend a visit to Walsingham to anyone, Christian or not, who has a fondness for anything old-fashioned and English. It’s not stuck in a sentimental time-warp, but it does have an air of genteel untidiness and unkemptness: little lanes and passages lead to empty buildings, hollyhocks and various weeds grow in abundance, windows and doorframes could do with a good scrape and a bit of fresh paint. Time is not static here; it moves, but at a determinedly gentle and self-controlled pace.
What I kept thinking of as we walked around Walsingham was a comment by the now little-read American philosopher, George Santayana, in one of his essays, “English Architecture”, in Soliloquies in England. He observed how England absorbed and reinvented the ruins of its previous existences – castles, moats, chapels, etc., so that in “growing picturesque” they became English. “Everything in its ruin,” he wrote, “seems in England to live a new life: and it is only this second life…that is English.”
The England that Santayana was talking about was one profoundly damaged by the Great War and yet much of his observations about the character of the English, that much-maligned race, remain true. That organic capacity to adapt the relics of the old into something new and alive and make something distinct of them seems to have survived.
He could also have added that another characteristic is the ability to absorb the alien into the familiar. My favourite church in Walsingham is not the Anglican or Roman one but the Eastern Orthodox church, installed in what was the old railway station. The waiting room, appropriately enough, is now the church, combining a domestic simplicity with the richness of icons and candles. Even an old atheist like me can appreciate that.
