“They emerge in the fields like the peaks of a vanished
Atlantis drowned four centuries deep. The gutted cloisters stand uselessly
among the furrows and only broken pillars mark the former symmetry of the
aisles and ambulatories. Surrounded by elder-flower, with their bases entangled
in bracken and blackberry and bridged at their summits with arches and broken
spandrels that fly spinning over the tree tops in slender trajectories, the
clustering pillars suspend the great empty circumference of a rose-window in
the rook-haunted sky. It is as though some tremendous Gregorian chant had been
interrupted hundreds of years ago to hang there petrified at its climax ever
since.”
Patrick Leigh Fermor on the ruined monasteries of England and Wales "that have remained desolate since the Reformation" (A Time to
Keep Silence, 1957).
Fantastic description and a reminder why ruined monasteries remain one of the major delights of the British countryside
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ReplyDeleteLove Llanthony. Spent a lot of time there last summer. Very quiet. Good for stars.
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