#34: Kilpeck church

Kilpeck church doorway is on the cover of the Ordnance Survey map of Hereford and Leominster. It is easy to see why; it is charming and intricate. Sinuous lines wind up either side of the door and make a half moon shape on top, opening there like a crinkly fan. These pink sandstone shapes were made in the 12^th century by the ‘Herefordshire carvers’. 

Amazingly, the detail is still there 900 years later, so that you can see fishes devouring each other, grimacing faces and an endearingly childlike angel. Fat serpents wriggle through delicate plant tendrils and a manticore (a lion with a human head) slinks past. The gentle relief of the carvings reminds me of the pattern on a custard cream biscuit, especially the stylised fronds on the tympanum over the door. No forbidding saints in dirty alcoves here.

Up under the roof is a Sheela na-gig, a baldheaded figure stretching her huge vagina wide open with overlong arms. This one has an impish confrontational stare which doesn’t give anything away. Sheela na-gigs appear all over Britain and may be fertility figures, but no one is really sure. Elsewhere a cartoon-like dog and hare snuggle together, staring down open-eyed. Two dragons touch tongues; two ducks bite a serpent.

The church is plainer inside, with high brick walls painted white. I briefly step up to the lectern, where there is a huge, slightly damp doorstep of a Bible. It is open at the Old Testament book of Kings, at the story of the prophet Elisha and the widow. The widow ‘cries out’ to Elisha that her husband is dead and his creditors are coming to take her sons as slaves. ‘How can I help you?’ he asks. ‘Tell me, what do you have in your house?’ Only a small jar of olive oil, she replies. The passage continues:

Elisha said, ‘Go around and ask all your neighbours for empty jars. Don’t ask for just a few. Then go inside and shut the door behind you and your sons. Pour oil into all the jars, and as each is filled, put it to one side.’

She left him and shut the door behind her and her sons. They brought the jars to her and she kept pouring. When all the jars were full, she said to her son, ‘Bring me another one’.

But he replied, ‘There is not a jar left’. Then the oil stopped flowing.

The prophet tells her to sell the oil, pay off her husband’s debts and live off the rest of the money.

As I stood there, I wondered how a widow’s cry for help in Babylon had filtered down to a lectern in 21^st-century Hereford. What countless processes of cultural and physical conquest, submission and storytelling were involved? And what use is it now, in a world of cold weather payments, female breadwinners and transferred pensions? I can imagine a vicar’s interpretation - the jars symbolising one’s capacity to receive God’s blessing, or a command from above encouraging neighbours to support each other. But stubborn questions remain - why ask the widow to find the jars? Why not create them? Why is it so important that they shut the door? Why is the prophet so precise about where to place them?

But what I like best is the way that more oil comes as the woman starts pouring. This seems to get at something about the way in which action, doing, has its own specialness. That it is sometimes only when something is started that results will come. Or that doing is qualitatively different from thinking about doing, or from planning.

Later that afternoon I find a table inside the steamed up windows of Morrisons Cafe in Hereford. Teenagers are arriving for toast and chat after school, many with their heads down over their devices. I join them by browsing the church website. Why have the carvings survived so well? The church is not sure, suggesting: ‘The sandstone is very fine so does not easily retain moisture and, in sunlight, there is a glint which could suggest hardening with mica or quartz. It is hoped a knowledgeable visitor will help.’ 

Little is known about Herefordshire carvers either; like the widow in the Bible story, they are anonymous. ‘Their work draws on a variety of cultural sources for its religious and mystical images,’ Wikipedia says. ‘Norman military figures, Anglo-Saxon animals and Celtic abstract patterns combine to create a unique and beautiful synthesis. Despite its overtly religious nature, Herefordshire School work also has a playful, occasionally bawdy approach.’

I think back to the doorway. Phrases like ‘cultural sources’ and ‘approach’ fit uneasily with the tail-in-mouth dragons and wriggling worms on the door. Such a tracking back of influences, to my mind, does not reflect the magpie-like nature of creativity; it halts the flow of oil, as scholarship so often does. But I still want to return to the sculptures.