Singing at Lanteglos

On Saturday evening I drove down to Lanteglos church with fellow singing neighbours Richard and Jacqui to do a summer concert there. I had not been out and about for a couple of weeks, and really enjoyed the drive through green lanes, often hedged by greenery taller than the lanes were wide. St Wyllows was quite hard to find, all things considered, and Richard and Jacqui have sung there before!

It was a beautiful Norman church, the old tiled roof rippling with age. There was a sundial fixed onto the church porch, horizontally. I have never seen the like. It is set in the middle of a very large graveyard. I had a walk around the back of the church, and thought that the graves there were so overgrown that a couple of goats should be tethered there... then I saw a sign saying that the weeds were deliberate to encourage birds and butterflies. (I might put up a similar sign in my garden back home.)

Inside the church was an arching wooden ceiling, with carved corbels over the joins in the beams. It was rather like being inside an ornate barrel. (Whoops. Just looked up corbels, and these are not they. These were like little wooden clusters carved over the joins.)

The choir's pews were very intricately carved. There was a tomb with a brass etching of a Norman knight on it, very clear, with faint tracings of the fresco that used to be above it on the wall behind. (The Reformation was responsible for so much artistic vandalism, it is to weep.) There was an odd little winding staircase that led to a hole in the wall a bit higher up - some sort of balcony of yore. What I liked best was the set of stocks at the back of the church, on the floor! (For dozing parishioners? Naughty children? It would have just fitted our kids, sitting in a row...)

Anyway, it was a very nice concert. We sang a mixture of secular and sacred pieces, madrigals and so forth. Some was even in English, praise be, although these were mostly of a rather gloomy nature (dying swans, dead lovers etc) for some reason. One cheery one was in praise of Queen Elizabeth the first. This church would have been pretty old even when she was born... A glass of wine was available at half time, so nice for exercised throats. It was a nice Australian red, too!

We drove home past 10 o'clock, as the twilight closed about us. Very beautiful.