Remembrances
Apr. 5th, 2005 06:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustToday is my father's birthday, and we went to Finchale Priory, and walked on the wooded banks of the Wear in the sunshine, and admired the drifts of windflowers, and the wild garlic just beginning to burst into bloom, and a handful of violets lurking under trees and hoping not to be noticed.
Finchale, for me, is a place where the past comes in layers. Even before the priory was built, Saint Godric came here to live as a hermit, after a life of travel and adventure: he was a trader, made many pilgrimages and in 1102 helped the crusader king of Jerusalem escape after the battle of Ramleh. Then, like Cadfael, he retired to a life of contemplation, and is reputed to have lived to see the building of the first stone church on the site, and to have been buried in it when he died, at the age of 105.
By the fourteenth century the priory had become a dependency of the Benedictine monastery at Durham, now the cathedral, and was used as a holiday cottage: a prior and four monks lived here permanently, and the monks walked out from Durham to join them, four at a time.
Finchale was part of the mental furniture of my childhood, too. When we asked for a story, my mother would invent something, but my father would tell us about "when he was a little boy" and he and his parents and his four elder brothers spent holidays in a shack his father had built at Finchale (in my mind, I spelled it "Finkle"), and how they constructed a raft and sailed it on the river, or took a jug to the farm to buy milk.
And since his death it carries more layers of memories, but who wants to forget? So I continue to make my spring-time visit, and to remember.
Finchale, for me, is a place where the past comes in layers. Even before the priory was built, Saint Godric came here to live as a hermit, after a life of travel and adventure: he was a trader, made many pilgrimages and in 1102 helped the crusader king of Jerusalem escape after the battle of Ramleh. Then, like Cadfael, he retired to a life of contemplation, and is reputed to have lived to see the building of the first stone church on the site, and to have been buried in it when he died, at the age of 105.
By the fourteenth century the priory had become a dependency of the Benedictine monastery at Durham, now the cathedral, and was used as a holiday cottage: a prior and four monks lived here permanently, and the monks walked out from Durham to join them, four at a time.
Finchale was part of the mental furniture of my childhood, too. When we asked for a story, my mother would invent something, but my father would tell us about "when he was a little boy" and he and his parents and his four elder brothers spent holidays in a shack his father had built at Finchale (in my mind, I spelled it "Finkle"), and how they constructed a raft and sailed it on the river, or took a jug to the farm to buy milk.
And since his death it carries more layers of memories, but who wants to forget? So I continue to make my spring-time visit, and to remember.
