Hello friends,
We are off in search of West Country saints this week. But first, a conversation with Irish writer and documentary maker Manchán Magan, recorded almost two years back tucked away in the back streets of Dublin, is out RTE Radio 1 today: The Almanac of Ireland podcast. Listen to a sneak preview here: The Almanac of Ireland trailer.
Good cheer, Martin
St Petroc, author’s painting.
When I was a lad living in a tent in the wild west of Britain, I had a fondness for what’s called a Green Lane. The description is accurate: an old lane often grassed over, hidden between fields and high hedges. You never knew what you’d find down them. An old Gypsy showman’s wagon, grazing horses, more latterly travellers of some kind or other, tucked away, not making a fuss. I’d come back a week later and it was as if nothing and nobody had ever been there. Maybe there’d be a ribbon tied to a branch but that was it. Even then I knew it was likely the last moments of witnessing such a thing.
I’d always walk them to see where they led: sometimes I’d see a roebuck leaping between hedges in the dusk, or the arse end of a badger. Green Lanes seemed magical, a gateway between centuries almost. I wrote once that under the motorway there is a smaller road, and under the smaller road is a lane, and under the lane is hoof prints of a deer. It’s that kind of thing I’m getting at.
It's Green Lane Christianity I love. The essential, mysterious thing that exists while the juggernauts swoop and grind overhead. A discovery, not a billboard. A Christianity that has animals roaming free within it, animals we’ve never seen before. That may be easy to scoff at, but I pity those that do. I’m searching for something on this pilgrimage to Cornwall, but I’m not sure what. The wider aim is to bang up against some of the early West Country saints.
As I drive over the Tamar bridge from Devon into Cornwall, it starts to hurl down great spits of rain.