Martinmas

It is the 11th of November. An old man, faded green waterproof creaking, polishes the war memorial in the church yard.[1] A new tricolour hangs limp in the still crystalline air. Armistice Day is a national holiday in France. For the Commune of La Haye du Puits this means that the chasseurs are once again out in force, dotting the bocage in their orange jackets like hips on a dog rose. I follow a deer path up the flank of Mont Doville, tunnelling through the green as shots thud dully over my head. In a field below me a hunter is quartering the pasture with two cream and orange setters, like a Constable painting. Hunting accidents are common in France. I quicken my pace. On the expanse of the gorse-blown summit humans and animals are harder to confuse. Wide swathes of the mont are mowed periodically, cutting a labyrinth of paths through the bramble and heather, so that you walk in a chest-deep gully of foliage. Diminutive oak trees in contorted postures record the strength and speed of winds long since died down. Suspended in the brush are pockets of spiders’ web, heavy with the dew that the sun has yet to reach. Shaggy parasol mushrooms erupt in clearings, their coffee-coloured caps as wide as dinnerplates. I round a corner. Silhouetted on the brow of the mont is a man, his shotgun slouched against his shoulder as he watches his dogs flush the gorse. His stillness and silence seems to draw all of the light and sound in the landscape to him.

But I am not here to hunt, nor to honour the war dead. I am here (though I do not know it yet) because it is Martinmas, the feast day of Saint Martin of Tours (Martin de Misericordieux).[2] And so I leave the chasseur to his dogs and his gun and take a different path. We used to call this day ‘Old Halloween’. Martinmas marks the start of winter in the agricultural calendar, the end of the harvest. Beer mutters gently in its kegs that it is ready. A time for bonfires and drinking, killing the fatted calf or hog or goose,[3] with one eye on abstemious advent approaching round the corner. I can feel it in the dawn now, the urge to retreat, to shelter, to coat our lips in fat and spice and light our little lamps. Here we are on the cusp of the dark times, asking ourselves, will we sing?

Mont Doville, towards La Chapelle Saint Martin, Inka, 11.11.21

Shrugged into the shoulder of Mont Doville is the church of la Chapelle Saint Martin. If you are not looking for it, it would be easy to miss it. Two large stones interpose a gap in a high hedge and form the entrance to the ancient churchyard, framing nothing but meadow, and a murder of crows rising like tattered mourning from the oaks beyond. Once inside, it is not the chapel you see first, but the deep green-black volume of a yew tree, which billows around the sacristy like a sail.[4] Yew, a tree of churchyards and sacred places, poisonous and protective. It is a tree which vibrates with ambivalence. This particular yew is around four hundred years old, [5]growing on one of the highest points in Manche. If you were to climb its branches you could see across the English Channel to Jersey. At some point in its history it has been struck by lightening and split open like a book. It carried on growing around the damage. We place a recorder in the bole of it, to see what it says to us. When we play it back I think I can hear the sound of an organ droning.

Entering the church I stop to take in the particular silence of a space unoccupied until moments before. A peculiarly peopled silence. The chapel is partly in ruins now. A new church of Saint Martin was built in Doville in the eighteen-hundreds and official services are no longer held here. There is no crucifix to be found, no sanctuary lamp flickering red. Yet the altar cloth is covered with votive offerings. Scallop shells blush peach and white, the faded parchment and steel of winkle shells, a carved wooden angel, sprigs of heather, statice, sprays of hydrangea in an amber bottle. Here and there, burned out tea lights. Below a painting of a former curé of the chapel: a single mushroom, its stem still damp with mud. I try to imagine who it is that comes here, with a pocket full of foraged tributes, to light a candle in this place. Whether I am looking at the prayers of one person or many, recent or historical, catalogued in flotsam.

Offerings, Chapelle Saint Martin, Mont Doville, 11.11.21

The church that stands here now is only the most recent place of worship to be erected here (though parts of even this structure date back to the Middle Ages, when the cult of Saint Martin gathered pace across France). The numerous medieval churches that litter the department of Manche are more often than not built on sites which were previously important to pre-Christian societies. Fountains, rock formations, ancient trees become fonts, knaves, misericords. That, now it has been abandoned by the Catholic church, the parish church relocated to the less pagan position of the town centre, la Chapelle Saint Martin has reverted to a much older way of asking for help, for forgiveness, for relief. This is a thin place. It is not altogether welcoming. It is a place which provokes a sense of uneasy anticipation, even on a vivid November morning, a sense that you are approaching or being approached by something you cannot fully comprehend. ‘Who is this who is coming?’ The dog Inka whines at the open door, beckoning me out into the dazzling winter light

Sandstone Quarry, Mont Doville, looking east. 11.11.21.

On the far side of Mont Doville is a sandstone quarry. The moorland landscape of the summit shifts abruptly along a barbed-wire border and confronts you with a moonscape of pale rock. Signs suspended at crazy angles from the fence warn you of explosions. In the mid-1800s, quarrymen working on the mont found bronze objects, similar to those discovered in wells in nearby villages, traces of bronze age burial mounds which have been giving up their treasures for centuries in this part of the world. The walls of the church are constructed, in part, of tufa a porous rock favoured by the Carolingians and the Merovingians for the construction of sarcophagi. On our way home the verges are pocked with fungi. Things come to the surface. In the distance I hear the dull retort of guns start up again. The church of St Nicolas chimes the eleventh hour as we descend back into the village. In the empty churchyard the war memorial rears up silently against a cloudless sky.

[1] Thirty-six of St Nicolas de Pierrepont’s men died in the First World War. In times past the Marie would stand in the cemetery at 11am on Remembrance Sunday to read the names of the fallen. I came this year, at this time, almost by chance, but the churchyard was empty except for me. I read their names myself and came away not understanding what it was I should be feeling.

[2] Welsh tradition has it that Martinmas is the only day of the year when the Cŵn Annwn, the phantom hounds who haunt the underworld, surface and join in with the Wild Hunt, stalking the countryside in a search for the wicked.

[3] The consumption of geese at Martinmas is traditional, partly from a practical standpoint that they have fattened sufficiently by this point in the agricultural year but also because St Martin is reported to have hidden in a barn full of geese in an attempt to avoid being made Bishop of Tours. The outraged honking gave him away and he reluctantly accepted his mitre and crosier in a state of farmyard deshabille.

[4] Yew trees are particularly common in Norman churchyards.

[5] A mere sapling compared to the Estry yew, found in the Calvados region of Normandy, whose age is estimated at 1600 years old.

The Pearls that were their Eyes [Pt.1]

Toussaint