St. Just--in-Penwith, Cornwall, and holy ground

Clock Tower, St. Just-in-Penwith Parish Church

I smelled Ireland last Friday….

The first time I visited Ireland, I bought a sweater made of very fine lamb’s wool. I wore it sitting in front of a turf fire, and it picked up the scent. I didn’t dry clean that sweater for years, as one whiff of it took me back to a very excellent time in a very beautiful place, what poet W.B. Yeats called, "the holy land of Ireland."

It wasn’t that smell.

What I smelled, standing in front of the fragmentary secco wall painting, “Christ of the Trades,”at St. Just-in-Penwith Parish Church, Cornwall, was the scent that reminds me of old buildings and fine furnishings, and also of the etheric remnants of lives lived, loves quickened, lives lost. A scent like no other, a scent heavy with meaning, and yet evanescent, grasped only a few times each decade, but prized, drawn into the nose like a heavenly perfume. And yet, I think that’s the first time I have come across it in a church.

My husband couldn’t smell it; by the time he responded to my silent beckoning, it was gone. He looked at the stone wall exposed below the secco (see below)  painting and pointed out the mold growing there. But it was not that.

The evanescent scent arises from the interplay, I think, of old stone (moldy, or washed clean), old wood, old plaster, old dust, old fibers…old being. The information of the universe, rendered close and personal, the hologram of all that has gone before in that place. And in such places, on occasion, such perfumes arise.

I couldn’t get enough of it, and yet, I knew it would not linger long. Or perhaps it is just that I would become used to it and would cease to note it as a scent separate from the environment. So I moved along. The church was quite beautiful, in a very rough-hewn way. And of course, it had an enormous number of historic features. It was, in its own way, emblematic of all that has happened to England in the Christian era.

The secco painting―one of six, at least, that covered the gray stone walls of the parish church in St. Just-in-Penwith, making the medieval church vibrant and the Bible intelligible to an uneducated congregation―dates to the 15th century. In the next century, when the Reformation and the spread of Protestantism arrived in Cornwall, all the beautiful and colorful decoration was removed or hidden; no one in those puritanical times wanted to be thought of as Popish. During some decades, it was worth one’s life to appear to be allied with Rome.

The secco paintings remained hidden until the restoration of religious freedom beginning in 1865. And, although six paintings were discovered then, only two remain, with no record of what happened to the others. Those two are the one I stood before, “Christ of the Trades,” and “Saint George and the Dragon.” St. George is the patron saint of England, making it perhaps somewhat unusual that he was painted in St. Just-in-Penwith, Cornwall, where even now many Cornish people would like to separate from England. Indeed, Celtic Christianity still abounds in this part of Cornwall.

But for now, I’m just appreciating the arrival of that scent, a scent like no other, and instantly evocative of all the good in the world, and all its ancient history, still proceeding day by day.

Next time: Celtic Christianity

Secco paintings are done on moistened dry plaster, unlike frescoes, painted on wet plaster. Colors on secco paintings are less durable, and paint may flake off. That has happened at St. Just-in-Penwith; restoration of the paintings has been undertaken from time to time.