Seeds of Stories 3 // Portland and St George’s Church
Local poet and The Stones Sing librettist, Anna Rose-Prynn, reflects on the places that inspired each of her Dorset operas.
Portland Bill (c) campsites.co.uk
If you’ve heard of Portland but don’t know anything about it, it may be because you’ve heard Portland Bill mentioned on the Shipping Forecast. That’s how I first heard of it - awake at midnight nursing a baby to “Sailing By” and the soft reassuring voice going over the mysterious (to me) litany of names and phrases. The reality of the Bill is different. I remember lowering myself from flat rocks into deep water of an opaque green and a searching cold that found out the weak points in my wetsuit - and the swell surging up to the rock and the sound of the sea, the surf, booming into cave and crevasse and blowhole - and being borne through a narrow blueish cave - and trying to grasp the barnacled and seaweed-slimed rock to pull myself out before the next wave retreated and sucked me back. And out there, a way offshore, white capped waves in a swarm; fierce and insistent, like ravenous surface-feeding birds. The Races. There’s an early Portland story I heard: when I clambered to the top of the lighthouse, and the lighthouse keeper told me the Races (a particular condition of the current off the Bill) were very dangerous and had a habit of swallowing boats and people whole. “Where the Races take ‘em, no-one knows, but they are never seen again”.
“Where the Races take ‘em, no-one knows, but they are never seen again”
Tout Quarry Sculpture Park (c) A family day out
Or it may be you’ve heard of Portland Stone. That magical grey-white seashell-spangled limestone that has been carved out of Portland for centuries and transported to cities all over the UK and the world beyond to make cathedrals, palaces, museums, memorials. Well, Portland is stone. It’s also the Harbour, the Navy, the prisons; it’s fishing, watersports, cliff climbing, birdwatching (a first stopping point, this promontory off the south coast, this southernmost point, for migratory birds). But more than any of them and some of them because of it, Portland is stone, or rather it is the result of what happens when stone meets hands.
“…Portland is stone, or rather it is the result of what happens when stone meets hands.”
I’ve carved stone on Portland, stood in Tout Quarry, in land hollowed out and shaped by extraction, chisel in one hand, mallet in the other. Carving stone is an extraordinary thing. Stone is stubborn and can be treacherous. It demands patience and persistence and still you might come across a diamond-hard shell that forces a change of plan, or a fault line that knocks away much more than you intended. But gradually, as you carve, the stone gives you some of its qualities. You endure, you are solid, you embrace slow weathering, but you are accepting of random forces. And you give some of your qualities to the stone: your ideas of beauty, the shapes and order of the human world. It is as if you’re fusing where you meet - your hands. The stone becomes more like your hands. Softer, rounded, with a visual quality of movement. And your hands become more like the stone as they are coated in dust and go dry and white, and stiffen. Of course, sometimes the stone becomes more like your hands because you are literally carving hands, sculpturally or in relief (not me, I have nothing like the skill to do that). The soft curved arms and the fluffy-looking wings of angels in the churchyard at Reforne were once on the brutal end of someone’s chisel.
“The soft curved arms and the fluffy-looking wings of angels in the churchyard at Reforne were once on the brutal end of someone’s chisel.”
One of the angels at Reforne (c) Andrew Blackmore
But stone is as much about what you take away. As Michelangelo famously said, every block of stone has a statue inside it and it’s the task of the sculptor to discover it. “I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free”. And so, without the intention, Portland itself. The quarries’ holes and hollows; the caves carved into the cliffs; the lost and abandoned tunnels under The Verne; the High Angle batteries; the mines. Portland is a honeycomb, and the sea and the swimmers and the birds and the rambling opportunistic plants crowd into the holes. The taking away of stone by hand and tool and later by machine has been a process, not only of producing to build and make, but of taking away to reveal an unexpected and beautiful form within: Portland itself. “Only a hand obedient to the mind can penetrate to this image”.
Portland is significant to me. I worked voluntarily for ten years in the prison that was built with stone blocks from its environs by the first people who were to be temporarily interred in the stone sarcophagi of its cells. I walked its coastline many times, accompanied by a dog whose ashes I would eventually give to the wind on the Weares overlooking Chesil beach and the Fleet. I watched its birds, swam off its rocks and coves.
“And on a tour of the churchyard then I was invited to contemplate the curiosity of the human form; monuments, angels or saints or anonymous figures, whose hands, one or both, by accident or intention, had been removed.”
St George’s Church, Reforne
I first went into St George’s Church when I visited an art installation on the cliffs nearby: Harmonic Fields, a meandering path through structures that made music with the wind. The church was a marvel inside (no-one who’d been to Portland could miss it from the outside) and I didn’t realise then it had been so recently and lovingly brought back from the dead (literally; for many years it was used only for burials, until the deterioration of its structure made that, too, impossible). I went to a different art event there a couple of years later - a sound installation, when I sat in the empty dim church and the sounds of quarrying, of hymn singing, of a mighty storm filled the building and seemed to engulf every sense. Fascination with the place and its stories had bedded in by then. I had learned about the unlucky times of St George’s - of the massacre of civilians who resisted press-ganging, of the prisoners and shipwrecks and bomb strikes.
“…even if this is a small story in the cascade of the history of St George’s, it’s too good to be lost in turn.”
Star of the sea (c) Gary G
And on a tour of the churchyard then I was invited to contemplate the curiosity of the human form; monuments, angels or saints or anonymous figures, whose hands, one or both, by accident or intention, had been removed. It was said (the guide said) that the figures had a habit of beckoning to people walking through the churchyard, so their hands were removed to make this horror impossible. I have been able to find out nothing more of this origin-story, and have heard other stories and theories about how the figures lost their hands, but even if this is a small story in the cascade of the history of St George’s, it’s too good to be lost in turn. There are the statues - stunted - made the more sinister by this whisper of ghosts in the dark time of the church. As with anything else to do with stone, it seems, it’s not just about what’s there but what is taken away. And terrifying that that thing is their hands.
Anna Rose-Prynn, February 2021