A flash visit to Abbotsbury and St Catherine's chapel...

Last Saturday, we drove 12 hours to Dorset and back (August. Motorway. No comment...) in order to sort out our unit at The Customs House before our holiday. August is the busiest month in West Bay and people are very careless indeed - the unit very quickly looks messy if we do not keep on top of it. We are a small venture but we want our space to look its best at all times...

As a reward for all our hard work at the unit, we managed to spend an hour or so at Abbotsbury, the location of my third novel and work- in-very-slow-progress, The Right Place. 
​
It really is my favourite place in the whole world. I am still genuinely heartbroken when I think about our aborted house purchase in the spring: we would have lived 20 minutes away from Abbotsbury...

​The light and the atmosphere around the village and Chapel Hill are truly unique. Each time I catch a glimpse of St Catherine's chapel from the top of Abbotsbury Hill whilst driving on the B3157, I get goose bumps.
The ancestral landscape is magical - there is an eeriness to the place, an inexplicable otherworldly quality which I will try to capture in my novel.

​Once again, the niches in St Catherine's chapel were empty of prayers to the saint. It has been the case on several of our visits now, when before the two small recesses were always full of messages. 
On Saturday, there was a lone Post-it note stuck to the rugged wall next to one of the niches.  It illustrates well the small passage below, taken from the first draft of The Right Place.

[…]
The recess was crowded with messages and tokens of fervent faith in the powers of the saint. Some of the wishes had obviously been scribbled in haste in the midst of  some sort of emotional whirlwind, on the first paper support the writer had found: a sticky note, the torn lined page of a notebook, or even the back of a supermarket receipt, often in biro or pencil. Then you had the ones that had obviously been composed carefully, thoughtfully. Those had been written down on the back of a postcard purchased in a local art gallery, on letter paper or on a posh bit of card.
Often, the words matched the traditional prayer word for word. Some other times, people offered their own, extended version of it, adding their personal preferences to the established verses. The most demanding ones went on for ages.
[…]
This little hollow, carved in the southern wall of the exposed chapel, would at times reveal so many snapshots of human stories. Kat had often stood in front of it and quietly read the messages to St Catherine which were sometimes accompanied by a few extra items: coins, ribbons, feathers, small candles, and always dried butterfly wings, tragically decaying and mixing with the stone dust on the rough surface of the recess... At times, there were pictures that would stare back at you almost too intensely – it would get too unbearable. 

                                                                                           The Right Place, first draft manuscript

I love this picture, it looks like a painting... You can see Chesil Beach in the background, as well as the Isle of Portland where we were supposed to move this summer...

Even though we have had to pause our house purchase in Dorset, we hope to resume as soon as possible. We'll keep you posted! 

More about events, published books and work-in-progress very soon! 

All pictures on this blog by Matt ArtPix.