I don’t think I have ever previously been in to St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge. Why would I have been ? From outside, it’s a not especially distinguished piece of early Victorian gothic, dated 1843, by Thomas Cundy the Younger who succeeded his father as Surveyor of the Grosvenor estates in 1825 and produced flimsy gothic in a sea of stucco. So, I had no idea that inside there is the most wonderful G.F. Bodley reredos and rood screen, installed in 1892 (screens were back in fashion after Pugin had published his Treatise on Church Screens and Rood Lofts in 1851).

Outside:-

Inside:-

I spent the afternoon at Photo London. The thing I liked best were the photographs of Luigi Gherri, which I’m sure I should have known, but have never consciously seen, so beautifully dead pan, wide angle, slightly surreal, as if life has been drained out of them, views of Versailles from the 1970s. I tried to photograph them, but failed.

Then, I always like exploring the subterranean vaults of Somerset House which show William Chambers backstage, rough hewn, the eighteenth-century city underground:-

I went last night to the dinner celebrating the Ondaatje Prize, now in its fifteenth year: a good prize ‘for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place’, won in the past by Rory Stewart, Adam Nicolson and Edmund de Waal. This year the subjects were mostly global. It was won by Aida Edemariam for her book The Wife’s Tale about her Ethiopian grandmother.

After three days of staying in The Secular Retreat, I have been reading Peter Zumthor’s book Atmospheres, based on a lecture he gave in Wendlinghausen in 2003. It has made me look more closely at the materials and textures with which the house is built: the fall of afternoon light on raw concrete:-

We admired Chivelstone so much as an example of unrestored, rustic, religiosity that we returned to examine it more carefully, particularly since it is so little written about in the relevant topographical literature and is the subject of an HLF application for lottery funding:-

The screen is, as I had thought, pre-Reformation, thought to be c.1460, and although presumably quite heavily restored, still gives a sense of Catholic iconography before Henry VIII and Cromwell got to work.

One of the figures on the outer screens, thought to be post-Reformation:-

St. Sylvester (or Gregory the Great):-

St. Matthew:-

St. Mark:-

St. Jude:-

St. Andrew:-

Outside there is a hillside cemetery with beautiful slate tombs:-

And the farmyard:-

We went to Coleton Fishacre, a National Trust house in a spectacular position on headland between Dartmouth and Brixham on land acquired by Rupert D’Oyly Carte, owner of the Savoy Hotel, and his wife, Dorothy. They employed Oswald Milne, a protégé of Lutyens, as their architect, and he designed a house in a suburban version of the Lutyenesque – not large, still well preserved, and with a wonderful 1920s garden stretching down to Pudcombe Cove:-

We went to see St. Saviour’s, Dartmouth, three stars in Simon Jenkins’s Thousand Best Churches.

Worth it for it’s South Door, which says 1631 very prominently, but whose design is assumed to date back to the fourteenth century and has magnificent foliage and odd, emblematic bears:-

There’s a fine, painted roof screen, with fan vaulting, said to be from the 1480s:-

Underneath, painted figures, defaced in the Reformation:-

And a magnificent, painted, stone pulpit:-

Slate tombs in the churchyard:-

I’m getting the hang of the South Hams, an area of intense agriculture and pastoralism – red earth, orchards, steep hills and even steeper lanes.

We walked round Prawle Point:-

And then further up the coast at Beesands:-

We went down to the National Trust car park at Mill Bay, on the wrong side of the Estuary from Salcombe, and walked up an old wooded track to Rickham and Gara Rock, full of gunnera, ferns and bluebells, with a run of old, possibly diseased beech trees, up towards the sea:-

At Gara Rock, one reaches the coast looking west:-

And down to the sea below:-