A dunnock is singing from the scaffolding on the bell tower of St Botolph’s, the small square Saxon church. I walk inside, out of the wind and rain, and open the heavy inner door.
Automated lights illuminate the walls, which glow with faded red and brown paintings. The walls are covered with figures – some very faint, some clear, part-Saxon, part-Norman in style – like a large, faded Bayeux tapestry. The closer you look, the more the figures come to life. Saint George rides in gallantly on horseback, levelling his lance. Adam and Eve are tempted by a wyvern serpent. An ox and an ass watch over a child in a cradle.
The fresco cycles were probably made in about 1120, 70 years after the church was built. Similar paintings, presumably by the same artists – known as the Lewes Group after their Lewes Cluniac priory origin or patronage – can be found in other churches in Sussex, but these are the most complete.
Simon Watson, the church warden, explains: “We think it probably took about six months to do the paintings. The artists had with them similia – collections of pictures related to worship and sainthood – and they would then choose what to put on the walls.
“There’s a lot of red and yellow ochre, which would have been the cheap and cheerful paints, because there wouldn’t have been a lot of money for anything more glamorous.” The blue colour, possibly ground from malachite, was expensive and used sparingly for treasured details.
Perhaps the best preserved is the Annunciation – Gabriel greets Mary as a white dove descends towards her. “I do like that one,” agrees Simon. “It’s got a lovely sort of boldness of design, and there are these gorgeous blue halos, which, because there’s so little other colour, stand out more strongly.”
Back outside, I walk around the side of the freshly white-washed church to the fence that looks across the valley to the South Downs. Clouds are racing across the sky. The calls of Canada and greylag geese and wigeon rise from the flooded fields by the river Arun below.
