Limston Abbey

It is, perhaps, true that we are all born free, and yet are everywhere in chains; and it is also perhaps true that some can roam wherever they wish.  But for those with wanderlust, given all the places to go and sights to see in the world, Limston Abbey would seem a prison.

Certainly the monastery, perched on a rocky island overlooking the bay, offers abundant views of the world outside: but, linked to the mainland by a single causeway that sinks beneath each high tide, the vistas of the sea only serve to remind the visitor of what it means to be cloistered: to see solitude from solitude.  A church bounded by dormitories, bounded by buttresses, bounded by walls, bounded by shoals and then bounded by water looks out onto a vast horizon from which it is locked away.

Circumscribed in those ramparts, the abbey has all it needs: for the thirsting tongue and hungering stomach, rigid gardens and hidden wells; for the inquiring mind and yearning spirit, a library to read and a scriptorium to write.  If the monastery were besieged for its treasures, it would still survive.  The devout could live their entire lives in those chambers and those halls, and never need to leave its cloisters.

Thorny archways march around bare courtyards flanking either side of the abbey's chapel, the shadows of whose spires loom, seeming like a ceiling over each open space.  Mute saints and apostles offer prayers in stone on the walls, or in bronze on each heavy door, or in pigmented glass on each slender window.  A web of holiness seems cast over the place, ensnaring its tenants; and like a web also the sharp buttresses lace around the apse of the chapel, breaking the light that slants across the cold marble altar, always half in darkness.

To be sacred is to be secret; and, indeed, somewhere around that altar the relics of the Abbey lie safely tucked away, perhaps guarded by some brass angel or some pale baptismal font, or even some pious statue hidden too high for anyone to see.  Festooned with these divine ornaments, the sculptured walls crowd close, but the vaulted ceiling soars high: perhaps the intention of the architect was to exalt heaven; or perhaps instead it was to create the impression of a pit, from which the astonished viewer witnesses the dark glories of the unreachable, painted stars.  Even the outside light, dimmed to shades of red and blue by the stained glass, falls in fragments on the darkly polished floor, and offers only feeble illumination to some holy--and therefore terrible--mystery concealed within.