Not my confession, but a friend's -

Buncton church sits in a beautiful spot outside Steyning, surrounded by fields, with a wonderful view of Chanctonbury Ring. The building dates to mediaeval times and cannot be reached by road. Instead, you must follow a path through some woods.

Once, this church had a sheela na gig carved on a pillar. This is an image of a naked, squatting woman, her vulva exaggerated and held wide open. It's a symbol found across Ireland and Europe, but rare in the south of England. Some say it's for fertility; some that it's a relic of an ancient goddess. Others say it is a warning against lust, or that it wards off evil.

This sheela na gig was well-known. People left offerings of flowers and there's a story about a couple making love in the church below it, hoping for help in conceiving a child. One night, in 2004, the vicar decided he'd had enough of this pagan symbol and hacked it away.

A friend was shown the space which had once held this powerful feminine symbol and decided to create her own clay sheela na gigs. They were tiny, an inch long, just the right size for hiding. For a couple of years, she spent her weekends visiting the churches of Sussex. From downland chapels through to evangelical warehouses, there are dozens of tiny sheela na gigs hidden in the county's churches, making up for the loss of that single one. Some of them she's forgotten, but she showed me two of the four hidden in Buncton church, one of them glued beneath a pew. They won't be there forever, but there's some she thinks will last as long as the churches.

Background

I can't say too much about the friend here, other than that she was happy for me to write this, if I gave no details about her.

I first read about what happened in Buncton church in Justin Hopper's excellent book on the South Downs Way, The Old Weird Albion. Hopper is an excellent writer, and this is probably my favourite book about Sussex.

In November 2019, I visited Buncton church with archaeologist Matthew Pope. The church is 900 years old, and Matt explained how its stones had been brought together from other buildings. Some Roman bricks had been used in the church wall, and Matt showed us how their centre wasn’t properly fired, retaining a grey clay colour. There was some talk of annual outings to mark the destruction of the sheela na gig.

I’d first learned about sheela na gigs as a teenager from the PJ Harvey song, which a friend’s sister recorded onto a cassette for me. But that mix tape is a whole different story.

Recommendations

Justin Hopper runs a podcast called Uncanny Landscapes. This looks into various aspects of landscape art, and Hopper is an excellent interviewer, who does a great job of drawing out his subjects.

I last saw Justin in Leeds when he performed his ‘true-crime folk-horror performance lecture’ The Great Satanic Swindle. Train times meant I missed the last five-minutes, but what I saw was an excellent story of 80s Sussex. It included a mention of disgraced bishop and sex-offender Peter Ball, who once gave a sermon at my school.

Justin’s most recent release is The Trapping Fog, a “chapbook of poems inspired by the language and landscapes of 1980s Dungeons & Dragons modules”.

The Monday Table

At some point in 2027, when I'm 51 years old, I will publish a novel called The Monday Table. Given my love of fragments and microfiction, the book’s format will be unconventional, but I also want it to be compelling and readable. It starts with a chef called Andy White who's deciding whether or not to poison a school bully who's eating at his restaurant.

Two-to-three years is a long time to work on a novel. Over the next year, 2025, I'll be focussing on prototypes; playing with form, content and distribution, exploring what this novel might be.

I'm going to be write a little about the development of this in the Substack, under a new Monday Table section. Hearing people talk about the process of writing can be tiresome - so do feel free to skip this. Sharing my thoughts on this will be helpful as I get to work.