WE ARE in a monk’s garden, and pondering a mystery. My guide is Rowan Berris, and she is explaining to me how, to complement the rebuilding of one of the monk’s cells at Mount Grace Priory - the best-preserved Carthusian charterhouse in England - English Heritage has also replanted the cell’s private garden.
Mount Grace has given up many of its secrets to the archeologists, who began excavating here in 1968, but research into the gardens had been scant. From what little evidence they have, and what records exist of the plants a monk would grow, they have laid out a parterre of box hedging and filled six oblong beds with culinary, medicinal and aromatic herbs and flowers, and plants from which the dyes for illuminated manuscripts were harvested.
There is fennel, for suppressing hunger during fasting; rue for sprinkling on Holy water during Mass and to protect against plague; hyssop, used as a flavouring and to expel intestinal worms; sweet woodruff and marjoram. In all, some two dozen varieties.
But they didn’t plant southernwood, or irises, or wild strawberries.
And yet, here along the foot of the great south-facing stone wall that ensured the solitude of the monk in Cell No. 8, these three are thriving.
How they came to be here is the mystery.
It deepens when you learn that these three plants were also important components of a Carthusian monk’s garden. The leaves of wild strawberry, Fragaria vesca, were an ingredient in a wide variety of medicines. The petals of Iris florentina were used to make pigments for ink, and southernwood, or southern wormwood, was thought to ward off infection, and was used as an expectorant. It’s a new one on me, and Rowan takes a pinch of its fine grey-green leaves and lets me sniff its sharp, citrus-and-sorrel aroma.
“It’s a real puzzle,” she says. “This garden hadn’t been cultivated since Mount Grace was dissolved in 1539, and we certainly didn’t plant these three. Yet here they are, thriving.”
Could it be that the seeds had lain dormant for 460-odd years under the turf and the top soil until they were disturbed by the archeologists?
It’s a delightful thought. Perhaps fanciful, or maybe not so when you discover how resilient and irrepressible Catholic life and worship has proved to be in this corner of North Yorkshire. For, over centuries of repression, in a Lady Chapel buried in the woods above the Priory and in a Catholic church hidden in the roof of a house in the nearly village of Osmotherley, the faith has never faltered. Later I will don my walking boots and stride off in pilgrimage, but first there is Mount Grace Priory to explore.
The Priory dates from 1398. On the Carthusian model, monks lived almost as hermits in individual cells which were actually handsome two storey stone cottages, complete with an enclosed garden at the bottom of which was a privy flushed with spring water. There are 15 cells around a cloister large enough for cricket.
Mount Grace is still a tranquil and magical spot today - even with the A19 trunk road, filled with lorries charging between York and Teeside, on its doorstep. It is built on a wide shelf of land in a valley on the edge of the North York Moors, with the oak-wooded Cleveland hills rising steeply behind.
Thanks to the restoration of Cell No 8, one gets an intimate sense of what life was like for the monks. I had expected to find austerity, but discovered comparative comfort. The cell has three rooms downstairs - a living room with a substantial fireplace, a bedroom and small oratory. Upstairs is a large, light and airy work room. Clearly, solitude was the greatest privation.
“The cloister was a production line for illuminated manuscripts” says Rowan, drawing on the evidence that the archeologists have found. “Cells 10 and 11 were occupied by copyists, 12 and 13 were the colourists, and this cell, number 8, was the bookbinder’s.
In recreating and tending the garden, Rowan and her colleagues are putting a link back in a broken chain. God and gardening have gone hand in hand since Adam was told to ‘dress and keep’ the Garden of Eden and then banished from Paradise for falling down on the job.
The Desert Fathers understood that tending a garden was a direct parallel to prayer. When St Anthony the Great took to the desert in the third century he cultivated a garden to provide for himself and for visitors. There, an angel appeared to him, proceeded to plait a mat from palm leaves, and said: “Do thus, and thou shalt be saved.”
The Benedictine Rule laid down strict instruction on the form and cultivation of monastery gardens. A plan of the ideal Benedictine monastery drawn up for the Abbot of St Gall in Switzerland in the 9th century shows three gardens, one of medicinal herbs, one of vegetables and the third an orchard in which the monks would be buried beneath the trees.
Monks were among the most diligent of medieval gardeners, but it was the Carthusians who were most committed. All Carthusians were gardeners, and the timetable of a monk’s day displayed in the museum at Mount Grace shows the hours of 12 noon until 2.30 set aside for gardening. Monks were allowed a high degree of self-expression., and the excavations at Mount Grace reveal variations in what was grown and how it was cultivated that seem to reflect the personal preferences of the monk. Layouts, and the type of plant grown, have been altered over the years, presumably as a new occupant has taken over the cell and organised the garden to his liking.
One was laid out as a pleasure garden with square beds or knots edged with lines of stones and divided with grass paths; others show signs of vegetable planting, with narrow v-shaped rows dug with a round-edged wooden spade; in another a trench had been dug for a box hedge. One had raised beds, another a planting pit with an ash stake to keep a shrub or tree upright.
It was Rowan who suggested I go up the hillside to the Lady Chapel, and I am glad she did, because without discovering it and the hidden village church I would not have understood the full story of the resilience and vitality of the Catholic faith here.
Although the trees hide it, the chapel is actually just above the priory, sitting on the lip of the hilltop, and I could walk. But as some unseasonable storms have turned the clay slope into a quagmire, she suggests I drive up to Osmotherley, where I can pick up the footpath.
From the village, which crouches in a sheltering bowl in the foothills, I strike out on a rough track through the bracken and gorse, and suddenly realise this really is a pilgrimage. Alongside the route I discover the stations of the cross - simple wooden crucifixes and plaques set against an abundance of purple foxgloves. The path is rutted, sometimes steep, and winding, and brings a very concrete sense of marking Christ’s Passion. I pause at each station, conscious that what I had expected to be a simple stroll to a country church has become something far more affecting.
As I enter the clearing before the chapel, Christ’s garments are torn from him. Half way across the springy turf he is taken down from the cross. Where a break in the oaks that blanket the slope down to the Priory give me a glimpse of the ruins, he is buried, and by the time I reach the heavy oak chapel door he is risen from the dead.
This haven has been a place of pilgrimage for 600 years or more. In the chapel I light a novena candle, wait for its uncertain flame to grow steady and strong, and then settle in a pew to read about this place.
I learn that Mass has been held here since at least 1397, and that the monks may have stayed here while they built the priory. It survived the reformation because the forward-thinking Prior had leased it to relatives, and it remained untouched.
In 1614 the Archbishop of York set up a commission to determine why so many pilgrims visited the chapel, especially on the eve of Our Lady’s feasts. On September 7 that year, 17 Catholics were arrested for praying here. Repression meant that, for centuries, worship became covert, but it continued.
By the middle of the last century, the by-then-ruined chapel was owned by a local farmer, but a trust was formed to buy and restored it. Solitary pilgrims had never stopped coming, but now an annual Assumption pilgrimage was instigated.
Yet, down all the dark years, the chapel and it’s pilgrims did not exist in isolation. They were supported by a Franciscan Friary which was established in 1655 for the benefit and comfort of pilgrims, and funded by a wealthy woman aristocrat. The Franciscans carried out this duty until 1832, and only ceased due to lack of vocations. Since 1994 Benedictines have been here.
I trek back to Ostmotherley to find their hidden church. Through an arch in a high wall I find a garden, a tall stone house, and a steep flight of steps that leads to the parish church of Our Lady of Mount Grace. Up in the eaves I enter a simple, white painted church with views, from a window behind the altar, down the steep village street to the green.
I sit and reflect, in this place in which the seeds of the Catholic faith were never allowed to die, of the other seeds, the ones in the monk’s garden, which I like to think also waited for so long to enter the light.
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