Last week, while staying in Minehead for a few days, my brother and I walked to the church of St Beuno in Culbone, pre-Norman in origin and apparently the smallest complete parish church in England. It’s only accessible on foot, a walk of some two miles from the coastal village of Porlock Weir, and involves a steep climb up through the woods where charcoal burners once lived and worked. (Leaving the church involves an even steeper climb through even darker woods, until you emerge on the sunny uplands above Porlock and a stunning sea view.)

It is a tiny jewel of a church, and the serenity of its setting puts me in mind of what Celtic spirituality calls ‘thin places’ – places where the boundary between time and eternity seems stretched to breaking point. On the day we visited the sun was shining hotly, and the little churchyard was green and welcoming, with its old wooden bench encrusted with moss, and wild flowers growing in bright profusion.

It is simplicity itself, the whitewashed interior contrasting with the dark wood of beams and box pews. Only 35 feet long, it can seat thirty-three people ‘in great discomfort’: the inhabitants of the surrounding farmsteads and the charcoal burners who lived and worked in the woods. It also had a ministry to a nearby leper colony, established in the second half of the 16^th century and lasting for 78 years. The tiny ‘leper window’ in the north wall of the church enabled lepers to receive communion without contaminating the rest of the congregation.

That sense of being woven into the life of the community is also reflected in a handwritten sign on the roughly-hewn stone font which says, ‘For nearly a thousand years, as shepherds put their mark on their lambs, so the children of the Good Shepherd have been baptised at this font.’ As someone with mixed feelings about the baptism of infants – but familiar with farmers’ markings on lambs - I find this a profoundly helpful insight.

The simplicity touches closely on austerity, however: the only ornamentation in this plain church – if you can call it ornamentation – is a massive wooden board at the west end on which the Ten Commandments are written. Any suggestion here of the ‘new commandment’ (‘that you should love one another, as I have loved you’ (Jn 13:34)) is implicit in the fact of the church being there at all in this remote hollow of the landscape, caring for the poorest of the poor.

In the churchyard, the gravestones are dominated by a single family with the surname Red, generations living and dying in the same place. Yet strangely one gravestone, which records the death of Thomas Red in 1892 at the age of 66, also commemorates his wife Thirza ‘who died at New Plymouth, N.Z. in July 1919, aged 92’. What the story behind that inscription could be, we can only speculate. The city of New Plymouth was first settled in the 1840s, by emigrants from the English south-west (hence the name); interestingly, it was described in 1876 as ‘the dullest hole in the colony… a quiet unassuming place’, so perhaps Thirza Red found it something of a home from home!

One exotic ‘blow-in’ who found the quiet beauty of Culbone a source of inspiration was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who settled about thirty miles away in Nether Stowey between 1796 and 1799. Penniless and struggling, Coleridge dragged his family down from London to be near his friend Wordsworth, living in Alfoxton Manor; and while he rejoiced in the rural idyll, his wife struggled to cope with penury, mice and children in a two-room cottage with no mod cons. Coleridge and Wordsworth ranged the countryside, enthused by its unspoiled loveliness, and Coleridge wrote his famous ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ a few miles away in Watchet.

The ‘mystical atmosphere’ of Culbone Church apparently gave rise to the great poem ‘Kubla Khan’: staying in one of the nearby farmhouses, Coleridge is said to have fallen into an opium-induced haze, and dreamed his dream of the ‘stately pleasure-dome’ in Xanadu, with its ‘forests ancient as the hills / Enfolding sunny spots of greenery’. On waking, he began to capture his vision in words, but was interrupted by ‘a person on business from Porlock’ and the poem remained ‘A Fragment’.

The ‘importunate person from Porlock’ has since become legendary, a shorthand for writers’ block – the poet Stevie Smith even wrote a poem about him (‘Thoughts about the Person from Porlock’). In Culbone churchyard, however, the real world impinges only in the form of tourists (there were quite a few that day when we visited). While the human figures come and go, the tangle of wildflowers and the dark woods remain, the tiny church merging into the landscape of hills and sky, a symbol of the ‘cure of souls’ in this most remote of places.

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You might be interested in the following websites:

St Beuno, Culbone | National Churches Trust

Coleridge Cottage | National Trust

Coleridge Way Walk and Guidebook