Two ascending buzzards dazzle against the sun as I climb to St Catherine’s Chapel alone on its hill above the sea. It is the saint’s own feast day (25 November), when women once came to recite a charm for getting married. The traditional wording was blunt: “A husband, St Catherine, a handsome one, St Catherine, a rich one, St Catherine, a nice one, St Catherine, and soon, St Catherine.” Impatient supplicants added in dialect: “arn‑a‑one’s better than narn-a-one” (anyone’s better than no one).
Today, I am the only person there. The lichened walls of golden sandstone are pitted and worn by gales and salt, the east window so eroded that it has been boarded over for renovation. Inside it is quite bare, long ago stripped of its medieval stained glass and fittings, nothing but pale stone and sunlight printing shadows on the walls.
But this sheltered space is far from empty. The air is filled with a restless roar, the noise of wind buffeting the sides and sighing over the roof, mimicking the seethe and tumble of waves against rock. An archway in the south wall leads into a dark porch. This was the wishing place, where maidens would put a knee in one of the wall recesses and their hands in two other holes and whisper to St Catherine.
The door to the outside is locked, but it fits loosely in its frame. Light glimmers around its edges and pools in a hollow underneath where the threshold has been worn by centuries of footfall. As the wind increases, the door knocks and thrums on its iron hinges as if someone is trying to come in.
I’m not surprised that there is such a strong sense of immanence here. Built by monks in the 14th century, probably on an older ritual site, the chapel is set in a long-inhabited landscape crowded with barrows, stone circles and hillforts. My thoughts turn to the young Iron Age woman, little more than a teenager, who was buried a few miles away at Langton Herring with her jewellery and a mirror of polished bronze. Did she once stand here and ask for a partner in the words of her time?
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