Traceries: Exploring Hexham Abbey from a female perspective.

A rubbing I made from one of the Roman stones in the crypt at Hexham Abbey I am Bridget Kennedy, visual artist living in rural Northumberland. Through my visits to the Abbey over the past months, conversations with Melinda and Catherine and information gleaned from the excellent Abbey guides I have become very interested the fabric of the building, the material it is made of and where this material has come from. The crypt is of particular interest to me,  I live in an area where there are many old lead mines and I am often thinking about what is going on below the surface.   The crypt is all that remains of St Wilfrid's Benedictine Abbey built in the 670's. Wilfrid was able to build here due to the fact that Queen Eltheldreda had bequeathed the land to him in thanks for his help in securing her divorce from Prince Ecgfrith of Northumbria.  The key to part of a map of the crypt on display in the Abbey I really like that there are layers of h...

Catherine's first blog post Hello! My name is Catherine Ayres and I’m going to be (hopefully) writing poems as part of this project. I say ‘hopefully’ because I’m a slow writer, sometimes excruciatingly so. I could take up a whole blog of my own writing about my slow writing, so I’ll stick to Hexham Abbey for now. I first visited the Abbey a couple of months ago, with Bridget and Melinda, which is shameful because I’m a Northumbrian who’s lived here most of my life. My first impressions were coloured by my main interest, which is the lives of women in history. I’m currently (again, very slowly and in-between working full time as a teacher) researching for a PhD in creative writing, which is centred around writing poems about the women who lived on Hadrian’s Wall at the time of the Roman occupation and how I can make sense of their lived experience, as archaeologists say, by linking their lives with the lives of modern women. Hexham Abbey was built after Etheldreda, Queen of...