Melinda's ideas moving on

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 Northumbria (also known as St Audrey), granted lands to Wilfred, Bishop of York in around 674. She is ‘the centre of saints’ in the Abbey and when I looked up during my visit her image was beautifully cut through with morning light in the magnificent stained glass windows. As I watched her swirl above me, I thought that perhaps I could use poems to find her, in the same way that I’m using poems to find Roman women. I’d like to unpeel the ancient layers of myth that surround her and use the sense of the sacred that I have in my own life to translate her story in a different way. That sounds very grand and I’m certainly not saying that I’m a modern-day Etheldreda but I think that linking her to me, a very ordinary, middle-aged single mother, could be interesting…


The other women who interested me on my first visit were two unknown ones. The tombs of ‘two unknown 14th century women’ are laid out at the side of some pews in the Abbey. I’m used to unknown women - most of the Roman women’s tombs are equally anonymous - and it made me think about the women who worship in the Abbey now, and the women who volunteer week in, week out. They are the heart and lungs of the Abbey, working as guides, or in the shop, or cleaning the many beautiful objects, or arranging the floral displays. I had a sudden urge, standing in front of the tombs, to record these modern women, and give voice to their largely anonymous ministries, which is how they express their faith. I remembered my own Anglican childhood and how the women would clean the church on weekday afternoons, passing quietly through the slants of light, and I felt a rush of love for them. So I think that as well as writing about Queen Etheldreda, I will write about the women who pass through her light.