Pauline Barclay : My Happy Place

I am delighted to have, once again, award winning author, Michael Reidy to share one of his happy places.

I’m blessed in that there are many places where I feel at home and content. I’ve already written about the charming French village of Lectoure, but can add a place that I discovered when I moved to Maidstone (Kent) sixteen years ago.

Not having a garden, porch or balcony, finding a place to walk and relax outside was an early goal. Fortunately, there are many such places along the Medway, but my best discovery was Aylesford Priory.

The Priory (aka The Friars, www.thefriars.org.uk), was the first Carmelite Priory in England, founded by St Simon Stock in 1242. It’s built on the River Medway and while not on the main route to Canterbury, it is near the Archbishop’s Palace in Maidstone where bishops going to and from Canterbury would lodge. The priory was its own attraction and offered spiritual services and hospitality until at least 1538 when it was seized in the Dissolution. The land and buildings were sold to private owners who occupied it until 1949 when the Carmelites bought it back.

There is a complete mediaeval courtyard that resembles the oldest Oxbridge colleges, and Pilgrims Hall boasts two complete galleries under its lofty roof and once again offers food and hospitality.

The grounds and many buildings are open to the public on a daily basis. There are areas for picnicking and quiet meditation. One of the two large thatched barns is used for a café and bookstore, and the second one is an exhibition space and venue for wedding receptions and other gatherings.

There are benches throughout the gardens and open spaces, and it is there on warm spring and summer days I can be found writing in my Clairefontaine notebooks with a fountain pen. Sometimes I’ll sit near the pond and watch the ducks, geese, black swans and coots. Others make frequent visits: double-crested gannets, herons, and smaller birds.

There is a quiet busyness – the modern equivalent of what the mediaeval atmosphere must have been like – and it is easy to think about Brother Caedfael or The Name of the Rose. Tourists, pilgrims, delivery vans, daily worshippers, volunteer gardeners and others come and go in a steady parade. People feed the ducks and children run around the open spaces. The layers of history meld with secular and religious lives of today and yesterday, so when sitting in the quiet of the orchard and gazing at the whitewashed mediaeval buildings, I would not be surprised to hear hoofbeats or the noise of carts rolling over the stones. Occasionally, the sound of Gregorian chant does filter through.

It's a potent mix for someone who grew up in Rustbelt, Massachusetts, and a reminder that in mediaeval philosophy, all things exist simultaneously in the mind of God. This partially explains the apparent contradiction in the outlook of those who believed in the imminence of the Second Coming, yet built for millennia.