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| St. Catherine's Chapel in Abbotsbury |
One of my favorite female musical artists, PJ Harvey, once visited St Catherine's Chapel in Abbotsbury, England (she grew up and lived nearby) which has a wonderful acoustic quality and decided to record a song there. The chapel is situated on a hill, as are most chapels to St. Catherine (Katherine) in the West, probably in reference to her shrine on Mount Sinai. It dates to the 13th or 14th century, but it is probably built on the ruins of an earlier Christian church, which was probably built over pagan ruins.
Her album Is This Desire? (EMI 1998) has a track "The Wind", inspired by her thoughts about the lonely, forgotten Saint - the chapel no longer functions and St. Catherine was abandoned and removed by the Catholic Church from its official list of Saints in the 1960's because they believed there was no historical credibility to her tale. The song ends in a prayer for a husband for St Catherine to appease her loneliness, a touching reversal of the usual invocation of unmarried girls who go there to pray for a husband. Read about the chapel here and see the video below, which transposes the ancient city of Alexandria with modern New York City, PJ's current home.
Her album Is This Desire? (EMI 1998) has a track "The Wind", inspired by her thoughts about the lonely, forgotten Saint - the chapel no longer functions and St. Catherine was abandoned and removed by the Catholic Church from its official list of Saints in the 1960's because they believed there was no historical credibility to her tale. The song ends in a prayer for a husband for St Catherine to appease her loneliness, a touching reversal of the usual invocation of unmarried girls who go there to pray for a husband. Read about the chapel here and see the video below, which transposes the ancient city of Alexandria with modern New York City, PJ's current home.
The lyrics are:
Catherine liked high places,
High up on the hills
A place for making noises
Like whales
Noises like the whales
Here she built a chapel
Her image on the wall
A place where she could rest
A place where she could wash and listen to the wind blow
She dreamt of childrens' voices
And torture on the wheel
Patron saint of nothing
A woman of the hills
She once was a lady
Of pleasure and high-born
A lady of the city
But now she sits and moans
And listens to the wind blow
I see her in her chapel
High up on the hill
She must be so lonely
Oh Mother, can't we give
A husband to our Catherine
A handsome one, a dear
A rich one for the lady
Someone to listen with