Our series of essays and podcasts reflecting on the fragments of Catholic wall art encountered in a one-day tour of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire churches concludes with two blog posts by Emma Bolland and Chris Jones. In ‘The Last Judgement‘, Bolland draws out the shape of the devil from the walls of St Andrew’s, Pickworth, and marvels at the persistence of pigment, centuries after the Reformation’s 100-year campaign to purge the churches of colour. The third and final post in the series, Jones’ ‘The Shepherds of Corby Glen‘, is a reimagining of the community that rural churchgoers might have known in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, reflected back to them through paintings of bucolic scenes, whitewashed, rediscovered, and now ‘floating up through the bricks and stone’. Both essays are accompanied by podcasts of Bolland and Jones discussing the wall art (recorded in the respective churches), and are illustrated with Bolland’s photographs.

On the West North East microsite, we’re serialising Matthew Clegg‘s narrative sequence Lost Between Stations (published by Longbarrow Press in 2011). A ‘poem in seven fragments’, it explores the shifting tensions of predicament and place in seven Leeds settings during the 1990s. Each of these ‘fragments’ will be posted on the West North East site (along with their accompanying recordings and films) during October and November. Click here to read the current Lost Between Stations extract.

Our current Featured Poem is Mark Goodwin‘s ‘slate-stepped’ ‘Step From I’, taken from his forthcoming collection Steps (out from Longbarrow Press at the end of November). Click here to read the poem, and to listen to Goodwin’s location recording of ‘Step From I’; click here to visit the new Steps microsite. Osip Mandelstam’s ‘The Ode on Slate’ is offered up in a new translation and short essay by Alistair Noon for the Glasgow Review of Books; the translation and the essay appear here.

Finally, we’ve updated our History page with a selection of films, essays, poems, and photos from the last 10 months; click here to review the Longbarrow year to date.