Battle Abbey in midwinter
3.30pm, Friday 21st December. The sun is setting on the shortest day of the year, and Battle is bathed in a strange yellowy glow. Passing through the fourteenth-century gatehouse, the last few visitors pour out behind me. The site is empty now, and the atmosphere one of eerie quiet.
As I approach the ruins of the Abbey building, even the rabbits scamper to hide in the undergrowth. The vast dormitory on the first floor, where some 140 monks slept in the monastery’s heyday, is roofless and exposed to the elements, but there’s a beautiful symmetry to the ruin, which juts out from Senlac Hill and overlooks where the Norman army stood on that fateful day in 1066.
Inside, the downstairs common room, where monks relaxed in their downtime, is nearly pitch black. Flashing a smartphone torch about the space illuminates some beautifully carved ribbed vaulting around the room’s many stone pillars, but also gives one the distinct feeling of disturbing the sacred and eternal peace of a religious ceremony.
Alone in the damp darkness, you start to imagine how the lives of the original inhabitants played out, and the countless rumours of this place being haunted become entirely understandable.
Moving outside, the sodden ground squelches underfoot in the undulating plain of the battlefield. Figures begin to appear on the dim horizon, and with ghostly monks fresh in my mind I proceed with caution. They turn out to be the cartoonish wooden statues of an archer and an Anglo-Saxon infantryman; a crude tribute to the tumultuous events that unfolded on Senlac Hill some 950 years ago.
After scaling the gate which leads back to the ruins and apologising to an irate English Heritage staff member for outstaying my welcome, I come across a stone slab set into the ground.
It lies amid what is left of the abbey church’s foundations, and erosion and dust have made its inscription difficult to read. On close inspection, it marks the high altar and the spot where King Harold died; as legend has it from an arrow in the eye.
This inconspicuous commemoration catches you off guard. After all, the battle fought here represents not only a key moment in the British story, but also in that of our relationship with Europe.
Treading the precarious path of the abbey’s high mediaeval walls, it’s not a huge leap to ponder whether this imagery of Norman invaders is enshrined in the national psyche, as midwinter heralds another year of frosty negotiations with the Continent.
