Folk Rite & Fertility · Kilpeck, Herefordshire
Kilpeck Church sheela-na-gig
England's most famous sheela-na-gig — a grinning female figure frankly displaying her vulva — carved on the corbel of a perfect Norman church. Warning against lust, fertility charm, or apotropaic guardian? Scholars still argue; the carving outlasts every theory.
The story
The Church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck, built around 1140, is often called the most perfect small Norman church in England — and around its outside runs a corbel table of some eighty-five carved brackets by the twelfth-century Herefordshire School of masons. Among the musicians, wrestlers, dogs and dragons sits a naked woman holding open an exaggerated vulva with both hands. She is a sheela-na-gig, the best-preserved and most famous in Britain, and — unlike most, which are older stones reset into later walls — she is an original part of the 1140s design. Somebody built one of England's loveliest churches and chose to include explicit female genitalia on the wall.
Why? Four theories compete. The popular one is that she's a survival of a pagan fertility goddess, smuggled onto the church — a reading pushed in the 1930s by Margaret Murray. The others: a Christian warning against the sin of lust; an apotropaic charm to frighten off evil; or, best supported of all, a Romanesque import, part of a decorative fashion that travelled from the pilgrimage churches of France and Spain with the Normans. Jørgen Andersen (1977) and then Weir and Jerman (1986) built that case; Eamonn Kelly of the National Museum of Ireland clinched it by noting that Ireland's in-situ sheelas cluster in areas of Anglo-Norman conquest, not native Irish ones. As Ronald Hutton observes, the pagan reading is the popular one and the least supported. She sits on a Christian church, built by a Norman lord, carved in a French-influenced style, around 1140.
Her neighbours were less lucky. The folklorist Roy Palmer recorded an old man's memory of "obscene" corbels — probably male figures — being knocked off in the 1920s by an offended parishioner with a pole. The sheela may have survived because nobody was sure what she was: in 1842 George Lewis catalogued her as "a fool" opening his heart to the devil. She's had a modern afterlife too, lending her name to a 1992 PJ Harvey song. The church is Grade I listed and open to all.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Wikipedia
- The Sheela Na Gig Project
- Gresham College (Ronald Hutton, "How Pagan Was Medieval Britain?")
- National Churches Trust
- Britannica
Nearby on the map
Piercefield's Lover's Leap is a designed viewpoint above the Wye: an eighteenth-century landscape feature whose romantic name matters more than any provable leap.
LegendScandal & SocietyTiger Bay (Cardiff's dockland demi-monde)Cardiff, Cardiff · WalesCardiff's legendary dockland — one of Britain's first truly multicultural quarters, notorious in its coal-boom heyday for sailors' taverns, dance halls and commercial affection, and beloved by those who lived there as a warm, tight community the papers never bothered to understand. Shirley Bassey is its most famous daughter.
Documented historyHot spotFolk Rite & FertilityCaru yn y Gwely — Bundling & the Love SpoonSt Fagans, Cardiff (museum); custom pan-North-Wales, Denbighshire/Gwynedd (custom); Cardiff (collection) · WalesCourting couples were sent to bed together — clothed, a bolster between them — while the suitor whittled a spoon to prove he was husband material.
Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.