Discovering that Suitably Disturbing Setting: St. Cohan’s Church, Merther

Nestled off the eastern bank of the Tresillian river, camouflaged largely by a cascading, crawling veil of ivy, lies the sleeping remains of St. Cohan’s Church. Dating back to around 1370 AD, this relic rests in the hamlet of Merther, and is dedicated to the martyr and local saint, Cohan. In Cornish language, or rather, Kernewek, the hamlet is known as Eglos Merther, translating literally as ‘Martyr’s Church’.

I won’t pretend I’m the font of knowledge on St. Cohan (also spelt Coan), nor will I rattle on about a chap who was possibly killed during or possibly killed soon after the Anglo-Saxon King Athelstan’s invasion of Cornwall in 938 AD. I am no historian. I’m an author, and where the facts of the past are as loose and perhaps as fabricated as the facts of the future, I’ll leave the digging to those with less idle shovels.

My first sighting of this place – or maybe I should say acknowledgement, as it wasn’t really a sighting at all – was when I fell onto it from several hundred feet up. I know, you’ve witnessed me walking, right? Ain’t no way that radge is parachuting… Google Maps, satellite mode; shiteng! I was carrying-out some groundwork (there’s an oxymoron for you) for my second novel, the as-yet-unfinished ‘Devil’s Arch’. For those of you who don’t know, Devil’s Arch is a really friggin’ old bridge – hundreds of years old (there’s the deadly accurate historian shining from within me again), lurking over an old and winding backroad at Pencalenick, near Tresillian. It’s a charming, tranquil place, where highwaymen would hang stagecoach drivers before robbing their passengers blind, and Royalist soldiers making their last stand at Tresillian would also eventually be hanged. Oh, and if you’re inclined to go and hang out there (guffaw), and fancy heading into its dark and crude underbelly, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, hold your breath while you’re in there, and sh…zip it, or the Devil himself will drag your tormented, screaming soul to Hell!

Anyway, I had the infestations of a story scurrying through my synapses. I had the setting for a satisfyingly disturbing and distressing prologue. I had my protagonist, Talek, already thoroughly alive in my head, desperate to form his mortal flesh and escort me on a journey through the darkness of his existence. So, when Talek told me he needed a place to live, I said I could help with that.

It was essential to the story for the house to be near Devil’s Arch: the focal point of all that is unholy in Talek’s spine-tingling tale; and taking flight on my trusty Microsoft Surface we soared over the diarrhoea-brown fissure of the Tresillian River. Just to the right of the winding waterway, seemingly hovering over nothing more than a tangle of trees and vegetation, was the symbol of the cross. Zooming in, the screen still offered me no more than a mass of greens to eyeball, but it did give me the name of a church, as well as displaying a bird’s eye view of a residential property to either side of the wooded area. If one such dwelling was to be Talek’s home, I needed to get a feel for the place, and discover what exactly lay in wait beneath the shielding, secretive thickets.

On arrival, were it not for two towering headstones at the height of the hedge I may have driven past altogether. It’s only when you stop to look in detail that you realise the mass of ivy bears the shape of a four-sided tower, and the slight pitch of a partially fallen porch off to one side. After clambering out of the car and heading up a short run of uneven granite steps, the awareness of being completely alone on the grounds of this ruin was enough to stunt my breath. The whisperings of a gentle breeze through the rustling canopies, the scratch of a falling leaf deflecting from a granite grave marker, all seemed amplified by the ethereal solitude.

After a glacially paced lap of the devastated former place of worship and its scattered, listing and occasionally fragmented tombstones – practically jumping out of my skin twice and joining the corpses around me as a humorous pheasant cracked its grating voice into life from a nearby copse – the realisation that this setting demanded a much more prominent role in ‘Devil’s Arch’ was palpable. And I got the feeling that, although Talek would have his concerns about next door and its occupants in his younger years, he would eventually develop a reticent affection for the place and its apathetic tenant’s tendencies.

Finding myself at the padlocked wooden gate that kept the intrusive world from entering the sleeping monument, I looked in through the overgrown and partially collapsed porch. Rocks green with moss laid a treacherous bed across the floor, while tendrils of spiney alien fingers tickled down from above. I knew that Talek was not ready to see what fate had in store for him; he was effectively a teenage new-born, with an innocence that needed protecting. I, however, found myself unsatisfied with loitering on the doorstep, on the wrong side of the fencing. Raising my walking crutch over, I climbed.

Entering the defunct bowels of the church was like stepping into the tropical biome at the Eden Project (only without the humidity moistening your body and causing you to reek of a hideous odour). Just me? The centre of the being surrounded by death teemed with life. Trees shot up from every part of the floor, like arteries and veins mapping the human body. Flourishing ivy, lichen and moss clung to an array of fractured granite bones that had once helped to form a glorious structure. Ivory-coloured plaster still held defiantly to the inner walls of the tower. This haunting edifice had cast away its doors and invited the wild world to come in and take root – or take a pew, you might say.

As for my nerves? They were shot. Every scurrying rodent; every snapping twig under feet that did not exist; every fall of autumn leaves raining through the absent roof. My head was darting from overgrown, glassless window to overgrown, glassless window, expecting to see human movement yet knowing I was completely alone, barring my imaginary friend from a story yet to be told or concluded. I’m a naturally shaky person anyway, largely thanks to the frailties of my peripheral nervous system. Couple this with my mild hysteria of the moment and my camera work may be a bit shoddy in places. But if you’ve made it this far I hope you can go a bit further, and I hope you enjoy the rest of my photographs.

‘Devil’s Arch’ will – as previously stated – be my second novel, though it is currently a work in progress. I have my design for how it should all end, though often the characters take over and their paths surprise even me. But rest assured, when all t’s are crossed, and i’s dotted, and the survivors survive, and the non-survivors perish, I’ll be putting it out there. Fingers crossed, you’ll want to follow Talek, as I have been. Until then, here are some more final resting place pics. Yeghes da!