I’VE WRITTEN before on this site about how Bridport’s oldest building – The Chantry in South Street – almost certainly began life as a seamark or primitive lighthouse.

Then, when it was converted to a priest’s house, one of the priest’s duties was to say regular masses to St Catherine.

That’s significant because, as the Dorset coastal historian Gordon Le Pard has noted, “St Katherine is the dedication of both the chapel at Abbotsbury, built as a sea mark, as well as the only certain medieval lighthouse on St Catherine’s Down on the Isle of Wight.”

But, is there even more to this connection?

Right back in Edwardian times, before the First World War, an unusual young man called Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford used to visit a Bohemian couple called Harold and Charlotte Peake, who lived in Boxford near Newbury.

The Peakes, says Kitty Hauser, in Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (Granta, 2008), were “comfortably off… spurned organized religion, worse sandals and went in for vegeterianism, Japanese art, the resuscitation of folk-rituals and the re-organization of mass society.”

And they also ran a sort of pagan cult based around St Catherine, as Hauser explains.

“Harold Peake had the idea that churches dedicated to Catherine had replaced sites where an earlier deity called Llud (known to the Romans as Nodens) was worshipped.

“Peake came to this conclusion because Llud – the Celtic god of the Severn estuary, associated with healing – shared St Catherine’s symbol of a wheel; the idea was reinforced by the high incidence of chapels dedicated to St Catherine that overlook a harbour or have a good view of the sea, since Llud had many of the characteristics of the sea god Poseidon.

“Somehow the Peakes and their visitors honoured this pagan connection by performing ceremonies in which they  walked round in circles lighting fires, loking out for ‘Kataric portents’, and signing off their letters with a wheel symbol, ‘yours in Kata’, and so on.”

Now, St Catherine’s Chapel at Abbotsbury clearly has a very good view of the sea indeed, and the Chantry used to be right by the river at the edge of Bridport.

So are these sites connected in some way with old Celtic and Roman gods? Or is it all just a coincidence?

Crawford believed that nothing ever quite disappears. There are always clues, if only we have the tools and the skills to interpret them. In the case of Bridport and Abbotsbury, is it the name of St Catherine that carries the trace of ancient ways of life across the centuries?

A bit more about Crawford and Hauser’s book. Crawford was the Ordnance Survey’s first Archaeology Officer, back in 1920. He got the job after serving in the Great War as an Intelligence Officer, where he developed a fantastic eye for landscape features, and what they could mean. He was brilliant at fieldwork, and as Hauser writes, his work in Dorset (and other counties) “put British prehistoric archaeology quite literally on the map.” As founder and editor of the journal Antiquity he also published the work of Mortimer Wheeler, who excavated Maiden Castle during the 1930s. Hauser writes superbly about the excitements of field archaeology and photography, and her book is highly recommended.

One final point: if you want to spot things in a landscape anywhere in Britain, Crawford reckoned that dry afternoons in March were best.

Just what we’re getting at the moment…