“A Husband, St Catherine”

It is six o’clock in the morning, in the dead of winter, and we are huddled in the doorway of the church. There is a cloak of quietness over the pre-dawn darkness, as the faintest hint of sunrise begins to lighten the horizon. It is the second day of filming and we are awaiting the arrival of the third of our trio of crew for that morning. We soon see a light flickering on the path below, wending its way through the churchyard towards us with disembodied movement, until a figure begins to take shape. A flicker of a white prairie dress confirms the figure’s identity as our leading actress.

With bags and torches strewn about us we sip coffee from a flask, gathering cameras and tripods, hi-vis jackets, and call sheets as we prepare to begin filming. As the hour goes by, and the sky changes from black to deep to pale blue, I check the time constantly, anxious not to miss a shot, each carefully timed against the sunrise.

Brink by Brink is the first film made by Chasing Cow Productions since formalising as a collective in the autumn last year. It was filmed over the winter of 2019-20, with a small crew committed to the long hours of being caught in fog, rain, and hailstorms on hilltops and beaches; and we were fortunate to complete pickups the day before lockdown measures began to be imposed. In lieu of its première at Port East's Blueprint Festival in Bridport in March, we are currently working on completing the final elements of post-production and will be holding a virtual première screening on Saturday 22 August – see end for more details of how to watch it.

The film, for which I was a combination of co-writer, First Assistant Director, composer, and supporting actress, centres on a young woman’s embrace of folk tradition and ritual in the 21st century as she tries to win the heart of a young man in the town. This age-old story of unrequited love is cut through with black comedic elements, as she roams the winter landscape and town performing her rituals. Influenced by black and white Shakespeare adaptations such as Peter Brook’s 1970 King Lear we wanted to continue the tradition of rendering the landscape in a striking, timeless black and white, embracing its harshness as well as its beauty. The film has no dialogue and is instead scored by a post-production soundscape and a folk-inspired original soundtrack. Building the soundscape in post, similar to that seen in Mark Jenkin’s recent film Bait (2019), has offered an interesting challenge for our sound team, experimenting with foley and spending a lot of time catching elusive wind, waves, and screech owl sounds.

The film was born out of an idea to look deeper into the history of our local area, rooted in the landscape, and specifically from the perspective of witchcraft and ritual practice. We searched the archives of the Bridport Historical Society and used our findings from a multitude of sources to structure the rituals that occur in the film. For instance, there are records of pagan ceremonies in Symondsbury village, just west of Bridport, to accompany the bringing in of the harvest, which lasted until Victorian times. We were particularly in search, however, for rituals with some connection to love charms, wishing, or invocation. Whether tending towards a belief in witchcraft and the supernatural, or more around a mythologisation of natural processes, ritual practice invites an exploration of the power of the mind in fabricating narratives and truths to live and die by. Certain supernatural beliefs remained strong until at least the mid- to late-19th century in rural Britain. Of course, to a far lesser extent, the practice of collective ritual does continue today, particularly with religious holidays such as Easter and especially Christmas, the latter of which some of our research went into. We explored the intersection of Christian religion and pagan traditions of midwinter or yuletide celebrations, with the laying of the old year, and the quietening of dark times, and how these competing myths form our conception of Christmastime today. In most areas of our lives, however, we have shed the collective rituals that guided lives for centuries, as we shifted from a precarious, agrarian society to a ‘rational’, modern society, and thus moving away from mythology and mysticism.

The first ritual in Brink by Brink – a frenetic scattering of seeds at sunrise – is performed around St Mary’s church in Netherbury, parts of which date from the 12th to the 15th centuries. Until the mid-19th century, the parish of Netherbury, having included Melplash and Beaminster villages too, was one of the largest in Dorset. The village is noted in the Domesday book of 1086 as Niderburie, belonging then to the Bishopric of Sarum; and the first known vicar of the church was William de Vicumbe, at the end of the 13th century. The exterior of the medieval church evokes this sense of historical continuity, initially setting the film in a state of timelessness, and it acts as a kind of central geographic point for the scenes that follow.

We were kindly given access by the Friends of St Mary’s to film a scene from the 15th century church tower, which gave us an extraordinary view across the surrounding landscape on a winter morning at sunrise. The church also appealed to us for its possible link to an ancient pagan past. Something that struck us during the research process was the connection between religious worship and pagan ritual in rural communities, and the fact that from around 400 A.D., early Christian churches and chapels were often built to replace pagan temples or druidic sites. There is a chance that the Netherbury churchyard was converted from pagan to Christian use; this merging of religious worship and pagan ritual is important to the history of witchcraft.

The scattering of seeds is found in several ancient customs, from ensuring the protection and fertility of crops and cattle, to finding one’s true love. Such rites have long since dropped out of quotidian routine (notwithstanding the revival in paganism; a quick search gives website entries for Neo-Pagan earth healing rituals), but our character reenacts rituals such as this, adapting them to her desires and intentions.

One local ritual performed in appeal for love which did not make it into the film, was one that lasted until the late 19th century, at St Catherine’s chapel in Abbotsbury. The chapel, which sits on a hill overlooking the village on one side, and a vast seascape stretching out from Chesil Beach on the other, was built in the 14th century by the monks of Abbotsbury Abbey. The young women of the village would climb up to the chapel and make a wish in a curious manner: in the south-side door were ‘wishing holes’ where a woman would place a knee in one hole, and a hand in each of the other two, and pray to St Catherine, patron saint of spinsters (among other things), that she bring her a husband:

“A husband, St Catherine,

A handsome one, St Catherine,

A rich one, St Catherine,

A nice one, St Catherine,

And soon, St Catherine.”

Bridport denizen PJ Harvey wrote the song ‘The Wind’ about St Catherine and the chapel, incorporating the rhythm and sentiment of the charm into the lyrics: “Oh Mother can’t we give / A husband to our Catherine / A handsome one, a dear / A rich one for the lady / Someone to listen with.”

The cult of St Catherine in medieval times held sway until the 18th century but appears to have continued in this specific area of rural southern England until the late 19th century. The historical accuracy of her hagiography has been contested, although many women have been postulated over the years as the true historic Catherine, including Hypatia of Alexandria, philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician murdered at the hands of a Christian mob, for accusations of satanic magical practices; and the slightly earlier Catherine of Alexandria, famously tortured on the wheel, and eventually beheaded in the early 4th century. Elements of an amalgamated history of women persecuted for their faith fused into the cult of St Catherine. She was one of the voices named by Joan of Arc to have visited and given her guidance and counsel, and would have been well known to Joan, through the painting cycles, poetry, and votive figures that were common throughout France, England, and other European countries in the 15th century.

These kinds of histories fed into our writing of the main character, with the idea of a fabricated persona holding powerful sway over fellow citizens, while avoiding any particular explanation or evidence that would suggest her being a supernatural witch practising white or black magic, or even the more folkloric “wise-woman magic of the countryside”, as Marina Warner puts it in her book Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism.

There is a hint of magical realism to the film, but rather than suggesting any particularly magical powers over nature, it’s more about harnessing the power of that nature, both in terms of natural processes and the human impulse towards a fabulous interpretation of those processes if moved in a certain way: the darkness of night, the vast and unpredictable sea, the magical feeling of a sunrise or sunset. It’s something that falls between the magical and tangible. As Marina Warner explains, certain ancient customs that would have been seen in one century as witchcraft, or maleficium, such as a druidic worship of trees, become in another century more charmingly folkloric practices, childlike even. There is dark and light at work at once.

The reasons why we might allow ourselves not only to revel in certain forms of ritual nowadays, but also to believe in superstitions, or something paranormal or magical at work, against our better judgements, seem precisely plausible because of the way rationality seems to govern our lives. Not everything can be easily explained away; sometimes we would rather believe in some other powers beyond us at work. Marina Warner describes the “ancient semantics of magic” as being a kind of subversion or “thwarting of the given order of things.” As soon as you upend the supposed order of society, the very human characteristic of gravitating towards story-telling and myth-making can take over. Our character, in her solitary strangeness, upends the world of those she encounters over a couple of wintery months of their lives.

Ritual practice is partly hinged on the corporeal experience of enactment and performance through one’s body, and partly on the symbolic attribution of meaning to objects. It can therefore be seen as a form of play-acting, perhaps enacting or playing a role, but not necessarily with any consciousness of the fantasy, as the performance of these acts is passed on through communities and generations, altered and once more passed on until there is a rootedness that has no particular beginning, and no particular end – until the spell, as it were, is broken. The lack of dialogue in Brink by Brink allowed us to toy with these ideas without being over-explanatory or didactic, rather letting a story unfold to leave its impressions and ideas like scattered seeds, trailing in its wake.

Grace Crabtree is an artist and a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art last summer.

Bryony Moores O'Sullivan is a founding member of Chasing Cow Productions, and a Theatre Practice graduate from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, who specialises in puppetry, poetry and illustration.