The foxy photographer

By Brian Clegg

This is a (much) longer than usual read. It’s a chapter from a book I’ve been attempting to get together for a long time – but the crossover of science and travel writing doesn’t appeal to publishers. This chapter was written 25 years ago (though edited since): as a result aspects like signs mentioned may no longer apply; they were there at the time.

 It was early when I arrived at Lacock, the Wiltshire village that was home to pioneering photographer William Henry Fox Talbot. I wanted to soak up Lacock’s atmosphere and take in the museum it houses before moving on to Lacock Abbey, the remarkable building that inspired the young Talbot to perfect his photographic technique. My eagerness was a mistake. I had not bothered to consult the National Trust guide to check opening hours, and had forgotten that this British treasure operates on its own idea of convenience. The grounds were closed for another hour, and the house for a further two .

Still, it gave me a chance to wander around the village, which proved almost too perfect. Because it has been protected against change, Lacock is a favourite of film makers who hope to portray rustic England before motorised transport. It helps, too, that the whole place belongs to the National Trust, so it’s hard luck if you don’t want your street covered in a three-inch thick layer of mud and horse manure yet again. 

As the Trust’s handbook points out ‘descendants of William Fox Talbot gave the Abbey and village to the Trust in 1944’ and this has doomed Lacock to feature in numerous TV and film productions, an unexpected spin-off of Talbot’s photographic experiments. Still, even if the locals don’t like the film crews, the manure’s probably good for the roses. 

It was easy to imagine oneself as old Fox in person (I’ll come back to that name), strolling around the village, enjoying the comfortable knowledge that this confection of gorgeous old buildings, a mix of timber-framed beauties and warm old stone, was all mine. I suppose, technically, as a member of the National Trust this was almost true for me in the present day – at least, I could think of myself as the owner of that speck of mortar below a mullioned stone window. Control by the National Trust has left the village preserved in a way that even the most idyllic location usually can’t manage. The result is stunning, though it can’t always be easy for the residents.

There was a single sign of dissent. One house and one house alone dared to be different. Instead of the mellow stone finish of the others, it was painted a vivid mustard yellow. It stuck out like a dandelion in a bunch of red roses. To be honest, it looked awful – yet I had to admire the courage of the owners. After all, living in Lacock is not without its pressures. I didn’t get much of an impression of a village under siege, but only because this was the last remnant of the season. You could see an entire street without a tourist taking photos. Yet the sad little signs in the house windows from the Lacock Tenants’ Association (just tenants, remember – no proud homeowners here), pleading with the public not to park outside their houses, told eloquently of summer mayhem.

Lacock is not a big place, but there are a surprising number of narrow lanes, lined with enough exquisite cottages to elevate an estate agent into a state of nirvana. One particularly appealing street led me past the rich, spicy scents of the old-fashioned bakery and a surprisingly trendy restaurant to the church. St Cyriac’s was a solid if not unattractive building, squat and high as if it had hunched its shoulders in an attempt to protect itself against the ravages of time. The high tower faces squarely down the street, turning its back on the manor house beyond. I went in, partly because I like churches, but also to look for traces of Talbot. They were there, of course, but I was first distracted by the story of the church’s name – this is, apparently, the only church with this sole designation in the country.

St. Cyriac must have been one of the most precocious saints (and sadly martyrs – it often goes with the job) around. At the age of three he and his mother were hauled in front of the Roman governor of Byzantium, charged with Christian tendencies. The governor was apparently fond of children and dandled the young Cyriac on his knee while he berated the mother in the sort of language that shouldn’t be heard by a three-year-old. Cyriac, despite his tender years, was horrified at the blaspheming. He turned round and boxed the governor’s ears. Now the governor may have been partial to kids, but this was a bit much, so he picked up Cyriac and threw him head-first onto the stone floor, killing the child. There was even a rather faded etching cartoon strip illustrating this unpleasant event.

Once I’d recovered from the gory image of Cyriac’s demise, I was able to find plenty of Talbotiana. Apart from the heavy duty, but unexciting family monument, built into the wall in the North aisle, there was a fascinating chart of patrons of the church. Originally this role fell to the Abbesses of Lacock Abbey, but when Henry VIII’s reforms got this holy place converted into a des. res., it seemed natural that the new owners should take over the job. For nearly three hundred years, bankrolling the church had fallen on the Talbots, with William Henry technically in charge from being a baby, though someone did stand in for him until he was old enough to contribute anything useful. Amazingly the practice continued up to the 1980s when the diocese took over. 

By the time I had completed my wander around Lacock, the museum was open for visitors. It doesn’t give much away from the outside – a great, long stone barn of a place in which a doorway opens on near darkness. I had to pause for a moment outside under the threatening grey skies to prepare myself for the inevitable, intimidating National Trust greeter. And there he was as I crossed the threshold, a big, hearty looking chap, clearly most happy when walking the dog in wellies (that’s the man, not the dog, wearing the boots).

Was I a member? Yes. Did I have a brochure? No. Was I pure bred English stock? Well, no, I’m also part Irish and part Scottish and… actually, I made that last question up. Before he had a chance to ask, I had scuttled into the exhibition area. It was a typical juxtaposition of modern fittings in a hacked-clean ancient shell that works better than it has any right to. In truth, though, the museum was a trifle worthy. It could have made more of Fox Talbot’s work than objects in glass cases and those arty-print-on-white-plastic signs that have become staple fare in museums now that badly typed little cards with interesting brown stains have gone out of fashion. Yet even so, it was worth the visit and it got the message across.

Or at least, I thought it did, though I wasn’t too sure by the time I was halfway round as I couldn’t help overhearing a pair of middle-aged women, heavily clad against the cold in overcoats and scarves and reddening noses, passing me by and commenting: 

‘Do you understand this?’

‘No, I’m afraid it goes right over my head.’

To give them their due, it didn’t stop them trudging nobly round the whole exhibition, though. Meanwhile, I was able to step back and look at what it was that had been so hard to grasp. It didn’t seem too tricky, so maybe it was just the over-familiarity of the photographic process that made Talbot’s wonderful achievements seem obscure.

I hadn’t realised that young William Henry hadn’t actually moved to Lacock until he was 27, though he had technically become lord of the manor at the age of six months, after his father’s death. His mother, Lady Elisabeth Fox-Strangways was from a significantly more illustrious family – her father was an Earl – and Talbot was born in the family’s grand home of Melbury Hall in Dorset. 

We need to spend a moment on the man’s slightly complicated name. Although his mother’s surname was hyphenated, his family name was the straightforward Talbot. ‘Fox’ in his case was a familial surname used as middle name – so as a former X-files fan, I feel justified using it as a given name, though in practice he was known as Henry to friends and family, perhaps to distinguish him from his late father.

Said father, William Davenport Talbot, inherited the Abbey, which had been in his family since the mid-seventeenth century. It had been converted from a nunnery into a domestic dwelling during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the 1500s, when it was bought by a Sir William Sharington for the sum of £783. 

With his mother, the young Fox had spent his youth shuttling around the stately homes of various relatives before being packed off to Harrow School and then, following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton, to Trinity College, Cambridge. There, apparently, he became twelfth Wrangler in Mathematics in 1821. At the time, the university did not have science or maths degrees per se (Talbot’s other distinction was winning a classics prize), but the best mathematicians, put through four days of extensive testing, were known as wranglers with numbered positions: becoming the top ranked ‘Senior Wrangler’ was the ultimate British academic achievement for undergraduates.

Over time, the nature of this honorific changed. Originally, only men could be named wranglers: women first appeared in the listings in 1882, but rather than being given a position as a specific wrangler they would be classed as fitting, say, ‘between the ninth and tenth Wranglers’. In 1890, Philippa Fawcett, who would later be one of the first female lecturers in mathematics, was listed as ‘above the Senior Wrangler’ – so was, in fact top of the list, entirely deserving of that coveted position, but could not be awarded it. Although this bizarre term still existed when I was at Cambridge (and still does today), it was only available to those focusing on mathematics in their final year. As a result of this, I never knowingly came across a wrangler in person.

Rather than rush home and start inventing photography (‘Would you like a cup of tea, Fox?’ ‘Not now my dear, I’m inventing photography,’), William Henry spent a fair while enjoying the European tour, and though he did take up residence at Lacock in 1827, it was out on Lake Como in 1834 that he had the inspiration that would make snaps available to the masses. At the time he was using various trendy optical devices like the camera lucida to help with his sketching. The principle such designer artists’ aids of the nineteenth century were based on was simple. A system of lenses either allowed the artist to see both subject and paper apparently in the same place, or projected an image of the view directly onto the paper.

Cue the light bulb over Talbot’s head (except, of course, the light bulb had not yet been invented, so it would have to have been a gas light). Here he was, tediously tracing the image that was being projected onto his drawing paper. Yet he knew that various chemical substances – usually compounds of silver – would darken when exposed to light, just as if the light itself were drawing on the paper (this had been known for at least 200 years). So why not soak the paper in a suitable silver compound and let the drawing develop independent of human interaction?

After experimenting with simple silhouettes, in August of 1835, Talbot was ready to take the revolutionary step. He set up a camera obscura – a simple projection device – in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey and allowed the light from the beautiful central oriel window to fall onto his treated paper. The result (or at least a copy of it) can still be seen. It is tiny, only 3 by 2.75 centimetres, and it is the world’s oldest known photographic negative. The negative bit is fairly obvious when you think about it. If light turns the silver black, then the bits of the picture that are most bright will get blacker, while those with little light falling on them will stay pale and interesting.

The apparent disadvantage of producing a reversed image proved in practice to be a real plus. The other photographic processes invented around the time produced a positive result. A normal picture. But this made them one-off images. Fox Talbot found that his negative originals could be used to produce many prints. Fox might have been a great inventor, but he wasn’t so hot with terminology. He called his invention ‘photogenic drawing’, and didn’t even come up with the term ‘negative’, which was left to his friend, John Herschel, the son of someone we’ve already met, William Herschel.

Talbot’s contributions to the world weren’t limited to this process. Soon after he was the first to discover that it was possible to make shorter exposures by developing the ‘latent image’ using a new mix of chemicals. Instead of waiting for the picture to appear on the paper, he would bring out the initially invisible image in the darkroom, the process that remains in use to this day by those who still practice chemical photography. He was also equally at home in Egyptology, or playing with electrical coils in the company of Michael Faraday. Yet it was that tiny negative of the window in Lacock Abbey that will always be his claim to fame.

As I neared the entrance of the exhibition in the Lacock museum again, I was taken by a somewhat random collection of old photographs. Two artists were at work, or rather one was sketching and the other was talking. The man with the pencil was the sort of artist it’s easy to misunderstand if you meet him at night in a dark alley. With a ferocious, sheep-sheared haircut and every visible fold of skin pierced, he made an odd contrast with the demure Victorian portraits (though the Victorians did have a secret passion for nipple rings). His colleague, an American was more conventionally dressed.

‘They’re amazing,’ the American said. ‘I spend most of my time now making engravings based on old photographs. There’s something special in them.’ And he might have been a pretentious poser, but this is true. Just look at Victorian photographs, particularly the portraits. There is something special.

Right at the end of the exhibition was a glass case that made me realise that I was verging on a historical character myself. It held a collection of old cameras, and one was identical to my first serious piece of kit, a Praktica FX2, a single lens reflex camera without the fancy prism on top that later models would have, which meant that the photographer had to look down onto a ground glass screen as the camera wobbled around somewhere near their belly button. Oh, it took me back.

Even after I’d made my way through the exhibition as slowly as I could, and flicked through endless over-priced books on photography in the bookshop, it was still too early to get into the abbey itself. But it was about time for a spot of lunch. In hindsight, I realise that by this point I had already fallen under the National Trust spell. My natural inclination would usually be to head to one of Lacock’s inviting looking pubs, all of which seemed well equipped to feed the visitor, but I had got it in mind that this would be a National Trust day, and that meant only one thing – a National Trust Tearoom. Scones, crusty bread and jolly wholesome rustic fare with plenty of fibre.

There was, however, one snag. The National Trust’s Courtyard Tearoom was only open in school holidays and weekends, both of which I had avoided for obvious reasons. But an enterprising independent has managed to provide a passable clone, so it was only with a slight regretful glance in the direction of the pubs that I crossed the road to the Stables Café. It was everything one would expect. High ceilinged, rural, ever-so tastefully furnished and just a little too cold. By the time I reached the counter, I had already decided that I would have to go for the soup (tomato and orange, with homemade wholemeal rolls).

The soup, when it came, was blisteringly hot. The microwave must have been on steroids. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the spoon’s end had melted and run into the bowl, Salvador Dali style . I could almost feel the skin peeling off my lips as I attempted to sip it. By the time the soup had cooled enough to finish, it was easily past the witching hour of one in the afternoon, when I would be graciously allowed entry to the abbey. The entrance was through the museum – grit your teeth and face the greeter again – which disgorged the visitor onto the curving driveway through the grounds.

Across a field came the first glance of this jewel of a building, glowing in the brightening light (those clouds were finally shifting). I should have stood longer, appreciating the view of the exterior, splendidly asymmetric, so much more pleasing than those nauseatingly regular neo-classical buildings, but the anticipation of a possible highlight of the visit dragged me on. Would it be there? Could they really do it? I hurried around the corner, momentarily losing the abbey in a clump of trees and passing a small but decidedly sexy statue of a sphinx, perched perilously on a tall pair of standalone pillars. I couldn’t stop to admire her either. Would it be there?

Round another corner, through a stone arch and up a shallow set of steps to the door. It led straight into a high, vaulted hall, the sort of room that makes you reel a little as you look up at the ceiling, but I wasn’t going to be distracted by that, nor by the rotund figure of a classically fierce-looking door guardian who boomed at me that WHEN (and only when) I had looked around the hall I should proceed through THAT door. I could do no more than nod. For ahead of me was the sign I had been hoping for, an example of irony of which surely even the occasionally po-faced National Trust should have been aware.

Here, in the entranceway to the home of the man who all but invented photography, squarely in the middle of the route to the room where the first known photographic negative was produced, stood a notice, embellished with a suitable pictogram. NO PHOTOGRAPHY. I sighed happily and obeyed the order to look around the hall. 

One thing you have to say for the Talbot’s – they liked their organs. There are a pair in the hall, one at each end. This was not the result of some bizarre dismemberment ritual. We’re talking musical instruments here, though compact versions, not the full-sized church variety. I can only assume that duets were played engagingly by organists either side of the hallway.

The organs looked fascinating (though of course one was encouraged NOT TO TOUCH and could feel the anticipation of the watcher of the door behind me, just waiting for anyone to lay a finger on the keyboard). But they were a distraction from the purpose of being there – to follow in the footsteps of Fox himself. It was surprisingly easy. Through the dining room (by memory a rather disgusting shade of green, though I forgot to make a note and I do find colours have a nasty habit of changing in my recollection) and out of another door and I was into that famous South Gallery.

It looks wonderful from the outside – three elegant stone mullioned windows bulging from the walls like handsome fungi, each design different, apparently imbued with the mellowness of hundreds of years of maturing. Actually, the whole gallery, windows and all, is relatively modern, the result of some structural rearrangement that William Henry had fancied. He had been building a drawing room on the site, but before it was finished he took a dislike to it, had it knocked down and replaced it with the current gallery. The windows – one big bay and a pair of smaller oriels – all date to around 1830. It doesn’t really matter, though: they’re still beautiful. 

It was the smallest, central oriel window that formed Fox’s subject. There were obvious technical reasons why he might have chosen to picture a window. His early attempts at creating images took a lot of light to blacken the silver compounds. What better subject than a natural light source like that window? Equally, though, realising that the gallery was a new addition to the Talbot household, William Henry might simply have wanted to show off his latest addition, the way you might proudly take a guest to see your new kitchen.

He certainly was more interested in showing off the house than displaying himself to the world. There are very few of photographs of Talbot himself. He seemed to shun the camera’s eye. In the few prints that exist it is difficult to see past the Victorian paraphernalia. You seem him dressed like Isambard Kingdom Brunel in a stovepipe hat, or posing at his desk looking decidedly worriedly at the camera, as if he is concerned that his balding head, with its fly-away tufts of hair either side, is going to prove altogether too shiny. 

When I arrived in the South Gallery, there was already a lively discussion underway between the room’s guide, an elderly man who seemed highly amused by his encounter, and a college lecturer who had obviously spent much too long studying copies of the photograph in one of those expensive books I’d seen earlier. By simply standing still I found myself part of the conversation. It just happened that way. The guide was pointing out that the gallery wasn’t very wide – it hadn’t given old Fox much room to get away from the window. But our lecturer friend was more interested in the image itself. He peered through the glass of the actual window.

‘Were those trees already there when Talbot took the picture?’ The glass had the limited translucency of age – it was difficult to tell just what you were seeing through it.

‘I don’t know,’ said the guide. 

‘What sort of tree is that big one? An oak?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the guide. I was warming to him already. He was small and gnarled, rather like a tree himself, and he smiled a lot.

‘You see, it’s this blob,’ said the lecturer. We all crowded round the small reproduction of the Talbot picture – negative and positive print alongside each other – framed on the wall. Sure enough, on the right-hand side of the negative is a near-rectangular blob with a rounded top corner, a bit like a cross section of a loaf of bread. ‘I’ve always wondered what this blob on the right is. I suppose it would be on the left in the real window.’

We all stepped back in unison like well-trained members of a Busby Berkley cast, to stare at the real window. There was nothing outside that could possibly have been the blob. The trees were nowhere near the corner, and were much fainter in appearance.

‘They could have chopped a tree down,’ said the guide helpfully.

Daringly I had approached the negative without my colleagues. ‘Is it in front?’ I asked. ‘Could the blob be inside the window?’ The other two joined me as we stared at the faded print. 

‘No, you can see the bar,’ said the lecturer dismissively.

Personally, I think he was wrong – the window’s mullion does indeed seem to go past the blob, but I reckon it’s an optical illusion and all we are seeing is Talbot’s hat or his case or something similar, accidentally included in the view. The object is much too dense for something that lies in the distance. But that’s just my opinion and I’m not a college lecturer.

By now I had dropped out of the conversation, which had moved on to the subject of the lecturer’s students, who were accompanying him on a tour of the birthplace of photography.

‘I’ve had a lot of your youngsters through,’ said the guide. ‘Some of them take lots of pictures, others they’re through in three seconds.’ 

Take lots of pictures? I thought. What about that glorious sign? Have they no sense of place? But then, they were students – what more could I expect? They didn’t appreciate culture. The lecturer confirmed this by reminiscing about one favourite essay on Lacock, which had quite clearly been written from the seclusion of the pub and said much more on the selection of beers available than it did on the father of photography. What was wrong with these students? Hadn’t they heard of tearooms?

It’s worth thinking about why the students were there in the first place. No one claims that Talbot invented photography. The first lasting photographs had been taken by the elegantly named French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s. He had originally attempted like others to use silver salts to capture an image, but failing to take anything that did not fade away, he had tried instead using a natural asphalt called Bitumen of Judea. This could be dissolved in acid, but became less soluble when exposed to light, meaning that it could be used to produce a photographic image.

Niépce’s method, which he called heliography, was rapidly displaced by the daguerreotype, the modestly named mechanism developed by another Frenchman, Louis Daguerre. This involved treating a sheet of silver-plated copper with fumes containing a halogen, such as iodine, bromine or chlorine. The plate was then exposed and treated with mercury fumes to develop it, before fixing it with a chemical solution. The process was slow and extremely dangerous to undertake, but the results were a finished positive photograph that could include reasonably impressive detail.

Arguably, Talbot’s major contribution with what he would name the calotype was negative photography, a central part of the process for all users until digital photography took over. As we have seen, like digital snaps, the negative made it possible to easily produce multiple copies of the same image, a huge step forward from techniques like the daguerreotype, where the original was the positive print. However, calotypes would not remain popular for long.

The problem with Talbot’s technique was that the negative was a piece of paper. Admittedly, it was translucent paper – but nevertheless its fibres absorbed much of the light that had to be passed through it to produce a positive print, meaning that calotypes lacked contrast and detailed definition. Within 16 years of the first calotype being taken, the English chemist Frederick Scott Archer had published details of the wet collodion process. As we will see, this was significantly more complex than a calotype (in fact, had the potential to be downright lethal) – but the quality was far in advance of the alternative.

We can get a feel for what was involved when working with wet collodion from the work of the English motion picture pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge. Before Muybridge (originally the rather less exotic Edward Muggeridge from Kingston-upon-Thames) started working on the moving image in California he was a popular landscape photographer, using glass negatives up to a massive 24 by 20 inches (61 by 51 centimetres).

To produce his images in the wilds of the Yosemite, Muybridge constructed a mobile studio. In his description of his huge 1880s photographic series Animal Locomotion, writing when the process had largely been replaced by dry plates, Muybridge commented about his work in the field:

Every photographer was, in a great measure, his own chemist; he prepared his own dipping baths, made his own collodion, coated and developed his own plates, and frequently manufactured the chemicals necessary for his work. All this involved a vast amount of tedious and careful manipulation from which the current generation is, happily, relieved.

The process was certainly unpleasant. Collodion is another name for gun cotton, produced by soaking cotton in a mix of nitric and sulfuric acids to produce a flexible explosive which, as the name suggests, was used as an alternative to gunpowder. This explosive was then dissolved in ether or alcohol to produce a flammable gel, which would have iodine or bromine salts added before attempting to spread it evenly across a glass plate. It was then soaked in a bath containing silver nitrate solution, and while still wet put into the camera and exposed. 

The final processes of developing, fixing with hypo or cyanide to remove excess silver, rinsing, drying and varnishing finally resulted in a long-lasting, safe negative on a durable glass plate. Wet collodion was so much better than calotype technology that it became the standard for professionals, though calotypes would continue as an amateur alternative for some time. Now, the calotype is frozen in technological time, just as the images of Talbot’s time captured moments from a past that seems alien to us.

Leaving the gallery at Lacock, it was surprisingly difficult to make a mental superimposition of the interior of the house onto the layout of the abbey that it had replaced. This struck me particularly as I ventured into the Brown Gallery, which was built over the nun’s refectory. It was just a passage with books and rather ordinary looking rooms off that could have been a pure Victorian construct. I was so taken by this incongruity that for a moment or two I didn’t notice the hat.

If you aren’t familiar with National Trust properties, all the main rooms are policed by a volunteer, often somewhat elderly, who lurks there to make sure that you don’t pocket anything, and to pass on engaging titbits of information. Squarely in the middle of the Brown Gallery stood a lady in her late middle age, whose entire appearance was dominated by a bizarre black confection that sat courageously on her head. She peered from beneath it and commented: ‘You can see through to the original medieval parts below. The covering is all Victorian, of course.’

For a moment I thought she was referring to her hat. No expert in millinery, I could easily be fooled into thinking that you could see the medieval parts below. This hat was like a gigantic black globe artichoke, hacked away in the centre to fit a head. It was impossible to drag your eyes away from it – this vision followed you around the room. Suppressing an urge to break out in hysterical laughter, and pausing as briefly as I could to examine the medieval flooring exposed beneath the Victorian boards (yes, that’s what she meant) I hurried out of the gallery, through a small winding corridor that gave every impression of being a part of the house that visitors weren’t allowed in, and back out into the main hall.

The guardian of the door was waiting. ‘HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE CLOISTERS?’ she boomed. It was strange, her speech wasn’t particularly loud, but every word was clearly enunciated in capital letters.

‘No,’ I muttered, feeling unaccountably guilty, ‘but I’m just going.’

And I’m glad I did. Lacock is a real two-for-the-price-of-one treat. When you enter the cloisters, all of a sudden the ancient abbey reappears. The place that Ela, Countess of Salisbury, had chosen for her nuns back in the twelfth century when this was an untouched pasture by the river Avon. It’s not only the cloisters, but the rooms off them – when you go around the house you just don’t notice that the whole thing is suspended above its medieval origins.

The elegant little chapter house was fun (it shows my ignorance – until I read the handy notice, I hadn’t realised that they’re called chapter houses because they used to read a chapter from the rule of Saint Benedict there every day). And the cloisters themselves were wonderfully peaceful that day, though they probably heave with bodies in the height of summer. But my favourite part was the nuns’ warming house.

Just the concept was a delight. I couldn’t help but imagine frozen nuns standing in front of the high fireplace like those chilly gentleman in Victorian etchings who lift their coat tails to let the heat through to their backsides. Did the nuns lift up their habits? The mind boggles. In fact, the nuns must have been much taller than I expected, because a notice informed visitors that one of the window seats, the one by the fireplace, was original and it was practically two metres up the wall. Perhaps the abbess hauled herself up there to supervise her flock.

Apart from the delights of the fireplace, the warming house also contains a huge cauldron dating back to 1500, the sort of thing that missionaries used to be boiled in when depicted in those painfully humourless cartoons in Victorian copies of Punch magazine. And then there was a great stone tank, taking up about a quarter of the floor space. The guidebook claims that this was not originally part of the warming house, and probably started life somewhere outside for keeping fish in or for washing clothes. I’m not convinced, though. I reckon it just showed that this was the medieval equivalent of a health spa. After warming themselves in front of the fire (next best thing to a sauna), the nuns could do a few lengths of the tank, or just bubble away in the cauldron jacuzzi.

I heard a giggling from the antechamber to the warming room, a parlour according to the sign, although it’s now a dark, dismal place with stone coffins that had been moved in from the grounds strewn across the floor. I crept to the doorway and saw a pair of girls in their early twenties, probably Scandinavian from their extravagant sweaters. One was lying in a coffin, the other (fittingly for the location) trying to take a photograph, but the corpse was corpsing in the theatrical sense, unable to lie still, torn with laughter. Suddenly I felt voyeuristic, as if I was peeping in on a bedroom scene. 

I backed up a little and took heavy footsteps towards the door. The Swedish (or possibly Norwegian) corpse shot out of the coffin with a rapidity that would have taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer by surprise. Somehow it finished off the visit to perfection. If only Fox had been there with his camera to capture it.

Images by the author, except Talbot’s original (public domain)

See all Brian’s online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here 

Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.

Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-foxy-photographer.html