Angels on the architecture, St Gal's church, Langast.

This was supposed to be 'A Painted Church for Winter', a counterpart to the 'Painted church for Summer' post of a year or so ago, about Morieux. For while the church at Morieux, out by the coast, its doors open to the west and the sea air, is all sunny gold and pink ochre, and the characters in its frescos seem to smile and grin with irrepressible aestival jollity, St Gal's at Langast is more pensive, austere, twilighty, and better suited to the paler, colder light of winter passing through its monochrome, grisaille windows.

And, as one looks and travels outward to the sea coasts and the playful places in summer, so one turns inward in winter; likewise Langast lies inland, in a quiet, interior landscape.

However, I had already left visiting the place for a couple of winters, and by the time I did, last Sunday, spring was already upon us. But no matter; the woods that lined the road there were still bare and silvery, with just a flicker of new green from strands of honeysuckle starting to leaf. The light is still low, and this clear, spare Lenten time is also a good moment.

The church does not look remarkable from outside, and, indeed, until the early eighties, no one thought it was. Like its bell tower, and most of the visible outer structure, and its very fine stained glass window, the oldest and best preserved in the region, it was assumed to be 16th century, old but not especially so for round here.

Many years ago, in my bookselling days, a friend and colleague showed me a picture in a Thames and Hudson catalogue of a beautiful yellow ceramic cat with black spots. It could have been ancient Egyptian, or from a 20th century craft pottery. 'How old is it?' I asked. He laughed, 'Why do people always ask that?'

Why indeed? Why does it give us a special thrill to learn that an artefact we might see and touch, that pleases and appeals to us, is exceptionally old, from a time we can't easily fathom, or imagine the people who made it? Or that sometimes the very old seems more contemporary and accessible in its aesthetic than something of just a century or two?

In 1982, the church was in need of serious structural renovation to stabilise it. Even restored and shored up, the interior structure has a swaying, slightly drunken look - this isn't just the effect of the camera.

While they were scraping off plaster, they found this herringbone stonework (below), and older, higher windows filled in, which were the clue to its greater age. It is reckoned now to date from about the 8th century, and to be perhaps the third oldest church building in France.

Investigating further, they discovered the frescoes. The church was closed for 12 years while the restorations took place.

In preparation for visiting Chartres cathedral in May this year, I have been reading Philip Ball's marvellous recent book 'Universe of Stone - Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Mediaeval Mind'. He stresses that it is not enough to appreciate the beauty of mediaeval church art and architecture from the point of view of a modern aesthetic, without understanding the minds, the world and the culture from which they came (and he gives an excellent synopsis of this, one of the best and most accessible to a non-specialist I've come across). This especially applies perhaps to the Gothic and the 12th century Renaissance from which it came. You might be better allowed to attribute wild and exuberant flights of imagination, a sheer sensual joy in decorative flourish, the kind of thing St Bernard of Clairvaux detested, to the less enlightened and ordered, more chaotic Romanesque and early mediaeval period. The transcendant meaning in pre-Gothic religious art is applied, not integral to the whole structure; the angels are on the architecture, not in it.

And it is difficult not to ascribe a sense of fun, of aesthetic pleasure for its own sake, in creating the shapes and patterns of the Langast frescoes. Yet there is a significant order and meaning in them.

The delightful rinceaux, the swirls and curlicues and foliate patterns which decorate the arches nearest the back of the church, represent the natural world, the lowest order in the divine hierarchy.

In the next set of arches, come old testament figures, this unidentified prophet or priest,

and Melchisedech. Oddly I remember him form a reggae song from my youth, the high priest of Salam, a mysterious personage who paid homage and tithes to Abraham and who was possibly not born of man and woman but was some immortal priest figure. His significance here can only be guessed at.

And from there on down the church toward the altar, angels.

And how old are they? We inevitably ask. There is a great wish to believe they date from the 8th century too, and it was for a while assumed they did, but more recent research indicates they can be no older than the 10th, though the signposts and guides still refer to them as older. Nevertheless, that makes them more than a thousand years old, which is impressive, even for immortal beings. I remember, many years ago looking into similar faces, in an ancient tiny chapel among olive groves in the Mani Peninsular on the Pelopponese, where an old crate in the corner proved to be a makeshift ossuary. Those paintings, of Byzantine saints, had a date inscribed 0f 991, almost exactly a thousand years before I stood there. (It's only lately that I've come to realise that that date cannot have been authentic, they would not have been using Arabic numerals then. Nevertheless, the paintings and the chapel were considered to date from that time.) But the Pelopponese Byzantine saints' faces were more pitiless and alien than these.

They all maintain the same position: a book held to the chest in the left hand, and the right hand raised, palm forward, in a gesture of ... what? Blessing, or interdiction?

All that is, save the Archangel Michael, who is on the pillar opposite Melchisedech, and with him, the only character to have his name written beside him, or at least still extant. In his draperies he is carrying a little human figure, a soul being taken to heaven, to all appearances like a child enjoying being swung and carried by a loving adult.

This depiction of Michael, the fighter, the guardian of high places, defeater and crusher of Satan, as the gentle psychopomp is a rare one, only known in two other places, once in England and once in Ireland. It is seen as confirmation of the early, Celtic origins of the church and its foundations.

Which brings us on to the matter of its patron saint. St Gal is the same St Gall of the monastery which bears his name in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Constance, which played such an important role in the preservation of learning and of manuscripts in the dark ages, which, whatever the sanguine revisionists try to make out, really were often fairly dark, save for the redeeming influences of the Irish and the Islamic world. An Irishman, in the 6th to 7th centuries St Gall travelled with St Colomban to the continent of Europe to spread learning and found religious houses. Many and doubtful are the legends about him, but the local story goes that when they fell out with a certain Queen Brunhild, she put the monks in a boat and sent them home to Ireland by way of the Loire. However, St Gall and his company sneakily disembarked in the vicinity of Nantes, and spent a short hermitic sojourn in Brittany. There is a small chapel somewhere in the countryside in the neighbourhood which is said to be on the site of his original hermitage, but I've yet to explore that.

So he is another of those elusive, protean Celtic saints who haunt these regions. While there is little basis to the story of St Gall's Breton digression, like the Swiss monastery, this place was founded barely 100 years after he died, so the connection is not impossible. Unless, of course, 'Gall' simply referred to another saint or missionary of Gallic origin, and the derivation is a false one...

Yet, as we keep finding, the need to affirm ancientness, originality, authenticity, a sense of reaching back to the source of things, is important. And to a tiny and otherwise featureless commune , in perhaps the least known and visited part of the westernmost region of France, the idea that, in time out of mind, a saint of true Celtic pedigree and legendary renown made his home here, and then stonemasons and artists came to create a special church and fill it with angels, is a matter of great pride.

The timberwork of the side aisles is later, but also interesting. More angels, 16th century cherubic ones this time, and a lively bestiary of carved creatures,

including these intriguing crocodile/dragons (below), who have horizontal beams springing from their mouths. I have seen these as a feature of the woodwork in churches and other old buildings throughout Britanny, but don't recall seeing them elsewhere, and I have yet to learn the correct name for such an architectural embellishment - an end, like a capital, only for a horizontal beam.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in spring, there wasn't another visitor in or near the place. After my visit, Molly and I went a little further on to walk by the plan d'eau in Plessala, a charmingly landscaped artificial lake, complete with an unusually well-equipped children's playground, mini-golf, boules and tennis courts and exercise circuit, which, again, we more or less had to ourselves, though by the time we left, just before 4 o'clock, a few sedate and probably well-lunched families with children and older couples with dogs were coming out of the woodwork.

Treasures are well hidden round here. I love it.