Audio tour Hidden Nature at St John-on-the-Wall

This mini virtual poetry tour takes visitors around some of St John on the Wall’s hidden highlights, including its conduit head, alabaster tombs and ceiling bosses.

St John’s is one of Bristol’s oldest historic buildings. It was founded around 1192, and was built in the fourteenth century and modified in the nineteenth century. Its steeple sits over one of the four surviving gateways into the original medieval town, making it a literal and symbolic gateway into a major, but sometimes overlooked, part of Bristol’s long and fraught history.

At each virtual ‘stop’, you will find a point of interest in or around St John’s, paired with a piece of medieval poetry for you to enjoy. In the tour, we explore the church’s relationship to the natural world in all its forms: from its hydraulic technologies and its baptismal practices, to its use of green man imagery and its connections with the wider world of trade and travel, via the River Frome.

The poems, which are in Latin, Old English and Middle English and span the seventh to the fourteenth centuries, are read in their original languages by current volunteers of the church and medieval literary scholars (Derek Cook, Ivy Li, Beth Whalley, Fran Allfrey, and Charlotte Rudman).