St Catherine's Oratory

“If you are what you should be, you will set the world on fire.”
St. Catherine of Siena
Another day of heavy, blustery showers so I’ve getting out and about in between the showers. This afternoon I made the relatively short walk up the greasy, wet, muddy and windswept hill to St Catherine’s Oratory, the ‘Pepperpot’. More of a space rocket from Tintin if you ask me, but very striking against the coastal backdrop.
And like every old building, it has a story; this one being that the original Oratory was built as penance in the C14th by the local Lord after he took wine from a shipwreck in Chale Bay, which came from a French monastery. He was threatened with excommunication unless he built an oratory and beacon on Chale Down, now St. Catherine’s hill.
The oratory is no longer there, having probably fallen into disuse with the dissolution of the monasteries in the C16th, the beacon, used until the C17th, is all that remains.