BUILDING AN ANCIENT CHURCH

 by Steven B. Young

Well, it’s not actually ancient if one is building it, but its roots go back a thousand years, probably a lot longer, so I’m calling it an ancient church.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sacred, especially peoples’ need to recognize and enhance sacred places. We can say with near certainty that this was already well established at least 40,000 years ago; it is difficult to see the Cave paintings as being anything other than attempts to build a bridge to the ineffable. We can, I think, safely assume that they were extraordinary only in the sense that their location allowed them to be preserved down the millennia. There must have been similar places in the open air where the genius loci was evident and appreciated. There are few remnants of this recognition: perhaps the faint outlines of open-air rock carvings, or small, portable artifacts that survived by some improbable chain of events.

People in the Upper Paleolithic, the later part of the Old Stone Age which ended roughly 10,000 years ago, were talented figurative artists—on cave walls, in clay, bone, and mammoth ivory, but they seem to have eschewed architecture—at least in any form that left permanent evidence. There are a few exceptions such as the mammoth bone structures on the Ice Age plains of what is now the Ukraine, but, even in places where perfect building stone was to be had for the taking, it was seldom, if ever, used to build structures, either residential or sacred. This changed radically at Gobekli Tepe, in what is now southern Turkey, at about the end of the Ice Age, apparently before people had discovered, or created, agriculture. It seems fitting that the earliest known complex buildings can hardly be interpreted as anything other than temples; they are so rich in stylized, symbolic images that they could only represent a deep and abiding sense of the numinous. 

The question, of course, is of how one might best define the concept of ‘temple.' As one might expect, there’s a rich, and somewhat contentious, literature on the subject. Without getting into it, let me just say that, for me, ‘temple’ is a broad term for a structure whose purpose is to elicit a sense of invitation to a deeper, more profound comprehension of being.Temples have traditionally been built on margins, places between tilled fields and wild forest, or between land and sea. They symbolize transitions, places where the boundaries between the world of daily life and activities and the world of a different sort of time are blurred. They engender awe, respect, mystery, and wonder. They call out a part of humanness that has roots in the deep past, but which is really timeless.

Early Christian churches were a variety of Hebrew gathering places; they and their derivatives, no matter how impressive they became, include many of the characteristics of temples; they share many of these features with temples of other religions. As Christianity spread into northern Europe a millennium or so after its founding, the early sacred buildings were small and made of wood. They were variations on traditional building methods that were not expected to survive the tests of time.  The walls were generally of palisade construction, with the lower ends of upright timbers and planks buried in the soil, where they soon rotted away with hardly a trace. Early in the second millennium of Christianity, they became more substantial. With the timbers raised on dry stone foundations, they demonstrated that wooden buildings could last for many centuries if they could avoid the primary enemy, fire, and if they were respected and cared for, rather than being supplanted by the more pretentious stone buildings favored to the south, where forests had already been mostly destroyed. 

The most famous, and generally the oldest, wooden churches are in Norway, where they are known as stave churches. At one time there must have been hundreds of these, but they are now reduced to a few dozen. They range from quite simple structures that were built shortly after the year 1,000 AD (or CE if you prefer), to complex, multistoried, ornate edifices. The main feature they share is a method of construction based on upright timbers, usually round, and as much as 20 feet or more tall. They are similar to ships’ masts, and they are the staves that give the churches the name. Dating back nearly to the Viking Age, most of the stave churches have decorative motifs that would have been familiar to pagan Norse people of a few generations earlier.

The Norwegian stave churches are the best known, earliest remaining, and most spectacular of northern wooden churches. But wooden churches were once widespread throughout Scandinavia. Christianity came somewhat later to Western Russia and the Baltic region, but there is a long tradition of wooden churches throughout the region. Although they were built later, and many sport the traditional onion domes of Russian Orthodox churches, they carry on the tradition of wooden churches in the North. It’s also worth keeping in mind that, while the stave churches may date back well into medieval times, they have often been extensively remodeled and redecorated over the centuries. What we see now is, in most cases, the result of a long history of cultural and artistic change.

I think that the urge to build a sacred structure must be deeply ensconced in my psyche. I was in my early 20s when I built my first house, and several people asked if I were building a chapel. I wasn’t, at least consciously, and I had little interest in anything even vaguely religious at the time. But I was interested in archaeology, architecture, and anything to do with medieval Europe, and it must have shown in the building. Several decades later, the construction of a sacred building became something in the nature of a calling that I couldn’t ignore. With my lifelong fascination with the North, and the lives of people in past times, it was an easy decision that my structure would have its roots in the ancient wooden churches of Northern Europe. That was a couple of years ago, and the idea has evolved a great deal since then, as well as having progressed a long way toward a finished—at least in terms of my contributions—product. The following pages are a report on progress so far, especially the decisions and constraints that have guided the project. I expect to keep adding to this narrative for at least another year, by which time the sacred building will be, if not complete, at least having attained its final form, and begun to acquire the atmosphere which, I hope, will sustain it for some centuries to come.

Many of the surviving old wooden churches are on spectacular, commanding sites, often overlooking fiords and mountains. I don’t have access to a fiord in northern Vermont, but I do have small crags and ledges not far from the shores of a beautiful lake. A solid rock outcrop seems like an appropriate substrate for a sacred building—it even has a Biblical connotation: “On this rock I will build my Church,” although that was actually a wordplay on St. Peter’s name. The question was: which ledge? It might have been nice to build on a small cliff directly overlooking the lake, but the State of Vermont has recently, and wisely, passed legislation to protect the shoreline of lakes and ponds. Since the shoreline is almost undeveloped, it would have been a shame to interrupt it with something manmade, even a sacred building, anyway.

I had long had my eye on a ledge about halfway between my house and the lake. It was a little close to a beaten path, but that was also an advantage: heavy materials could be brought to the site without roadbuilding, and it would be easy access for people of limited mobility. It could also be easy to get to work on when I had a spare hour or two. The final decision came about as a result of our driveway being upgraded, as a large excavator was available. The ledge itself was irregular, with a steep drop off of six feet or more to the west side. The more or less level area was too small for the sort of building I had in mind. I turned this problem into a positive. With the excavator we took out a couple of large trees and cleared away some rubble from the base of the mini-cliff. This provided an opportunity to build a stone foundation out from the ledge face and make a sort of undercroft for a portion of the building. All it would take was a lot of stone, mortar mix, and time. With the site cleared and the surrounding trees thinned out, the character of the site became obvious. While the lake was only a glimmer through the trees, it was an easy saunter away, and the forest rolled away in all directions.

With the site determined, I needed to take stock of the situation—its potentials and pitfalls. First, I needed to decide whether I wanted to copy one of the remaining ancient churches or whether to use the spirit of them as a springboard. This isn’t an either/or question, and I’ll discuss it more later. Next was a feasibility check: what was a reasonable undertaking for a man approaching 80 who planned to do most of the work himself. And, of course, there were financial concerns: this needed to be a fairly low-budget undertaking.

The idea of a serious stone foundation was already a break with tradition. As far as I could tell, most of the old wooden churches were built on level sites, with only a rough dry-laid stone base high enough to keep the wooden structure above the soil and weeds. It seemed to me that an ancient church, even if mainly constructed of wood, could well do with a symbolic connection to deep earth and rock, so the idea of a stone-built undercroft seemed appropriate—even recognizing that it would be enormously labor intensive. I’m experienced in working with stone, and I even toyed with the idea of building a stone church, such as I had come to love in rural parts of Scotland. But that would have entailed too much work and stone, the thick walls would have used up too much space, and it seemed inappropriate for our continental climate, with its frigid winters. It would have been impossible to get it warm enough to use for at least half the year.

The simplest—and perhaps the oldest—of the Norwegian wooden churches is called the Haltdalen Church. It now lives in an outdoor museum in Trondheim, but it came from the countryside, and it was probably assembled as two separate buildings many centuries ago. It was a reasonable size, and there was good information on its construction methods. In fact, replicas of it have been built in Iceland and the US. Although small, its appearance is impressive, and it wears its 900 or more years well.

My decision as to how closely to follow the Haltdalen Church ultimately came down largely to practical questions. When the original church was built, carpentry tools and techniques were vastly different from now. In particular, there would have been nothing comparable to a modern sawmill, or even today’s array of sharp, efficient hand saws. Planks and timbers were riven from tree trunks with wedges, adzes, and broadaxes, and the amount of labor involved must have been prodigious. Nails would have been precious, to be used only when absolutely necessary. There was no way I could have carried out a project duplicating traditional building methods.

Even in the small Haltdalen Church, with no interior walls or supports, the builders used massive round timbers on the corners. These were set on bulbous wooden bases and they were connected by sills and plates, into which were set thick planks. The roof was supported by complex trusses. In a building this small, the construction apparently works and is stable, but some of the other stave churches, massive as their timbers may be, seem to have design flaws such that they have need to be shored up with various inappropriate looking bolts and timbers. It was clear to me that slavishly following stave church construction methods would be impractical for design, as well as labor, considerations. In any case, I realized that I needed to allow myself some creative leeway. 

Although my project was clearly inspired by the medieval stave churches, I wasn’t really interested in creating a replica, even if I had had the resources to do it. The huge staves of the churches weren’t simply tree trunks; they were worked down from even more massive timbers with broad axes, adzes and planes, and many had carvings on them. To copy this technology was clearly beyond my capacity. I decided to use sawn timbers, up to 8 inches square, instead.

I’ve had experience with traditional braced frame, post and beam construction, which is more typical of medieval Britain and southern Scandinavia. It seemed to me that a combination of the two carpentry traditions could work out aesthetically as well as practically, and I began to design the building around this concept. First, though, I needed to do the stonework.

A major portion of the stone construction is out of sight. The steep face of the ledge didn’t level off, but became a more gentle slope below the original ground/rubble level. Given our climate, with frost penetrating down several feet by late winter, I wanted to base the stonework on bedrock, so that there would be no chance of it shifting and cracking. The excavator had left a commodious hole that needed to be cleaned out by hand to expose the irregular bedrock surface. I augmented the stone from the excavation with quite a few pickup loads of fieldstone from old piles on my brother’s land, hauled in a few loads of mortar sand, bags of cement, and got to work, building a two-foot-thick sub-wall up to what would be the final ground level. Fortunately, it didn’t need to be aesthetically pleasing, since it would be buried, but it had to be solid. With a couple of tons of hand-mixed mortar and a lot of rock, it was. I backfilled around the wall and left it for the winter, knowing I’d need better stone for the above ground work. So, I ordered a massive load of schist-like rock from a quarry in Jeffersonville.

I also went to visit Stuart Lapointe’s nursery, having noticed that he had garnered a batch of granite slabs and pieces from somewhere. Many of the 19th Century houses in our area had the upper part of their foundation formed of long slabs of granite, usually some 12 to 15 inches high and about 6 inches thick. I bought several of these from Stuart (actually traded them for rhododendrons) and cut them up into blocks about as wide as they were high, so I could dress the corners of the new stonework with granite quoins. The schist was largely in big slabs, often weighing several hundred pounds; it was easy to split into thinner sheets with a hammer and wedge, but almost impossible to trim to a particular dimension, so fitting the stones together neatly was a challenge. It took me most of the summer of 2017, and about 100 bags of mortar mix to do the job. I abandoned the old-fashioned, mix your own mortar: one part cement, one part lime, six parts sand, turned over three times dry and three times wet. Premixed mortar wasn’t that much more expensive, and it cut mixing time and effort by about two thirds, as well as being of a more uniform consistency.

The undercroft has a window opening that will later have a leaded glass window, a niche which a bit of statuary or an icon could share with a couple of candles, and a doorway capped by a 600-pound granite lintel with a rune carved on it. At some point it will acquire a flagstone floor. 

So, by the end of 2017, I had a twelve-foot-square undercroft, one wall of which was the original ledge, and a lot of rocks and dirt in the place that would become the dry-stone foundation of the main body of the building, 16 by 20 feet. Now at least the footprint of the building was set in stone, as it were.  

I had a good supply of decent-sized spruce, balsam, and hemlock trees on the land, so I decided to cut some of them and have a portable sawmill come in and saw out the timbers. Some of these would have been hard to buy commercially, since they were 20 feet long, 8 inches square—some even 8 by 12—and weigh several hundred pounds. I marked timber in the fall of 2017, arranged for a logger to cut and yard the trees, and sought out a sawmill owner to mill out the timbers. Levi Chase came in from Hardwick, his Dad came along to help, and we transformed the pile of logs into a smaller pile of timbers, one of boards produced as by-products, and an equally large pile of edgings and other waste.

Once you have milled green timber, the job is not finished. It needs to be carefully stacked, in layers interspersed with narrow boards (‘stickers’) so that it can dry evenly, avoid warping, and not be damaged by the fungus that appears almost immediately in hot weather, of which we had plenty in the summer of 2018. The timbers were delivered to a spot near the building site, and I set to work stacking those that I wouldn’t be needing immediately. With timbers this heavy, it’s safer to figure out how to maneuver them by yourself unless you have a helper who knows how to work with you. It’s surprising how much you can do on your own, if you don’t mind waking up with evidence that you are no longer young.

There was still a good deal of work preparing the drystone portion of the foundation for the massive hemlock sills and floor joists. I dug down to bedrock all around, stacked stones, did some mortared work at the corners, and roughly leveled the walls in preparation for laying down the heavy sills. These were notched out and fastened—21st Century technology—with hardened steel lag screws driven with a battery powered hammer drill. I finished leveling with a crowbar and shims, then laid the sills on the stone basement walls, and filled in gaps with stone and mortar.

Old barn builders would have notched out the sills for floor joists, but I decided to raise the ends of the joists and lay them on the surface of the sills, then level up with blocks of wood between the ends of the joists. This raised everything a few more inches, allowed for more air circulation under the floor, and avoided weakening the sills with notches. The joists were round logs which were flattened on the top surface with a chainsaw once they were in place. Then it was a simple matter to nail down a subfloor of boards from the sawmill. With all this in place, I could begin turning the raw timbers into components of the timber frames. By now it was nearing the first of October, and the prospect of actually raising timber frames was beginning to ebb with the weather. 

By this time I had done a lot of thinking about what the final building would look like and made a slew of decisions. The major one was the decision to use a modified form of post and beam construction. I also decided to deviate from the model of the Haltdalen Church with respect to the roofline. Rather than having the smaller portion of the building have a lower roof, I decided to have the ridgeline run continuously the length of the building. This made it much easier to make a transition between the two portions. It also raised the roof of the smaller part—the choir—several feet, which would make the building much more impressive both from the inside and from the western end, where the tall, narrow, wooden structure on top of the stone basement would together rise to over 25 feet and give the effect, almost, of a steeple. With this decision, I was ready to design all of the wall frames, in such a way as to provide for the rafters all to fit together properly.

The side frames of the larger portion of the building are the largest and heaviest. I began to build the north side frame first. It used a 20-foot-long spruce 8x8 as a top plate, with a 4x8 for a sole. This could be less robust, since it is supported by the underlying sill. There are no plans for any windows in this wall, but they could be installed in the future. I decided on an arch motif for the upper braces, since everything else was so angular.  I was tempted to use gothic arches, but they would have been out of scale in the wide bays—and the early wooden churches all seemed to use round, Roman arches.

The heart and soul of timber frame construction is the mortise and tenon joint. At its simplest, this is a reduced-in-dimensions end of a timber that fits into a socket on another timber. Once fitted, it is usually locked in place with one or more wooden pegs.  It’s important that the joints be accurately and tightly fitted, as any amount of play would allow wear to occur and ultimately cause the joint to fail. Angled braces lock the timbers in place and also help eliminate any possibility of movement. Braced frames are immensely strong; they don’t depend on sheathing for rigidity. They can also be made entirely without using nails or any sort of metal fasteners. (Here I deviated from tradition; tempered steel lag screws are too convenient, and too effective, to be ignored. In most cases, in my design, they are invisible. In a few places, I’ve countersunk the heads and will fill the holes with dowels.)

Cutting tenons is fairly straightforward and usually easy. You mark out cuts on the timber, cut them to the proper depth with a saw, and then split away the excess wood with a chisel. It’s nice if you have a little extra in the length of the beam and you can plan the cuts so as to avoid knots. But if that isn’t possible, you can slog your way through with a saw and chisel. In any case, it’s important to have a good chisel. Framing chisels—eighteen inches long or so, and weighing perhaps three pounds—are common antique tools, but it pays to spend the money—quite a lot of it—on a new tool made with modern steel. You want it to hold an edge sharp enough to shave with. You also want to trim the faces of your tenon to tolerances of a sixteenth of an inch or less.

Mortises are a bit more work. In the old days you used a wood boring tool with a large bit, turned by hand, a slow and demanding process. Then you trimmed the sides with your framing chisel, once again working to tolerances of a sixteenth of an inch or so. You want the tenon to slide into the mortise without forcing, yet with no significant play; not so easy when you’re dealing with timbers that may weigh well over 100 pounds apiece. Practice helps. The main innovation here is the power drill. You drill smaller holes around the periphery of the tenon, break out the waste wood, and trim up with the chisel.

Constructing a frame involves getting all the component parts to fit together as a whole. When you have all the mortises and tenons cut, you try to assemble the frame in such a way that several tenons slide into place simultaneously. If one doesn’t fit, you need to catch the problem early on and trim it accurately. If you discover the problem when the assembly process is well underway, you have to disassemble much of your work, and see if you have corrected the problem by trying again. You want to avoid this as much as possible when you’re dealing with heavy timbers.

By the end of September of 2018, I had fashioned all the components for the north wall. The mortises and tenons were laid out and cut, the exposed surfaces of the beams had been dressed with a small power planer and further smoothed with a belt sander, and I was ready for the assembly. I wanted to do this before starting work on components of the other walls, just to see if my plans and craftsmanship were good enough to make the whole frame come together. Also, because the timbers were still green—contained a lot of moisture—it was a good idea to get them locked in place, so that they wouldn’t warp and twist and ruin the alignments.

We got all the components in place on the newly laid floor, balancing the 20-foot long top plate on the bucket of my little tractor. Everything fitted together with a minimum of adjustments and false starts, and, after a few hours of work, I had a complete frame, weighing some 800 pounds, ready to be raised into place. 

Since there were considerable safety issues, I gave a good deal of thought as to how to accomplish this: could I assemble a group of strong men, or could I bring winches or power equipment into play and avoid risks. I finally decided that I could bring the bucket loader of a large tractor close enough to hook onto the top plate with ropes and chain and raise the frame into position, and a neighbor offered to supply the tractor. Meanwhile, October weather hadn’t been terribly cooperative, and I had begun work on the other frames in the shelter of the garage. Things were looking okay for the raising on about the first of November, and I expected to get several sections of frame raised before winter. Then it began to snow; it is still snowing. 

Fortunately, the assembled frame won’t suffer much over the course of the winter, and I can continue to fashion the components of the remaining frames under cover of the garage. I can also begin to build the doors and doorframes (I haven’t entirely settled on the designs for these). Sometime in May, I expect to be able to raise all the wall frames and then begin work on the rafters and roof. Since the plan is for a cathedral ceiling, this will necessitate some interesting scaffolding to make it all work—safely. 

Overall, at this stage, I’m counting on the clarity and simplicity of the design and construction for the main aesthetic appeal of the church. Once it’s all in place, I’ll give some thought to decorations. The one thing I am already certain of is that there will be colorful wall hangings.

I’ve decided that the interior wall surface will be wide hemlock planks. I had planned to buy these from a local bandsaw mill this fall, but the weather interfered. As far as the exterior siding is concerned, that’s quite a long way off, and it will be easier to make a decision after I see what the proportions of the building look like in real life. Wide planks with or without battens seems the most likely option, but cedar shingles are a possibility. There will be plenty of decisions to be made about various trim elements, and there might be some paint or staining involved.

A major deviation from traditional building methods will be the use of plywood. I plan to cover the subfloor, interior wall boarding and roof boards with half-inch exterior plywood. This, in turn will be covered with a finish wide plank floor, exterior siding and roofing material, so it won’t be visible anywhere. The reason for using plywood is to make the building tight and windproof. I’d like to be able to provide enough heat, probably with a small portable gas heater, so that the building can be used on occasion in all but the coldest weather. Traditional plank building would leave a lot of gaps for the wind to whistle through and disperse any heat; the old Norwegians must have shivered during the ceremonies, even if they wore fur clothing and heavy robes.

I hope to cover the roof with slate, which should be good for at least a couple of centuries. But slate is expensive, its installation is labor intensive, and I’m going to need to respect my age and get some younger legs climbing around on the roof.

There are still many other decisions to be made: whether there will be windows in some walls, the kind of windows, whether there will be stained glass, the nature of door hardware, even whether there might be a skylight on the southern roof. At some point I’ll need to decide about chairs and/or benches. One of the goals of the project is to have a venue for various kinds of music, especially ancient music such as Gregorian chants. These hills are home to a surprising number of harpists, lute players, and trained singers. Some of the stave churches are known for their acoustical qualities, as well as their atmosphere. It will be interesting to see how this one works out, and what might be done to ‘tune’ it to bring out the best in performances. I don’t plan to electrify the building, but it’s close enough to a power source that I could run a temporary line to run a gas heater. Lighting is a bit more problematical; I expect that it would normally be by candlelight, but there might be art exhibitions on occasion, and we’d need come up with some sort of an artificial light source for them.

As I mentioned before, one of the fascinations of this project has been the challenge of melding ancient design and construction concepts and techniques with modern ideas and resources. This has led to a lot of interesting compromises and decisions, and I have no doubt that there are many more to come. I’ll be updating this account as things progress.