At the easternmost edge of the windswept Dengie peninsula stands the chapel of St. Peter-on-the-Wall.

The Dengie, in Essex, is an area of marshland bounded by the Blackwater to the north, the Crouch to the south, and the North Sea to the east.

St. Peter-on-the-Wall was built in the seventh century AD by Bishop Cedd of Lindisfarne as a base from which to convert the local Saxon tribes to christianity. Construction utilised the ruin of a substantial Roman stone fort already present at the location, by building out from the walls of its western gate, the Porta Praetoria, and by quarrying the ruin for materials to complete the remainder of the chapel. During its long life the chapel disappeared from the written record for 800 years, and also survived a burning, removal of much of its once-larger structure, and even functioned for several centuries as a barn.

The massive walls of St. Peter are an archive of pilfered and ingeniously reassembled Roman stonework, a patchwork of upcycled bricks, roof tiles (still distinctively red after 1900 years), rubble in-fill, and dressed masonry taken from the fort’s doorways or gateways.

Although the Roman fort is no longer visible - reduced finally to ground level by centuries of flood, scavenging, and the plough - St. Peter-on-the-Wall’s structure points clearly toward both this absent building and the hands that shaped it.

This work is presented as a triptych of three prints, made from images taken on the same day in 2018.