CONSERVATORS doing routine work in the chapel at Goodrich Castle, in Herefordshire, have uncovered traces of a rare medieval wall painting.

There was known to have been red masonry patterning in the building, which was used as a quick and easy way to cover large expanses of space, but, when conservators were able to look more closely from the scaffolding at a recess in the south-wall window embrasure, a tiny, delicately painted male face appeared, in three-quarter profile and with wavy hair.

“It was an incredibly exciting discovery,” Sophie Stewart, an English Heritage wall-paintings conservator, said. “Although wall paintings were relatively common in religious buildings, to find figurative subjects in a secular setting is rare. It showed that there was a figurative narrative scheme, which meant the chapel had so much more important decoration.

“The typical format was a series of separately framed scenes to tell a complex biblical, moral, or historical story. This little figure is in a frame; so it’s clearly a very sophisticated sort of painting. He’s very beautifully executed as well, and clearly of very high quality.”

She continued: “We know that, as a private chapel, it would have served as an intimate sanctuary — a personal space where high-ranking nobility could engage in personal worship. The two-window recesses have ledges that could potentially have been places to sit.”

English HeritageGoodrich Castle

All the later paint above the red under-drawing appears to have been lost. To their astonishment, however, the conservators found a microscopic particle of the high-quality, bright-blue pigment azurite: further evidence that this was a sophisticated scheme.

There are also traces of a second figure, with a halo. “Like all wall paintings, it’s in a very perilous sort of state, but at least we found it, and it’s recorded, and we can visually monitor it to make sure it stays in as good a condition as possible,” Ms Stewart said.

“By measuring just that one scene, we can then apply it to the rest of the interior of the window recesses to give a rough idea of how it would have looked.”

Fragments of some equally rare wall paintings in the chapel at Chester Castle, well preserved for their age, have served as a starting point for creating a digital reconstruction of the lost mural at Goodrich.

Built in about 1210, the walls of the chapel in the Agricola Tower in Chester would have been richly painted with scenes depicting apocryphal miracles of the Virgin; the vaulted ceiling would have been adorned with representations of Old Testament prophets and scenes from the early life of Jesus; and, underneath the wall, there would have been miracles from the life of Edward the Confessor.

English Heritage has now painstakingly reconstructed the decoration across almost the entire interior, offering a vivid impression of how the chapel may have looked 800 years ago

Dr Will Wyeth, a curator of history at English Heritage, said that the fragments hinted at a remarkable painted scheme created in the mid-13th century, at about the time King Henry III took control of the castle.

“By carefully studying these traces, we’ve been able to reconstruct how the chapel may once have looked, revealing a space that was filled with colour, imagery, and storytelling,” he said. “It brings us closer than ever to experiencing the chapel as medieval visitors would have seen it.

“Taken together, the discovery at Goodrich and the reconstruction at Chester offers rare glimpses of a lost decorative world, where painting played a central role in shaping religious experience and expressing status and patronage.”