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The legend about St Brelade’s Church, as it is usually presented (for example in L’Amy), is impossibly modern in style. There is often a rector, a sexton, workmen and there are fairies moving the stones of the Church by night from the chosen location to where it currently stands.
As far as narrative form goes, we have here the kind of narrative which fits easily under the heading of the Victorian fairy tales retold for children. It is a basic, flattened out style of narrative, told as a piece of fiction; full of stock characters from Victorian fairy tales, it is not presented in any form in which we could read it today as depicting an event which actually happened. It is also completely detached from the history of the site and the real building of the Church.
Of course the story may be just a piece of make believe, a "just so" story to explain the peculiar siting of the Church. The fact that the story appears late in history, and has no early source documents, or even purported documents, lends to it the likelihood that it is that kind of story, which is in a way rather a shame.
How then, can we re-imagine the story to make it appear authentic, and give it a historical feel? That was the task to which I set myself in this narrative poem. It is a difficult task, because the story as it stands is pretty impossible to use, both in terms of the story form and the content. It needed, I felt, a very radical reworking of the original tale.
I decided to set the story at a supposed missionary enterprise to Jersey. The missionaries are seeking a safe haven from stormy weather, and the place where they land (by where the church is now) is eminently suitable. It is also by the site of a Neolithic monument, whose origins have been forgotten by the natives, who use it instead in part of their pagan culture and religious practices. So far, there is a fairly decent fit with the historical reconstructions of Warwick Rodwell (in "The Fisherman’s Chapel") for the area, and the missionary enterprise borrows from Balleine’s "Popular History of the Church of England", which contains something of the same kind.
The way the story is unfolding is now clearer. The missionaries are going to break up the old site (which would have been further up the hill), and use part of the stones for the new chapel. This is seen as a common practice, and one which again fits in with the archaeological evidence. They do this surreptitiously, by night, using flaming torches, which again fits the fairy tale version.
Names are brought into the narrative, again to supply verisimilitude. The leader of the missionaries is Branwallader, the Neolithic focus for pagan worship they call "the tomb of Helen" or "Tomberlaine". This is intended to locate the story in the real history and geography of the place.
The final change or twist comes with taking the missionaries as the movers of the stones, hence the story must be told from the perspective of an outsider to that, so that it fits with the modern story, where the "others" move the stones.
So my story must be told from the point of view of the last of the pagans, who is alone unconverted to Christianity as the story ends, and is trying to pass on the account of how his (or her) religion had ended to future generations. In this way, the missionaries, as strangers, take on the "fairy" role, acting by night, moving stones. The reason for the movement of stones is also made clear; it is so that the old shrine will no longer be present for the natives to fall back into their own superstitions.
At the end of the sequence, it is also made clear that the position of site of the old stone burial site will be lost to memory, again to fit the modern story, and will become garbled over time until it takes the modern form with fairies moving stones by night.