For a village that already looks as if it has wandered in from a location scout’s daydream, Altarnun did rather well out of Doc Martin. St Nonna’s Church, clinging to the valley side above the packhorse bridge and the River Penpont, was drafted in not once but twice as the stage for Martin and Louisa’s faltering progress towards matrimony. It is the sort of church that looks as if it has been waiting centuries for a film crew to notice it.
By the time we reach Series 6, the couple have already survived one aborted attempt at marriage and the small matter of their baby James being kidnapped by the well-meaning but unhinged Mrs Tishell. That particular nightmare, oddly enough, pulls them closer together. So when the cameras return to St Nonna’s, the Doc is finally in his wedding suit, the village has turned out in force, and the Reverend is quietly wondering whether Louisa will bolt again. PC Penhale, naturally, has misunderstood his own importance and assumes he is best man.
The wedding itself is played against the granite solidity of the church: a Cornish congregation squeezed into a building originally funded by wool and moorstone, now pressed into service as a television parish. The tension is all human—Louisa late, Martin prickly, the Reverend doubtful—but the setting is immovable. Whatever the Doc’s neuroses, the tower of St Nonna’s has seen worse weather.
In classic Doc Martin fashion, the romance is immediately undercut by practical disaster. Bert Large deposits the newlyweds at a remote honeymoon lodge with no telephone, no neighbours and, crucially, no working chimney. The fire smokes them out in their wedding clothes, and they end up stumbling through the woods to encounter Bellamy, an armed hermit with a collapsing porch. Louisa disarms him with more confidence than her new husband shows in most social situations; Martin, back on familiar ground, saves the man’s life with impromptu surgery.
While all this is going on, the domestic chaos has simply been relocated back to Portwenn. Aunt Ruth is left wrestling with a howling James Henry, a power cut, and a steady procession of men—Al Large, PC Penhale and electrician Mike Pruddy—who are all more hindrance than help until Pruddy finally manages to calm both the electrics and the baby. It is a neat inversion: the supposed sanctuary of the honeymoon turns feral, while the storm at home slowly settles.
St Nonna’s works on screen precisely because nothing about it has been tailored for television. The church appears exactly as it is: a granite, moorstone building serving its community for centuries, now briefly used as the backdrop for a fictional wedding that had already failed once. Both the jilted ceremony and the eventual marriage were filmed in the same place, and the continuity of the setting does more work than any dialogue. The production simply turned up and used what was already there.
Image courtesy of: https://docmartinseries6.blogspot.com/2013/08/
