Murals at the Gas Station

When British Garage Owner Arthur Lindley surveyed the creaking, pre-Elizabethan cottage he owns next door to his gasoline station at Piccott's End near Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, he saw a depressing sight. The wood was moldering, the rooftop sagged, grey plaster was flaking off the old brick walls. Disconsolately tugging at a damp patch of wallpaper in an upstairs bedroom, Lindley got the surprise of his life. A flap of wallpaper six layers thick, backed by linen cloth, tore away, revealing beneath a broad expanse of orange, grey, black, blue and yellow mural. Recalled Lindley: "I am not a fanciful man, but when I saw those paintings, the whole atmosphere of the room changed. It was as if those pictures were waiting to get out."

What Lindley had uncovered is today rated as a prime artistic find: five panels of 15th century medieval religious wall paintings, blurred but still color-bright. Experts guess that the cottage was once a pilgrims' wayhouse between British shrines. Except for purposeful defacing by some iconoclasts' pikes in the dim past, the murals remain as they were painted 450 years ago.

The discovery, made in 1953, caused little stir until a fortnight ago when Lindley's publicity-wise Shell Petroleum distributor got the press interested. Reporters and scholars flocked to the site. Sir Albert Richardson, president of the Royal Academy, traveled down to view the discovery, enthusiastically pronounced the paintings "unique." Said Egmont Lind, art restorer of Denmark's National Museum: "They are the only early wall paintings I have seen in England that have not been touched, apart from the deliberate disfigurement since the day they were painted."

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