Cathedrals

Not sure where this obsession with cathedrals comes from.  Even before I went to Norfolk boarding school when each Sunday we could go to the church of our choice for mattins, in summer taking a picnic on our bikes, and there are plenty of glorious churches in Norfolk.  Earlier, aged 10 or 11 when we were living in Chatham, I was ticked off by a woman – ‘What on earth do you think you are doing – Get off!’ – in  Rochester Cathedral for stepping on the steps of the high altar.

Holiness?  No, I’m not very holy, though all cathedrals spread a spiritual essence which inevitably touches.  Beauty?  Yes.  Grandeur, like mountains.  Silence, often, apart from the babble of guides.  The silence and the gleam of the worn stone floor – no chairs – in Winchester Cathedral in the time of Covid, was a revelation.  The expanse of it!  Like a still shining sea.  Services and sermons, oh no, spare me.  Though then I remember Toby and Arabella getting married in the Lady Chapel.  Aisles like narrow forest paths through giant trees, shrinking people to their true significance.

I must remember next time, a pair of binoculars!  At Malmesbury Abbey and Chartres and Canterbury I could not see enough of the windows – designed to be seen by God and angels, by the super sighted, for the general ethos, rather than the average searching worshipper.

Now, since I go regularly from Hampshire to Edinburgh to see Bill and Margot, I usually spend a night en route visiting a cathedral, either having another wander or marvelling for the first time.   Always by train, to sit back, to look and think, or not think.

So – York Minster and that giant statue of Constantine outside (he visited Ebor, York).  The grey veils of the Seven Sisters windows, and – particularly – all those heads near the transept which must have been carved by a sculptor with toothache.  Their agony!

And fortress Durham, the north comes alive as I see it from the train.  Inside, its drum pillars of lozenges, chevrons and spiralling incisions, powerful and primitive.  The best Norman!  The lion knocker and the lions at the base of a pillar, alive.  The mysterious and sacred Cosmati pavement.  Steps with modern railing ending in a serpent’s tail.   St Cuthbert’s window, which I’ve included because I loved walking to Lindisfarne where he communed with birds and seals centuries before St Francis went on about sister this and brother that.

Lincoln so massive, best seen high on its hill from the train.

Peterborough – statuesque Norman but without the fortress look of Durham or Winchester, and a west facade with three cavernous entrances, and a lovely harmonious south facade with later gothic windows beneath the Norman clerestory.   The nave the day I went was set up with white clothed circular tables for the mayor’s banquet.  A splendid eagle lectern, and some beautiful van vaulting. Love the walk up the aisles under the rounded arches.  No entrance fee (or place for cream teas), unlike lesser cathedrals, because not many visitors to that town of Bangladeshi and Turkish restaurants, and they make money as best they can?  A short spread of fan vaulting.  Burial place of Catherine of Aragon, where fresh flowers are laid.

Ely medieval glory, like a gothic citadel approached from a distance, and inside to walk down the nave into the burst of lierned light of its lantern, ah.  Walking there from Soham with Ann Jarman during Covid was like a pilgrimage. Green men galore.

Wells with the most beautiful curving stone steps splitting into to the chapter house and some higher office.  Exeter with its facade of cross legged kings, worn and holy.    Gloucester cathedral, the intricate vaulted cloister.  Canterbury Cathedral, I walked there, a pilgrimage along the North Downs Way, and I think of the vastness, and the windows, particularly one of pilgrims, some astride, others walking including a woman in a green dress.  I bought Bob a tie designed with these windows.

Norwich Cathedral, forgotten, just some amazing repainted bosses.  Ripon Cathedral, forgotten.  Salisbury Cathedral, the purity of its exterior and the spire reaching to God, yet the curious chilliness within.  Because of those black columns of Purbeck marble clinging to the main piers?  Because built so quickly, I think in a couple of decades?  After that, virtually untouched.  No accretions, no chantry chapels or green men there.  (I think).  Yet when I asked Bob which was his favourite cathedral he replied at once Salisbury, and Constable and Turner chose to paint there – obviously the outside.  Hereford, its Mappa Mundi, Chester, Worcester and the cathedrals of the west, all a rather unhappy red sandstone.

Last January, going to Edinburgh via Birmingham, I checked in at the Cathedral Hotel (don’t  go there) of Lichfield, then walked to the gothic cathedral.  Oh what happened?  It’s a dull day, and see, the west front is plastered with Victorian saints and kings in this unfortunate red stone, identikit pious and spiritually dead.  Three spires, two atop the west front, and one above the central transept crossing.  Dedicated to St Chad, who lived the 7th century when England was six warring kingdoms.  We are in Mercia.  Nice enough inside, get the guide book, and understand more.  Here Prince Rupert was fighting the Roundheads, and the central spire came tumbling down and the figures on the west facade shot down except for one or two at the very top.  All restored, later.  Shrine to St Chad (what a name!  Rhymes with cad, mad, sad, bad, fad) evangelist of the Mercians, it’s nice but so recently redecorated that no patina of holiness, of prayers bestowed through the centuries have had a chance to accrue.   A delicate marble tomb to two sisters, and I like some of the Victorian glass.  A  medieval bearded angel.  And as I leave,  after  rain the sun shines on the west facade, and I see its beauty, and I see the beauty of the three spires.   I think, how much lovelier Winchester cathedral would be, if they’d built a spire over the crossing.  (Though, considering Winchester’s muddy site, it might well have tumbled down.)  Lichfield – the little city and its cathedral, lovely.

Back to Winchester, built in stone from France shipped over the Channel and up the Itchen.  My nearest and dearest.  Important and grand and bulky outside, but beautiful?  Well, not really.  More, imposing.   All is power here, says Pevsner, nothing grace.  Even the west front is a tad odd, lacking in rhythm and harmony, as though it’s been pressed down, with spires then added.  (Disappointing, says guru Pevsner).  But inside, a revelation, particularly when the chairs are swept away and the stone floor lies worn and gleaming, and the high ceiling is paced by the vaulting receding into the distance.   Chunky satisfying Norman transepts.   Chantry chapels like reliquaries for grandees like Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester and William of Wykeham – where they were sung to heaven under their lacy vaults, while below their stone cadavers shrunk and agonised are covered by a wisp of loin cloth.  In its perpetually flooded crypt, naked Anthony Gormley stands reading, haloed by arches above and below.  The retrochoir, where the medieval tiles under my feet are griffins, fleur de lis, rosettes, spiky stars and patterned arcs.  The mystery of the green men who stud the vaulted ceiling.  The great west window with its mad mosaic of broken glass.  The south aisle a walk through vast trees, reducing us to our proper size.  And high, unseen, above the ceiling, is a wooden walkway traversing the length of the building where you look down at the rather rough inverse shape of the vaulted ceiling, amazed to be there, wondering how they achieved it, thinking that if you fell a couple of feet on to it, would you burst through and fall to the nave floor?  Most I love the choir, with its misericords, and above the stalls in spandrels are carved hunting scenes, a monkey, a falconer with bird, and a green man – they are in the dark forest but above them a deep blue sky blazes with stars.

With such things, I would never wish to live outside Europe.