Cumbria 2: Three Cathedrals and an Abbey

This holiday was a chance to bag three northern cathedrals I’d never seen before – Durham, Newcastle, and Carlisle. Durham, seat of the Prince-Bishops, is of course the grandest of the three and of almost anywhere, virtually spanning the whole of the hilltop on which it sits. The sheer mass and weight of the Norman arches may be what gives it its atmosphere of intensity; I can’t recall seeing so many people praying in a cathedral before, a verger lighting a candle and another praying the collect for St Cuthbert at his shrine.

Newcastle is a bumped-up parish church cathedral, so it’s much smaller in scale, with a lot of intimate details (I especially like the memorial brass to Bishop Wilberforce in his distinctive headgear). They put out no more seating than needed for services, meaning there’s a lot of exhilarating space.

Carlisle is a bit of a shock when you walk in: half the nave was dismantled in the Civil War and the remainder now forms a regimental chapel, so when you enter through the transept door you find a westward-facing altar to your left and the organ and choir screen to the right, which feels completely incorrect. It was even more of a surprise when I arrived, just after a service for the county’s legal establishment, complete with bewigged judges, ended, and someone turned the lights off: the degree of gloom took me aback. The choir is the main space, with a sumptuous, elaborate altar designed by Charles Nicholson.

The cathedrals supplied me with my images of St Catherine this time, in the form of a (?) Kempe window at Newcastle and the 14^th-century embroidered orphreys of a cope in the treasury at Carlisle.

I entered Hexham Abbey in pouring rain and emerged into the sunshine. The nave of Hexham is Victorian but the eastern portion is old, including a stone screen with some very weird carvings. My favourites were the fox preaching to the geese, and the figure with four faces including a death's-head and a demon. An entirely different experience awaits beneath the nave floor: the crypt St Wilfrid built in the 600s out of salvaged Roman stone to house relics, we believe, brought back from his continental sojourn. Pilgrims would have made their way through a passageway in and out, pitch-dark as far as anyone can tell, pausing in a central chamber in the presence of whatever it was that was installed there, lit by four flickering oil cressets. The passages can only accommodate one person at a time: it’s almost traumatically intense.