Peterborough

The Writing on the Wall...

The Book of Daniel, Chapter 4

I was here before - I don't know when - but I remember the face of the cathedral as if it were yesterday [And it wasn't..... Ed?]

Young woman, the Town Hall

Now look, this is a picture essay.  I cannot tell you the whole truth, the nothing but....  The time is passing and, to be very Francis, it is sad.....

Peterborough Cathedral, West Front

Peterborough (named, possibly, after my dad, but little (?) to do with Petersburg, nor Petrograd, nor Walpole St Peter, nor even Chalfont St Peter....) is a town that hangs near the middle of a map that is centered on Peterborough [Is that surprising?  Ed.]  What else can you say?  It is on the way from here to there, from many other places to other places.

View of Peterborough from the Cathedral West Front

And I am here.  

I was there.....

Pace/Roper Crucifix, 1975

I came to scale the heights of one of the finest Norman Cathedrals in the Universe.....

As Simon Jenkins wrote in England's Cathedrals (Little Brown, 2016) Peterborough has long been the poor relation of the great East Anglian cathedrals. It is buried in a new town of the 1960s, since bleakly expanded, with none of the suavity of its neighbours, Ely and Norwich.....

I am not going to attempt to describe the extraordinary architecture of the cathedral nor the depression of the town around it.  I am very grateful to Rod and Paul who took me to the heights and to all those who worked their fingers to the bone to produce such a god-given masterpiece as the Cathedral of St Peter, St Paul and St Andrew.  

I am not going to try and tell you how sad I felt to wander the streets of this Cambridgeshire city on the River Nene that now has a population of some 200,000 (it was little more than 1,000 when the cathedral was rebuilt in 1170) - that is a different story - but I will offer you a selection of pictures from my visit and you can draw your own conclusion:

Please feel free to observe.  My eyes are damp and failing - you will see more than me:

The museum (above) is fascinating: there's a collection of portraits of the grand and the good but on the top floor I find one of the earliest of any operating theatres:

And a celebration of gender diversity:

And on the middle floor there is the skeleton of a marine crocodile [Steneosaurus durobrivensis, Ed.] being skipped around by tiny children delighted to be out of the classroom.....

Is this an unparalleled universe?  I am lost....

Wandering, hopelessly, around the town centre, I photograph random sights and people.  I don't mind saying that my spirits are a little low.   Try as I might, nothing seems to make me feel that life was quite what I wished it to be:

Not even the Westgate Arcade(!) uplifts.....  

Nor even the inverted cathedral, really....

Even though it is, undeniably, marvellous......

Whichever way you look.....,

{How did they do this?  No cranes; no computers......}

Other architectural masterpieces have fared less well:

Or been adapted:

Though the nearby church of St John the Baptist has a breathtaking altarpiece:

While the River Nene carries on regardless:

And multiculturalism paints the walls:

When the lonely night falls:

And I look toward the sheer brilliance of the cathedral facade:

There is little solace in the neighbourhood:

And then the following morning brings another tale of the cycle of life:

And the young woman under the Town Hall at the top of this piece morphs into the woman who walks in the rain......

We are so near to others.....

But everything is so far......

Well, well, Wells!

Oh Wells!

Oh Well 

I can't help about the shape I'm in

I can't sing, I ain't pretty and my legs are thin

But don't ask me what I think of you

I might not give the answer that you want me to

Oh well 

Sister morphine made the juddering ambulance comfortable.  I could just see a green paramedic uniform hunched over a clipboard in the dim interior.  I tried to imagine where we were. 

Gurney wheeled into midnight bright A & E unit; lifted to a bed.  Blue nurses, blue doctors, blue curtains: bloods, pressures, pulse, ECG.

Psilocybin would have explained some of it, but this was pain.  Worse than any childbirth, or so my paramedic friend told me…..  Last time I had this pain I was at scout camp the day Marilyn Monroe OD’d and I had cider and cake with my mum and dad then a swim in the coldest river in England…..  Fifty years and counting.

Pills, drips, x-rays, blood pressure standing and lying, echo-graph, etc. 

Morphine wearing off; codeine sulphate and ranitidine; pains abating; deemed well enough to vacate the bed.

Out in the cold and dark at 4.30; taxi home.  Diagnosis, probably acute gastritis.  I disagree, but hey!

Episode over.  In the past.  Finished.  

Oh, well!

Several tender days later, recovering from what I was sure was biliary colic, I woke early in Bristol and saw the sun rise over Clifton Downs.

The Balloon Fiesta was on and eighteen daring balloonists flew

from Ashton Court across Hotwells before the management deemed the wind unsuitable.

As the glowing orbs wafted into the clouds, I set off across the empty city, and up the A37 to Midsomer Norton, then over the Mendips on the A39 to the city of Wells.

It is still early, and the place is quiet, with market traders just setting out their stalls, and the mighty Cathedral just waking up.  In the interests of health and scenery I trek back up the scarp slope above the spring line to the heights of the hills, crossing the Old Bristol Road and following a sunken lane, cut deep into the limestone, 

before reaching the plateau.

From here the view back is fine, across the Cathedral amidst fields, and on to the Somerset levels, and to the sea.

I wander on, along a drover’s road, and then across fields, to the stunning gash that is Ebbor Gorge.  It’s a mini-cheddar, to coin a phrase (sic), though without the crowds, and without a road.  It is designated a National Nature Reserve, owned by the National Trust (in memory of Winston Churchill) but managed by Natural England.  Ash trees, oak, beech, wych-elm and dogwood fill the gorge. 

It’s damp and deep and ancient.  

Psilocybin

Once a watercourse following faults and weaknesses in the limestone, it became a cave, then fell in, tens of thousands of years ago.  

It’s more popular now than when I last visited some tens of years ago, but it is still a wild and awesome place.

From the rocky narrows, its not far to the village of Wookey Hole, where visitors wonder at the vast grottoes and children experiment in the Axe-driven paper mill.

Across the fields I can just see Glastonbury Tor, and then I pass through abandoned Underwood Quarry (where in the 1930s bones of a hippopotamus from 150,000 years ago were uncovered) and back towards the sculpted west front of Wells Cathedral.

Founded near St Andrew’s spring at the foot of the Mendips, there was a minster church here before it was granted cathedral status in 909.  The current building was consecrated in 1239, and it would have looked very different with its painted and gilded statues, though it is still impressive today.

I enter through Martin Stancliffe’s 2008 discreet but beautiful visitor centre and cross the medieval cloister.  

Inside the giant scissor arches seem modern, but these were built in the 1330s to support the central tower which was beginning to crack.  

The play of light over the fair stone is glorious, and, despite my lack of faith, I cannot help but feel uplifted.  The undercroft is gently quiet, 

and then above it rises a worn stairway to heaven, leading to the Chapter House and then to the Vicars’ Close.

The Chapter House is a wonder, lit by clear windows where Cromwell’s men smashed the stained glass. 

A single pier holds up the tierceron vault with thirty-two radiating ribs. On benches around the walls the Canons used to sit to discuss cathedral business every day. As Simon Jenkins says in England’s Cathedrals they saw their great church not just as a place of prayer but as a mirror of the entire community of medieval England. 

Modern government could learn something from this.  Without the defence of heavy tables, to sit in equality in a chamber like this might be good for cabinets and committees of our times.  Nowhere for the narcissists or the wooden to hide!

Outside I watch the swans on the moat of the remains of the Bishop’s Palace, then make my retreat.  Wells is busy now, and I need to return to Bristol.

Up on the Mendips, between the hurdle stack on Priddy’s green and traces of ancient lead workings I pause for bread and cheese and a pint of Cheddar Ales Potholer at the Hunters’ Lodge Inn.  The landlord here has been in charge for nearly fifty years, and, like the great Cathedral, not a lot has changed in recent times…. 

It’s a long way from the Luton and Dunstable Hospital Trust's A & E department. 

And for that I give thanks.

Oh well! 

Now, when I talked to God I knew he'd understand

He said, Stick by my side and I'll be your guiding hand

But don't ask me what I think of you

I might not give the answer that you want me to

Oh well

Peter Green