Durham Cathedral

A church built in forty years to hold the body of a hermit who had been dead for four hundred, on a rock in a loop of river chosen because a milkmaid was looking for a cow. It contains the oldest large-scale pointed rib vault in Europe, the grave of the man who effectively invented English history, and a cloister most visitors recognise from a film. Entry is free. Here is what to look at.

A body that would not settle

Cuthbert died on Inner Farne in 687, a monk and hermit of Lindisfarne who had been made a bishop against his own wishes and gone back to his island as soon as he decently could. Eleven years later his community opened the coffin and found the body, they said, uncorrupted. That finding made him the great saint of the north, and his shrine on Lindisfarne made the community rich.

Then the Vikings came. In 875 the monks left Lindisfarne carrying the coffin, and for over a century they did not stop — Chester-le-Street for a hundred years, Ripon briefly, and then, in 995, this peninsula. The story the community told is that the cart carrying the coffin stopped dead and would not move, that a vision named “Dun Holm” as the destination, and that nobody knew where that was until they overheard a milkmaid asking after a lost dun cow. There is a carving of the milkmaid and the cow high on the north-east turret of the chapel of the Nine Altars. The community was almost certainly also looking for a defensible rock, and the Wear does three sides of the work.

The Normans arrived, and in 1093 Bishop William of St Calais pulled down the Saxon church and began this one. The main body was finished by about 1133 — forty years, which for a building of this size is extraordinarily quick, and it is the reason Durham is so consistent. It was never remodelled in the later Gothic taste the way Canterbury or York were, because it was never fashionable enough to be worth the trouble and then it was too old to touch.

Durham's bishops were not ordinary bishops. As prince-bishops of the County Palatine they raised armies, minted coin and held their own courts, because the crown needed a warlord on the Scottish border and gave the job to the church. That is why the cathedral has a castle across the green from it, and why the two are inscribed together by UNESCO.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The approach: come up from the river

Most people walk up from the station or the market place and arrive on Palace Green, where the cathedral is a wall of stone at close range and you cannot see what it is doing. The peninsula walk along the riverbank — from Framwellgate Bridge round to Prebends Bridge and back up South Bailey — takes about half an hour, and it is the reason the building is famous.

From Prebends Bridge the cathedral rises out of a wooded gorge on a cliff, and you understand in one look why the monks stopped here. Turner painted it, Girtin painted it, and there is a stone on the bridge carved with Walter Scott's lines about “half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot,” which is the best short description anyone has managed.

The Sanctuary Ring on the North Door

The bronze ring in a lion's face on the north door is the emblem of the whole place. Until 1623, a fugitive who reached it and grasped it could claim sanctuary: two watchmen slept in a chamber over the door to let people in at any hour, the Galilee bell was rung to announce a claim, and the man was given a black gown with St Cuthbert's cross on the shoulder and thirty-seven days in which to make his peace or agree to leave the kingdom. The priory register records hundreds of claimants, most of them for homicide, and their names and offences are written down.

Two corrections. First, the cathedral calls it the Sanctuary Ring and not the knocker, because it was never used for knocking. Second, the one on the door is a 1980 replica; the twelfth-century original is inside, in Open Treasure, where the weather cannot get at it.

The nave

Then you go in, and it is the best interior in Britain.

The nave runs on colossal cylindrical piers alternating with compound ones, and each of the great drums is incised with a deep-cut geometric pattern — spirals, chevrons, lozenges, flutings — no two alike, cut into stone rather than applied to it. Nobody is certain why. The usual guess is that they were meant to be read as the columns of a Roman or Jerusalem temple, possibly painted. The effect is that a building made of enormous plain shapes is also, at close range, textured all over.

Above them is the thing that matters architecturally. The high vault over the nave, finished by about 1133, uses pointed transverse arches with a rib framework, and it is the earliest surviving large-scale example anywhere in Europe. The pointed arch and the rib vault together are the structural basis of everything called Gothic; both are here, in a Norman building, decades before they appear at Saint-Denis or Sens. Durham is not a Gothic cathedral. It is where the technique that made Gothic possible turns up first, in a building that used it to hold up a very heavy roof.

Look down as well. A line of black marble set across the nave floor, a few bays in from the west, marked the point past which women were not permitted to go — the priory took Cuthbert's alleged aversion to women seriously enough to enforce it in stone, which is why the Galilee Chapel was built where it was.

The Galilee Chapel and Bede

At the west end, a low, wide, five-aisled space of slender paired columns and zigzag arches, built about 1175 and quite unlike the rest of the building: light, horizontal and almost Moorish-looking. It was the Lady Chapel, put at the wrong end of the church so that women could use it without crossing the line in the nave floor.

Bede is here. He died at Jarrow in 735 having written the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which is the reason we know anything much about Anglo-Saxon England, and which gave the English the habit of dating events from the birth of Christ. His bones were stolen from Jarrow by a Durham sacrist in the eleventh century, kept for a while in Cuthbert's own coffin, and moved to the Galilee in 1370.

The tomb is a plain black slab on a plain plinth with one line of Latin. After the shrine furniture of the rest of the building it is startling, and it is right: the man who wrote the history got the least decorated grave in the cathedral. The 1930s inscription on the wall behind it is taken from his own commentary on the Apocalypse.

The choir, the Neville Screen and the Miners' Memorial

East of the crossing, behind the high altar, stands the Neville Screen: a wall of Caen stone shipped up from London in 1372–80, paid for by John, Lord Neville, and probably designed by Henry Yevele, the king's mason. It once held 107 alabaster statues. Every one of them went at the Reformation, and the empty canopies have been empty since. It is worth looking at slowly for the same reason Ely's Lady Chapel is: the vandalism is the exhibit.

In the south transept is the clock made for Prior Castell about 1500, one of very few English pre-Reformation clock cases to survive. The Scots prisoners held in the cathedral in 1650 broke up almost all the woodwork in the building for firewood; the story goes that they spared this one because a thistle is carved on it. It is probably too neat to be true and it is repeated by the cathedral anyway.

Also in the south transept is the Miners' Memorial, and it deserves more time than most visitors give it. County Durham was a coalfield, the cathedral was the coalfield's church, and the memorial carries a book recording the names of men killed underground. Every July the banners of the lodges are carried into the cathedral at the Durham Miners' Gala and blessed at a service, a tradition running since 1897 and now larger than it has been in decades. There is no other English cathedral where industrial history sits this close to the middle of the building.

St Cuthbert's grave

Up the steps behind the high altar, in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, is a plain raised slab cut with one word: CVTHBERTVS.

What stood here until 1539 was one of the four great shrines of England, plated in gold and hung with the gifts of four centuries of pilgrims, with a cover that was winched up on ropes so that the crowd could see. Henry VIII's commissioners stripped it. The story recorded by an eye witness is that the goldsmith sent to break open the chest struck through it, broke Cuthbert's leg with the hammer, and then found the body whole, in its vestments, and had to send to the prior for instructions. He was told to put it in the vestry until the king's pleasure was known. The body was reburied under the site of the shrine.

The grave was opened again in 1827 and 1899. The coffin fragments, the pectoral cross of gold and garnet, the portable altar and the embroidered vestments given by King Æthelstan in 934 came out of it, and they are all in Open Treasure now.

The Chapel of the Nine Altars around you is thirteenth century, built to give the pilgrim crowds room, and its north rose window and tall lancets are the one place in the building where the Norman weight lets go entirely.

The cloister

Out through the south side, and this is what most people arrive knowing without knowing why. The cloister was used in the first two Harry Potter films — the snow-covered courtyard where Harry releases Hedwig, and the corridor where Ron's slug-vomiting scene was shot. The Chapter House off the east walk was Professor McGonagall's classroom.

Underneath the film locations is a complete Benedictine monastery, which is unusual: Durham kept its monastic buildings when most English cathedral priories lost theirs. The monks' dormitory along the west range, built 1398–1404, still has its original oak roof and is now a library you can walk into. The Great Kitchen of 1366–74, an octagonal room with a vault of intersecting stone ribs, is one of only two medieval monastic kitchens left in England and now forms part of Open Treasure.

The Chapter House itself was where the community met daily to be governed, hear a chapter of the Rule read, and discipline itself. Its east end was demolished in 1796 by a dean who found it damp and rebuilt in the 1890s. Several early bishops are buried under the floor.

The tower

325 steps up a spiral stair, around £11, capped numbers, and children under eight are not allowed. It is a hard climb in a narrow shaft and there is no way past anyone slower than you. At the top the view runs over the whole peninsula, the castle, the university colleges and the loop of the Wear, and out to the Pennines. Book it; on graduation weeks and summer weekends it goes.

Open Treasure

The museum, around £7.50, laid out through the monks' dormitory and the Great Kitchen. The Cuthbert relics are the reason to go: the coffin fragments with their incised figures, the pectoral cross, the portable altar, and the Æthelstan embroideries, which are among the very few surviving pieces of Anglo-Saxon textile anywhere. The building it is housed in is worth the ticket on its own.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The incised piers Walk the nave slowly and look at the carving on each great drum. Spiral, chevron, lozenge, fluting — no two the same, cut into the stone, and nobody is sure why.
• The pointed rib vault The oldest surviving one of its size in Europe, finished about 1133. Everything called Gothic comes out of the technique overhead.
• Bede's tomb In the Galilee Chapel. One black slab, one line of Latin, and the man who taught England to count years from the birth of Christ.
• CVTHBERTVS Behind the high altar. One of the four great shrines of medieval England, reduced to a name cut in a slab in 1539.
• The Miners' Memorial South transept, with the book of the dead. The banners come in every July.
• The Great Kitchen 1366–74, octagonal, stone-vaulted, one of two left in England, and now part of Open Treasure.
• The line in the nave floor Black marble across the floor near the west end — the limit past which women could not go, and the reason the Lady Chapel is at the wrong end of the church.

Insider tips

Evensong is free, sung by the cathedral choir in term time, and it seats you in the choir stalls under the Neville Screen. It is the best half-hour available here and it costs nothing.

The walk up from the railway station is steep and the last stretch is cobbled. There is no parking on the peninsula worth attempting; the Park and Ride with the Cathedral Bus is genuinely the sensible option, and the bus drops you on Palace Green.

Term time matters. Durham is a collegiate university city and the cathedral sits in the middle of it; graduation weeks in summer fill the peninsula completely, and the cathedral is used for the ceremonies. Check the diary before booking a tower slot.

If you have half a day rather than two hours, add Durham Castle across Palace Green — it is a university college and can only be seen on a guided tour, but its Norman chapel and Great Hall complete the UNESCO site. Lindisfarne, where the whole story starts, is about ninety minutes north and worth a day of its own if the tides allow.

Where to stay and eat nearby

The peninsula itself is almost all university and cathedral property, so the places to eat are down the hill: Saddler Street and the Market Place immediately below the cathedral, and Elvet Bridge across the river. The cathedral's own Undercroft restaurant, in the vaulted space off the cloister, is better value than its location suggests.

Durham is small enough to stay in the centre and walk everywhere, and out of term it is inexpensive. In graduation weeks it is not, and rooms go months ahead.

More English cathedrals

• Ely Cathedral — the other great Norman nave, and the Octagon
• York Minster — two hours south, and the largest Gothic interior in northern Europe
• Lincoln Cathedral — the next great hilltop cathedral down the East Coast line
• Canterbury Cathedral — the shrine that eclipsed Cuthbert's, and met the same end

See all the cathedrals and churches worth visiting in England →