Hereford Cathedral

In 1988 the dean and chapter of Hereford, desperate for money to repair their cathedral, announced that they would sell the Mappa Mundi. The outcry was immediate and national. The map stayed, a public appeal and a large private gift built it a new home, and today the greatest medieval map in existence hangs a few yards from where it has been for seven centuries, beside a seventeenth-century library in which every book is still chained to its shelf.

A murdered king, a burned church and a fallen tower

Hereford Cathedral is dedicated to St Mary and to St Ethelbert, a young king of East Anglia who came here in 794 to marry the daughter of Offa of Mercia and was murdered on Offa’s orders instead. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and a church grew up around it. In 1056 Welsh raiders burned that church to the ground.

The Normans rebuilt it from about 1079, under Bishop Robert of Lorraine, and the nave arcade you walk through today is theirs: massive round piers and round arches of the early twelfth century. Over the next three hundred years the cathedral was extended and refashioned piece by piece — an Early English Lady Chapel, a startling north transept, a fourteenth-century central tower — until by the end of the Middle Ages it was a patchwork of every English style.

On Easter Monday 1786 the west tower collapsed, bringing down the west front and part of the nave. The architect James Wyatt was brought in to repair it, shortened the nave by a bay, and gave it a new front that almost nobody liked. That front was in turn replaced in 1902–08 by the one you see now, designed by John Oldrid Scott. It is a good Edwardian design in the local red sandstone, and it is worth knowing that it is younger than the railway station.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The nave and the Norman east end

Enter by the north porch and the scale is Norman: the round piers march down the nave, heavy and plain, with carved capitals at their tops. Walk up to the crossing and look east through the choir to the high altar, which stands framed by a great Norman arch in the east wall of the presbytery — one of the best surviving pieces of the twelfth-century church.

Under the tower hangs the corona, a modern crown of light suspended over the crossing. It is either a triumph or an intrusion depending on your view of new work in old buildings; either way, it makes the crossing feel inhabited.

The north transept and the shrine of St Thomas

Turn into the north transept and the architecture goes strange. Built in the 1250s for Bishop Peter of Aquablanca, whose tomb is here, it has arches with straight sides rather than curves — triangles, almost — and a rich surface of carving that looks more French than English. It is one of the most distinctive thirteenth-century interiors in the country.

Here too is the shrine of Thomas de Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, who died in 1282 and was canonised in 1320. He was the most popular English saint of his day after Becket, and the stone base of his shrine, carved with knights in armour, survived the Reformation. In 2008 it was given a new painted and gilded canopy, so that for the first time in five centuries it looks like a shrine again rather than a monument.

The Lady Chapel

At the far east end, the Lady Chapel is Early English work of about 1220–40: tall lancet windows in groups, deep mouldings, and an east wall of five lancets that is one of the loveliest in the West Country. Beneath it is a crypt, which is unusual for an English cathedral of this date. Take a minute at the tombs along the side walls, and at the Audley chantry chapel opening off the south side.

Mappa Mundi

Now go out into the cloister and into the museum. The map is shown in low light in its own room, and the first surprise is its size: about 1.58 metres high by 1.33 wide, on a single calfskin, tapering to a point at the top. It was made about 1300 and names its author as Richard of Haldingham and Lafford — Holdingham and Sleaford, in Lincolnshire.

The second surprise is that it is not trying to be a map in our sense. East is at the top, where Paradise is shown as a circular island. Jerusalem is at the exact centre. The Mediterranean runs up the middle; Britain is squeezed into the bottom left-hand corner. And over the whole known world are some five hundred drawings: around 420 towns and cities, fifteen scenes from the Bible, plants, animals and the strange peoples medieval writers placed at the edge of the world — a man with one huge foot he uses as a sunshade, people with faces in their chests. At the top, Christ sits in judgement over all of it. It is history, geography, natural history and theology on one sheet, and an exhibition around it explains how to read it.

The Chained Library

In the next room stands the Chained Library, arranged as it was from 1611 to 1841. Each book is attached by a chain at the front cover to a rod along the shelf, so it can be taken down and read at the desk but not removed. They are shelved with their fore-edges facing out, which looks wrong until you realise it stops the chains tangling. It is the largest chained library to survive with all its chains, rods and locks. Among its more than 220 medieval manuscripts is the eighth-century Hereford Gospels, the cathedral’s oldest book, and the museum also holds one of the four surviving copies of the 1217 issue of Magna Carta.

All of this is here because of the 1988 crisis. After the sale was announced, the National Heritage Memorial Fund and a large donation from Sir Paul Getty kept the map in Hereford, and the money paid for the New Library Building, opened in 1996, where the map and the library are now kept together.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• Mappa Mundi The world as a medieval scholar saw it, about 1300, with Jerusalem in the middle and monsters at the edges.
• The Chained Library The largest surviving library with all its chains, arranged as it was in 1611.
• The Norman nave Round piers and round arches of the early 1100s, the oldest large part of the church.
• The north transept Straight-sided arches of the 1250s, and Bishop Aquablanca’s tomb.
• St Thomas de Cantilupe's shrine The medieval base, carved with knights, under its new painted canopy.
• The Lady Chapel Early English lancets at their best, and a crypt beneath.
• The view from the Wye Bridge Five minutes’ walk, and the best view of the tower you will get.

Insider tips

Hereford is one of the three cathedrals of the Three Choirs Festival, which it shares with Gloucester and Worcester and which has been held since the early eighteenth century. When it is Hereford’s turn, in late July, the city fills with choral music and accommodation fills with singers; plan accordingly.

Evensong is at 5.30pm on weekdays and 3.30pm on Sundays and costs nothing.

On the green by the cathedral, Edward Elgar leans on his bicycle and looks at the building. He lived in Hereford from 1904 to 1911 and cycled the lanes of Herefordshire while composing. Then walk down to the river: the medieval Wye Bridge is a few minutes away, and the view back to the tower across the water is the picture everyone takes.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Hereford is a small market city and everything is walkable. Church Street and the lanes north of the cathedral have independent cafes; the Cathedral Café in the cloister is good for lunch. The Black and White House Museum, a Jacobean timber-framed house in High Town, is a ten-minute walk and worth the detour.

More English cathedrals

• Gloucester Cathedral — its Three Choirs partner, an hour away, with the first fan vault
• Exeter Cathedral — another Norman cathedral remade in the Gothic centuries
• Wells Cathedral — Early English at its most complete

See all the cathedrals and churches worth visiting in England →