Wells Cathedral

In the 1330s the crossing tower at Wells began to sink into its own piers. It had been raised and topped with a timber spire twenty years earlier, and the ground underneath could not take it; the stone was cracking. The master mason William Joy answered with something nobody had built before: inverted arches stacked on top of upright ones, three great stone Xs braced round the crossing, holding the tower up by geometry alone. They were emergency surgery on a finished building. Seven hundred years later they are the reason most people come.

The first Gothic cathedral

Something has stood here a very long time. Excavations in 1980 found a late-Roman mausoleum on the site. Aldhelm built an abbey church in 705, where the cloisters are now; a charter of 766 records King Cynewulf endowing it with eleven hides of land, and in 909 the seat of the diocese moved here from Sherborne. The first bishop, Athelm, crowned King Æthelstan; he and his nephew Dunstan both went on to Canterbury. A choir of boys was established, and Wells Cathedral School still dates its foundation to that.

Then the see moved about for two centuries in a way that is genuinely hard to follow. In 1090 John de Villula took it to Bath. In 1197 Savaric FitzGeldewin moved it to Glastonbury and called himself Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury, a claim abandoned in 1219. Jocelin of Wells moved it back to Bath. Wells became co-cathedral in 1218, and only in 1245 did Pope Innocent IV settle the matter with the title that has stood ever since: Bishop of Bath and Wells.

The building had not waited for the paperwork. Reginald Fitz Jocelin began it around 1175, and here Wells has a real claim to a first. Canterbury and Durham grafted Gothic onto Norman work. Wells was designed as Gothic from the foundation up — clustered piers instead of columns, a gallery of identical pointed arches instead of paired Romanesque openings, no round arch anywhere. John Harvey called it the first truly Gothic structure in the world. Adam Lock was master mason from about 1192 to 1230, and also built the north porch to his own design. Work stopped between 1209 and 1213, when King John was excommunicated and Jocelin was in exile. Jocelin dedicated the church in 1239 and died three years later without ever seeing cathedral status granted; the brass on his tomb is one of the earliest in England.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The west front

Stand back on the green before you go anywhere near the door. The front is 100 feet high and 147 feet wide, built of Doulting stone quarried eight miles east, and it is a screen: the towers stand well beyond the aisles, so the facade deliberately hides the shape and size of the church behind it. Then look at the doors. They are domestic — two small ones and a central one ornamented with almost nothing. After the enormous portals of French cathedrals it is a shock, and it is on purpose. The whole front is a wall for sculpture, not an entrance.

It was built to hold about four hundred figures, of which roughly three hundred survived into the twentieth century. They run in nine horizontal zones, and the archaeologist Charles Robert Cockerell worked out the scheme in 1851, calling it “a calendar for unlearned men”. The south side of the central door is the more sacred: prophets and patriarchs there, early missionaries to Britain on the north, where Augustine of Canterbury, St Birinus and Benedict Biscop can still be picked out by what they carry. Above them, bishops and abbesses to the south, kings and queens to the north, the important ones larger and seated rather than standing.

Find the resurrection. Just under the upper string course runs a band of small niches full of the dead climbing out of their tombs on the Day of Judgement. They are naked, but you can tell the kings by their crowns and the bishops by their mitres, and the sculptor gave some of them joy and others despair. Above that, nine angels; above them the twelve apostles; and in the top niches Christ the Judge, with the Virgin and John the Baptist beside him. The iconoclasts got all three. A new Christ was carved for the central niche; the two side niches now hold cherubim instead.

One more thing about the front. When a chunk of stone dropped off a statue near the main door in 1969, it triggered a conservation programme that ran from 1974 to 1986 — washing with water and lime, packing gaps with soft mortar, stabilising figures that were being split apart by rusting iron dowels. It turned up a great deal of surviving paint in the niches. All of this was once brightly coloured. Pevsner, incidentally, was unmoved by the whole thing, calling it “spare”, with “harsh uprights and horizontals... like steel scaffolding”. Harvey called it the supreme triumph of the combined plastic arts in England. Both were looking at the same wall.

The nave, and why it feels so horizontal

The nave is 67 feet high, which is low — French Gothic naves run half as high again — and Wells makes a virtue of it. There are no vertical lines. The triforium is a unique unbroken run of identical narrow openings with no bay divisions at all, separated from the arcade by a single string course that runs the whole length of the church without stopping, and the shafts that carry the vault start above the triforium rather than running down to the floor. Nothing pulls your eye upward. Everything pulls it east.

The detail is where the money went. Every pier carries 24 slender shafts in eight groups of three, and every capital is different, carved in the deeply undercut “stiff-leaf” foliage that is Wells's signature. Some of them have stories hidden in the leaves, and this is the best treasure hunt in the building: there is a man with toothache, holding his jaw; and a four-scene strip cartoon of the Wages of Sin, in which two men creep into an orchard, steal fruit, and are caught and beaten by the farmer. In the north transept aisle, a lizard — sometimes called a salamander, and a symbol of eternal life — climbs a foliate corbel.

The scissor arches

Between 1315 and 1322 Thomas Witney heightened the central tower and put a timber and lead spire on it. The piers below started to show stress; the tower had already been damaged by an earthquake in the previous century. In 1338 William Joy inserted low arches with inverted arches of the same size on top of them, forming scissors that brace the crossing on three sides, the fourth being held by the choir screen.

Two things worth knowing while you are standing under them. They are properly called strainer arches, but at Wells they have a better name: St Andrew's Cross arches, because the cathedral is dedicated to St Andrew and his emblem is a diagonal cross. Whether Joy intended the pun is unknowable and irresistible. And not everyone loves them — Wim Swaan called them “brutally massive” and intrusive in an otherwise restrained interior. Judge for yourself, but note that the spire they were built to save burnt down in 1439 anyway.

The clock

North transept, and give it a full quarter of an hour. The dial shows a geocentric universe: the Earth fixed at the centre, the Sun going round once every 24 hours against the hours, a smaller star marking the minutes, and a rotating plate showing the phase of the Moon and the day of the lunar month. Four angels in the corners hold the four cardinal winds — possibly, the suggestion goes, generating the power that runs the whole thing. Round the moon window is written sphericus archetypum globus hic monstrat microcosmum: this spherical globe here shows the archetypal microcosm. Beside the moon a small painted figure of Phoebe is captioned Sic peragrat Phobe — so progresses Phoebe.

On the quarter, knights joust above the dial, and a figure called Jack Blandifers hits two bells with hammers and two more with his heels. It lasts about thirty seconds.

Then go outside, round to the north transept wall opposite Vicars' Hall, and look up. There is a second dial, added about seventy years after the one inside and driven by the same mechanism, with two armoured knights who strike the quarters. Most visitors never know it is there.

Where did it come from? The story you will be told is that it was made by Peter Lightfoot, a monk of Glastonbury, and moved here at the Reformation. That is a legend, first printed in 1828, and the balance of evidence is that Lightfoot was commissioned to build a clock for Wells. The likelier connection is a different one: Bishop Ralph Erghum came to Wells from Salisbury in 1388, having installed the Salisbury clock in 1386, and may have brought his clockmakers with him. The two clocks are almost identical in construction, and Wells has the improvements — a double-lever striking system, which is more reliable. Salisbury is usually given the older claim; Wells looks like the second attempt by the same hands.

The choir, the Golden Window and the misericords

William Joy extended and remodelled the choir in 1329–45, and gave it a net vault completely unlike the plain quadripartite one over the nave — possibly copying a local kind of compartmented wooden roof. At the east end is the reason to bring binoculars.

The choir east window is a seven-light window of 1340–45 showing the Tree of Jesse, the genealogy of Christ. It is one of the earliest English uses of silver stain, a then-new technique that let the glass painter put yellow onto glass rather than leading it in separately, and the yellow and green have given it its name: the Golden Window. It survived the Parliamentary troops who smashed so much else here in 1642 and 1643, and it went through a major conservation programme from 2010.

Now lift the seats. Wells has one of the best sets of misericords in Britain — the small shelves under hinged choir seats that let clergy lean while appearing to stand through very long services. They were carved between 1330 and 1340, probably under the master carpenter John Strode with Bartholomew Quarter. There were 90; 65 survive, 61 of them in the choir, three displayed in the cathedral, and one in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Here is the detail nobody tells you. About a fifth of the surviving 65 were never finished. When the rebuilt choir opened in 1339 the canons, who had already paid for the rebuilding, told the prebendary clergy to fund their own stalls, to a total of £200. A good many of them simply did not pay. You can see exactly where the money stopped.

None of the carvings illustrates a Bible story. There are 27 animals — rabbits, a puppy biting a cat, a ewe feeding a lamb, monkeys, bats, two doves drinking from an ewer — 18 mythological subjects including mermaids and wyverns, and five narratives, among them the fox preaching to the geese and Alexander the Great being carried up to heaven by griffins. Eleven show human figures, several of them designed for the job of holding up a shelf: one lies under the seat taking the weight on a cheek, a hand and a foot; another squats with his knees apart and a strained expression that needs no explanation.

The Sea of Steps and the chapter house

From the north choir aisle a staircase rises, divides and turns, its treads worn into hollows and waves by six hundred years of feet. Frederick H. Evans photographed it in 1903 and called the picture “A Sea of Steps”; it is one of the most famous architectural photographs ever made, and the stairs really do look like that.

At the top is the chapter house, built between about 1275 and 1310 over an undercroft, and Alec Clifton-Taylor thought it architecturally the most beautiful room in England. It is octagonal. A single central column, ringed with Purbeck marble shafts, carries one continuous rippling capital — not stiff-leaf this time but unmistakably grapevine, with leaves and bunches — and from it spring 32 ribs, which is why everybody compares it to a palm tree. Round the walls are 51 stalls, and the carved heads on their canopies are worth a slow circuit: a great many of them are smiling or laughing outright. On the stair, look for the corbel of a monk killing a dragon.

The Lady Chapel and retrochoir

Thomas Witney began the Lady Chapel about 1310 as a free-standing elongated octagon; the plan then changed, and it was joined to the church by a retrochoir, probably by Joy. Its vault is one of the earliest lierne vaults in England, and it is slightly irregular, because the room is not symmetrical about both axes. Four of its five windows still hold fragments of medieval glass, including a figure of the local saint Dunstan.

The retrochoir in between is the cleverest space in the cathedral. Its vault comes down onto a set of angled piers, two of them placed so as to complete the octagon of the Lady Chapel — Francis Bond called it “an intuition of Genius” — and the effect is that from every position you stand in, the columns and vaults line up differently. Walk about in it.

The Saxon font, and two sheela-na-gigs

In the south transept is a round font with an arcade of round-headed arches on a round plinth. It came from the Saxon cathedral, and it is the oldest thing in the building by three centuries — people have been baptised in it since before the Norman Conquest. Its cover was made in 1635 and is decorated with the heads of putti.

And in the west walk of the cloister, near the shop and cafe, look up at the vault bosses. Two of them have been identified as sheela-na-gigs: female figures displaying their genitals, variously read as a warning against lust or as a survival of something much older. They are in a cathedral cloister, on the route to the gift shop, and almost nobody looks up.

The cloisters themselves are an oddity worth a moment. Wells was a secular cathedral, not a monastery, so it did not need cloisters at all; only Chichester among the other English secular cathedrals has them. And like Chichester's, the north range — the one against the church, which in a monastery would have caught the winter sun and held the scriptorium — was never built. There are three walks, not four.

Vicars' Close

Out through the chapter house stair and over the Chain Gate is a street running away from the cathedral: 27 houses now, 44 originally, with the Vicars' Hall over an arched gate at the south end and a chapel and library at the north. The hall was finished in 1348, under Bishop Ralph of Shrewsbury; the houses went up through the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It is reckoned the oldest purely residential street in Europe with its original buildings still standing — John Julius Norwich called it “that rarest of survivals, a planned street of the mid-14th century” — and the vicars choral, the men employed to sing the services, still live in it.

Look down it from the cathedral end and then from the far end. It is about 140 metres long, and it narrows by three metres along its length: from the cathedral it looks longer than it is, and from the other end it looks shorter. That is deliberate, and it is 14th-century. A major restoration of the Close began in 2024, so expect some scaffolding.

Why it exists is the interesting part. Ralph of Shrewsbury built it to give the singing men a secure place to live and eat away from the town and its temptations. He had a difficult relationship with the citizens of Wells, largely because of the taxes he imposed on them, and he dealt with that in the other direction too: he surrounded his palace with crenellated walls, a moat and a drawbridge. The moated Bishop's Palace that visitors photograph today, with the swans that have been trained since the 1850s to ring a bell at the gatehouse when they want feeding, is a fourteenth-century bishop's answer to his own ratepayers.

Harry Patch

In July 2009 the cathedral held the funeral of Harry Patch, the last surviving British Army veteran of the First World War, who died at 111. He had been a plumber in Combe Down and fought at Passchendaele, and he spent most of his life refusing to talk about it before spending his last few years talking about very little else. His memorial stands beside the cathedral. It is worth five minutes of anybody's visit.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The scissor arches Three stone Xs at the crossing, inserted from 1338 to stop the tower collapsing. Properly strainer arches; here, St Andrew's Cross arches, after the cathedral's patron saint.
• The man with toothache Carved into the stiff-leaf capitals, along with a four-scene cartoon of fruit thieves being beaten by a farmer. Look into the foliage, not at it.
• The unfinished misericords About a fifth of the surviving 65 were never completed, because the clergy who were told to pay for their own stalls in 1339 didn't.
• The second clock face Outside, on the north transept wall, driven by the same mechanism, with two armoured knights striking the quarters. Almost nobody goes to look.
• The Golden Window The choir east window, 1340–45, one of the earliest English uses of silver stain.
• The Sea of Steps The chapter house stair, worn into waves, and the subject of Frederick Evans's 1903 photograph.
• The sheela-na-gigs Two of them, among the vault bosses of the west cloister, near the shop.
• The Saxon font South transept. It came from the pre-Conquest cathedral and is the oldest object in the building.
• Vicars' Close Begun 1348, still lived in by the cathedral's singing men, and built to keep them out of the town's pubs.

Insider tips

Buy the Joint Day Ticket at £22 if you are doing the Bishop's Palace as well; separately they cost more. And ask at the desk about re-entry — a standard ticket is valid for twelve months, which is worth having if Wells is going to be a repeat stop.

If you arrive late in the afternoon, entry after 3.30pm drops to £10. That is not enough time to do the building justice, but it is a fair price for the nave, the arches and the clock.

Sunday sightseeing is short — roughly midday to 2pm, and the cathedral's own website gives two different closing times for it, so treat 2pm as the deadline. A weekday morning is far better.

The organ is tuned monthly and the choirs rehearse throughout the year, which makes the building noticeably loud. The cathedral flags this itself for hearing aid users and anyone sensitive to noise; the closures page is worth thirty seconds before you set out.

Do not leave without going through the chapter house and out over the Chain Gate into Vicars' Close. A surprising number of visitors see the west front and the clock and never discover the medieval street on the other side of the wall.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Wells is England's smallest city and its medieval core is built around the cathedral, so everything — cafes, pubs, small hotels — is within a few minutes of Cathedral Green. It makes an easy base for the Mendips, Cheddar Gorge and Glastonbury, six miles south. The Loft Cafe in the cathedral itself runs Mon–Sat 10am–4pm and Sun 11am–3pm.

More English cathedrals

• Salisbury Cathedral — whose clock is the rival claimant to Wells's, and whose bishop probably brought the clockmakers here in 1388.
• Winchester Cathedral — the longest medieval cathedral in the world, an hour and a half east.
• Canterbury Cathedral — where Gothic was grafted onto Norman work, which is exactly what Wells did not do.
• Lincoln Cathedral — another cathedral that lost a tower, and kept the scars.

See all the English cathedrals in this guide →