Scenes from a retreat in the Catskills. Nineteen visionaries spend a week at work on new projects and strategies for wholesome and sovereign living.

Yoda: You must stretch forth with your feelings!

Data: But Sir, I have no feelings.

Yoda: Then you must unlearn what you have learned!

Data: Sir, are you suggesting that I purge my memory banks? I hardly see how that would be helpful.

Yoda: (sigh)

this country ain't nothin but a company's dream

a couple hundred million workers that's all that they see

our hands on our tools, money writing the rules

from the sweatshop prisons to the cops in the schools

got the middle class livin like it's gonna last

workin longer, harder hours for less & less cash

got the media spins, republi-crat twins

got the war profiteering for good executive friends

got the heroin runnin through the veins of the poor

got the ghettos locked down paying blood for the war

got the city's decay, the dealers to pay..

and the death squads working for the cia

 

you got a million new jobs inside a thousand new jails

outsourcing the unions, profit dipin in the scales

you got a brainwashed youth, a trumped up truth

and snipers aiming rifles on the factory roof

you got a 30 min speech full of ooo's and ahh's

got the cops armed tough out there breakin the laws

you got the front row seat to your own defeat

you got the tear gas canisters fillin the street

 

you got the laws all written for the rich and the white

trick the rest of those fools into the army to fight

in a dead end game, each war the same

you got a land and a people and a market to claim

you got a woman beaten down everywhere that you look

in the courts, in the jails, in the schools and the books

got the the tv set, sexisms on it

you got a country full of men taught to fall for that shit

yeah and i do too, i'm not blaming you

but i'm trying to unlearn what they said was true

yeah and i need help, i'm not afraid to say it

it's a subliminal tool sometimes it's hard to see it..

 

you got a job in an office, you got your own room

got the pen and the paper and a drive to consume

got the suit pressed in, got to insist you win

and the raise to replace true ambition

you're gonna move up the ladder at the company's speed

gotta learn to dance quick for the company's greed

gotta justify every step that you can

with your eyes closed tight and your head in the sand

you gotta fight the desire to fight the police

you gotta fight your heart and your every belief

you gotta trust the leader, whatever he says

with the flag held high, yeah.. you're already dead

you already gave up if you took their advice

if you played their game, you payed their price

you're gone gone gone, yeah there's no comin back

unless you realize your potential, raise your fist and react

 

if we look to each other and to ourselves

& ignore the phoney remedies they stock on the shelves

we can undermind the greed on which the system depends

in hopes to build a new world based on lovers & friends

we gotta build at the bottom what we want at the top

we gotta work together if we want this to stop

from the thick grass roots to the top of the tree

i aim for peace and justice and anarchy

i want peace and justice an anarchy

 

Having hair that people want to touch (without my consent) has helped me unlearn “good girl” rules. I have learned to set boundaries, I have learned to say “no” when someone makes me uncomfortable. And most of all I have learned that, as India.Arie says, “I am not my hair.”

Signage that gives you a choice. Go left along the Humber Bay Park West Trail. Going right takes you along the Promenade, part of the Waterfront Recreational Trail, a shared path in Toronto.

 

Thanks for visiting, enjoy your week.

This capture shows the lovely nebulae that lie around the left-most star in Orion’s belt. This star, Alnitak, is actually a triple star system and lies about 1260 light years away from us. The Flame Nebula, on the left, lies around 1300 light years away. The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33 is around about 1500 light years away and is a part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex where star formation is taking place. The blueish nebular cloud almost at center is NGC2023. What must this all look like if we were in orbit around the Alnitak system?

 

I think this is my best capture and processing of this part of the sky to date. I’m very happy with the clarity, lack of noise, lack of star blooming and color of the final image. Learned a lot about doing a better of job of selecting correct color balance, offset, gain and exposure settings this time around. I also had to remove some satellite trails by learning about and utilizing Kappa Sigma clipping during stacking in DSS, which does nice work. Also learned not to push too hard on the processing side and carefully utilize HDR software to bring out some extra goodness. Sometimes, stepping back, unlearning what you’ve learned and starting from scratch pays off.

 

Image Details:

- Imaging Scope: AstroTelescopes 80mm ED Refractor

- Imaging Camera: ZWO ASI183MC Color with UV/IR Blocking filter

- Guiding Scope: William Optics 66mm Petzval

- Guiding Camera: Orion Starshoot Auto Guider

- Acquisition Software: Sharpcap

- Guiding Software: PHD2

- Light Frames: 27x3 mins @ 100 Gain, -10F, Offset 40

- Dark Frames: 27*3 mins

- Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker

- Processed in PixInsight, Photomatix Pro HDR and Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop

 

I saw a painted underpass in Toronto’s West End and paused, thinking it would be a good location for a photo. I checked the light and proceeded to wait for a potential subject. One good candidate declined with politeness, apologizing that he was on a tight schedule. As he walked on he turned and said “I’m really sorry to be in such a rush but I hope your project goes well.” When people decline, it’s often that polite. A few minutes later this man came through the underpass, pushing a stroller with a toddler, bundled against the snow flurries. He stopped to hear my introduction and my wish to photograph him alongside the brightly-painted wall. I showed him the sample photos on my contact card and he reflected on the name of my project “The Human Family.” “Sure” he said. “I’ll do it. It sounds like a really nice project. I would prefer you not photograph my son, though; we want to keep his internet exposure at a minimum.” I said I understood and we shook hands. Meet Josh.

 

I told him he had already made a favorable impression on me because our youngest son has the same name. He smiled. I showed him where I wanted him to stand and suggested we turn the stroller around so his son Amos would be able to see his Dad while I took the photos and chatted. Amos, who is 20 months, sat patiently in his stroller for ten minutes, watching while we did the photos and got acquainted.

 

Josh is 32 and he and Amos were on their daily outing and got caught in some snow flurries. They were just returning home from their favorite café where Josh had enjoyed a tea and they shared a morning snack. Josh told me he is a stay-at-home dad and has been doing the daytime parenting since his wife’s maternity leave ended. “It was an easy decision for us because my wife earns more than I do and daycare is very expensive.” When he told me his background is in Theology and he worked in the ministry I said I could imagine his wife earned more – no matter what she did. He laughed and agreed. He had ministered in a high-needs Toronto neighborhood south of where we were standing. He told me that being at home all day with Amos, bonding and watching him develop, was a big adjustment at first but he clearly loves being a stay-at-home dad and I sensed he felt it is a privilege. His wife is a behavioral counselor for clients with mental health issues. She is employed by a nonprofit housing agency. When I told him of my own Social Work background he said “My wife wants to do a Master’s degree in Social Work which would improve her employment options.” They hope to move to Sarnia, on the shore of Lake Huron, in the near future. “We have friend there and let’s face it, Toronto is a very expensive city for a young family.” Very true.

 

I learned that Josh is an American who married a Canadian. He’s from south of Buffalo New York on the other side of the border. We had a good deal to talk about given the political climate in the U.S. right now. With election campaigning underway and Donald Trump getting a shocking amount of support, we are both puzzled. Josh pointed out that Trump was defeated in Wisconsin yesterday and said “I’m an optimist.” We are both impressed by Bernie Sanders who seems to have a great deal of integrity and a deep commitment to peace and to those who are not living “The American Dream.”

 

Amos had been remarkably patient, watching us intently and not uttering a peep. Realizing that it was cold and that we were heading in the same direction, we talked as we walked toward the subway station. Josh’s greatest challenge? “That would be learning how to make myself vulnerable in an authentic relationship.” His message to the project? “Trust is a habit that can be learned. Mistrust is a habit that can be unlearned. It is only through risking that we can learn trust and your project is a great example of that.”

 

We reached the subway station and shook hands. I thanked Josh for an enjoyable chat and said goodbye to Amos. As I told Josh, he was a great subject for my project. It’s such a pleasure when someone quickly grasps and appreciates the part of the Human Family project which goes beyond making a street portrait. Josh wished me good luck with my project and said he was looking forward to viewing the photos. “See you soon in cyberspace” he said with a smile as he and Amos headed up the street.

 

This is my 224th submission to The Human Family Group on Flickr.

 

You can view more street portraits and stories by visiting The Human Family.

 

Follow-up: I received this nice email from Josh:

“Thanks for sending this! Sorry for my delayed response. I've been distracted by many things happening lately. The photos look wonderful. Thank you for your impromptu neighbourliness! I wish you all the best in your photo project. Keep spreading the love.

Peace, josh”

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read & write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn"

2015, london, shoreditch, england

Scenes from a retreat in the Catskills. Nineteen visionaries spend a week at work on new projects and strategies for wholesome and sovereign living.

A short trip to the mexico border yielded some fruitful images that will leave a lasting impression for a while. Thee beauty of making such trips is usually in meeting new people and making new friends, the things you learn and the things you try to unlearn.

 

Wells Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Wells, Somerset, England, dedicated to St Andrew the Apostle. It is the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, whose cathedra it holds as mother church of the Diocese of Bath and Wells. Built as a Roman Catholic cathedral from around 1175 to replace an earlier church on the site since 705, it became an Anglican cathedral when King Henry VIII split from Rome. It is moderately sized for an English cathedral. Its broad west front and large central tower are dominant features. It has been called "unquestionably one of the most beautiful" and "most poetic" of English cathedrals.

 

Its Gothic architecture is mostly inspired from Early English style of the late 12th to early 13th centuries, lacking the Romanesque work that survives in many other cathedrals. Building began about 1175 at the east end with the choir. Historian John Harvey sees it as Europe's first truly Gothic structure, breaking the last constraints of Romanesque. The stonework of its pointed arcades and fluted piers bears pronounced mouldings and carved capitals in a foliate, "stiff-leaf" style. Its Early English front with 300 sculpted figures is seen as a "supreme triumph of the combined plastic arts in England". The east end retains much ancient stained glass. Unlike many cathedrals of monastic foundation, Wells has many surviving secular buildings linked to its chapter of secular canons, including the Bishop's Palace and the 15th-century residential Vicars' Close It is a Grade I listed building.

 

The earliest remains of a building on the site are of a late-Roman mausoleum, identified during excavations in 1980. An abbey church was built in Wells in 705 by Aldhelm, first bishop of the newly established Diocese of Sherborne during the reign of King Ine of Wessex. It was dedicated to St Andrew and stood at the site of the cathedral's cloisters, where some excavated remains can be seen. The font in the cathedral's south transept is from this church and is the oldest part of the present building. In 766 Cynewulf, King of Wessex, signed a charter endowing the church with eleven hides of land. In 909 the seat of the diocese was moved from Sherborne to Wells.

 

The first bishop of Wells was Athelm (909), who crowned King Æthelstan. Athelm and his nephew Dunstan both became Archbishops of Canterbury. During this period a choir of boys was established to sing the liturgy. Wells Cathedral School, which was established to educate these choirboys, dates its foundation to this point. There is, however, some controversy over this. Following the Norman Conquest, John de Villula moved the seat of the bishop from Wells to Bath in 1090. The church at Wells, no longer a cathedral, had a college of secular clergy.

 

The cathedral is thought to have been conceived and commenced in about 1175 by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, who died in 1191. Although it is clear from its size that from the outset, the church was planned to be the cathedral of the diocese, the seat of the bishop moved between Wells and the abbeys of Glastonbury and Bath, before settling at Wells. In 1197 Reginald's successor, Savaric FitzGeldewin, with the approval of Pope Celestine III, officially moved his seat to Glastonbury Abbey. The title of Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury was used until the Glastonbury claim was abandoned in 1219.

 

Savaric's successor, Jocelin of Wells, again moved the bishop's seat to Bath Abbey, with the title Bishop of Bath. Jocelin was a brother of Hugh (II) of Lincoln and was present at the signing of the Magna Carta. Jocelin continued the building campaign begun by Reginald and was responsible for the Bishop's Palace, the choristers' school, a grammar school, a hospital for travellers and a chapel. He also had a manor house built at Wookey, near Wells. Jocelin saw the church dedicated in 1239 but, despite much lobbying of the Pope by Jocelin's representatives in Rome, did not live to see cathedral status granted. The delay may have been a result of inaction by Pandulf Verraccio, a Roman ecclesiastical politician, papal legate to England and Bishop of Norwich, who was asked by the Pope to investigate the situation but did not respond. Jocelin died at Wells on 19 November 1242 and was buried in the choir of the cathedral; the memorial brass on his tomb is one of the earliest brasses in England. Following his death the monks of Bath unsuccessfully attempted to regain authority over Wells.

 

In 1245 the ongoing dispute over the title of the bishop was resolved by a ruling of Pope Innocent IV, who established the title as the "Bishop of Bath and Wells", which it has remained until this day, with Wells as the principal seat of the bishop. Since the 11th century the church has had a chapter of secular clergy, like the cathedrals of Chichester, Hereford, Lincoln and York. The chapter was endowed with 22 prebends (lands from which finance was drawn) and a provost to manage them. On acquiring cathedral status, in common with other such cathedrals, it had four chief clergy, the dean, precentor, chancellor and sacristan, who were responsible for the spiritual and material care of the cathedral.

 

The building programme, begun by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, Bishop in the 12th century, continued under Jocelin of Wells, who was a canon from 1200, then bishop from 1206. Adam Locke was master mason from about 1192 until 1230. It was designed in the new style with pointed arches, later known as Gothic, which was introduced at about the same time at Canterbury Cathedral. Work was halted between 1209 and 1213 when King John was excommunicated and Jocelin was in exile, but the main parts of the church were complete by the time of the dedication by Jocelin in 1239.

 

By the time the cathedral, including the chapter house, was finished in 1306, it was already too small for the developing liturgy, and unable to accommodate increasingly grand processions of clergy. John Droxford initiated another phase of building under master mason Thomas of Whitney, during which the central tower was heightened and an eight-sided Lady chapel was added at the east end by 1326. Ralph of Shrewsbury followed, continuing the eastward extension of the choir and retrochoir beyond. He oversaw the building of Vicars' Close and the Vicars' Hall, to give the men who were employed to sing in the choir a secure place to live and dine, away from the town and its temptations. He had an uneasy relationship with the citizens of Wells, partly because of his imposition of taxes, and he surrounded his palace with crenellated walls, a moat and a drawbridge.

 

John Harewell raised money for the completion of the west front by William Wynford, who was appointed as master mason in 1365. One of the foremost master masons of his time, Wynford worked for the king at Windsor, Winchester Cathedral and New College, Oxford. At Wells, he designed the western towers of which north-west was not built until the following century. In the 14th century, the central piers of the crossing were found to be sinking under the weight of the crossing tower which had been damaged by an earthquake in the previous century. Strainer arches, sometimes described as scissor arches, were inserted by master mason William Joy to brace and stabilise the piers as a unit.

 

By the reign of Henry VII the cathedral was complete, appearing much as it does today (though the fittings have changed). From 1508 to 1546, the eminent Italian humanist scholar Polydore Vergil was active as the chapter's representative in London. He donated a set of hangings for the choir of the cathedral. While Wells survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries better than the cathedrals of monastic foundation, the abolition of chantries in 1547 resulted in a reduction in its income. Medieval brasses were sold, and a pulpit was placed in the nave for the first time. Between 1551 and 1568, in two periods as dean, William Turner established a herb garden, which was recreated between 2003 and 2010.

 

Elizabeth I gave the chapter and the Vicars Choral a new charter in 1591, creating a new governing body, consisting of a dean and eight residentiary canons with control over the church estates and authority over its affairs, but no longer entitled to elect the dean (that entitlement thenceforward belonged ultimately to the Crown). The stability brought by the new charter ended with the onset of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Local fighting damaged the cathedral's stonework, furniture and windows. The dean, Walter Raleigh, a nephew of the explorer Walter Raleigh, was placed under house arrest after the fall of Bridgwater to the Parliamentarians in 1645, first in the rectory at Chedzoy and then in the deanery at Wells. His jailor, the shoe maker and city constable, David Barrett, caught him writing a letter to his wife. When he refused to surrender it, Barrett ran him through with a sword and he died six weeks later, on 10 October 1646. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the choir before the dean's stall. During the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell no dean was appointed and the cathedral fell into disrepair. The bishop went into retirement and some of the clerics were reduced to performing menial tasks.

 

In 1661, after Charles II was restored to the throne, Robert Creighton, the king's chaplain in exile, was appointed dean and was bishop for two years before his death in 1672. His brass lectern, given in thanksgiving, can be seen in the cathedral. He donated the nave's great west window at a cost of £140. Following Creighton's appointment as bishop, the post of dean went to Ralph Bathurst, who had been chaplain to the king, president of Trinity College, Oxford and fellow of the Royal Society. During Bathurst's long tenure the cathedral was restored, but in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, Puritan soldiers damaged the west front, tore lead from the roof to make bullets, broke the windows, smashed the organ and furnishings, and for a time stabled their horses in the nave.

 

Restoration began again under Thomas Ken who was appointed by the Crown in 1685 and served until 1691. He was one of seven bishops imprisoned for refusing to sign King James II's "Declaration of Indulgence", which would have enabled Catholics to resume positions of political power, but popular support led to their acquittal. Ken refused to take the oath of allegiance to William III and Mary II because James II had not abdicated and with others, known as the Nonjurors, was put out of office. His successor, Richard Kidder, was killed in the Great Storm of 1703 when two chimney stacks on the palace fell on him and his wife, while they were asleep in bed.

 

By the middle of the 19th century, a major restoration programme was needed. Under Dean Goodenough, the monuments were moved to the cloisters and the remaining medieval paint and whitewash removed in an operation known as "the great scrape". Anthony Salvin took charge of the extensive restoration of the choir. Wooden galleries installed in the 16th century were removed and the stalls were given stone canopies and placed further back within the line of the arcade. The medieval stone pulpitum screen was extended in the centre to support a new organ.

 

In 1933 the Friends of Wells Cathedral were formed to support the cathedral's chapter in the maintenance of the fabric, life and work of the cathedral. The late 20th century saw an extensive restoration programme, particularly of the west front. The stained glass is currently under restoration, with a programme underway to conserve the large 14th-century Jesse Tree window at the eastern terminal of the choir.

 

In January 2014, as part of the Bath film festival, the cathedral hosted a special screening of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. This provoked some controversy, but the church defended its decision to allow the screening.

 

In 2021, a contemporary sculpture by Anthony Gormley was unveiled on a temporary plinth outside the cathedral.

 

Since the 13th century, Wells Cathedral has been the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Its governing body, the chapter, is made up of five clerical canons (the dean, the precentor, the canon chancellor, the canon treasurer, and the archdeacon of Wells) and four lay members: the administrator (chief executive), Keeper of the Fabric, Overseer of the Estate and the chairman of the cathedral shop and catering boards. The current bishop of Bath and Wells is Peter Hancock, who was installed in a service in the cathedral on 7 June 2014. John Davies has been Dean of Wells since 2016.

 

Employed staff include the organist and master of choristers, head Verger archivist, librarian and the staff of the shop, café and restaurant. The chapter is advised by specialists such as architects, archaeologists and financial analysts.

 

More than a thousand services are held every year. There are daily services of Matins, Holy Communion and Choral Evensong, as well as major celebrations of Christian festivals such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and saints' days. The cathedral is also used for the baptisms, weddings and funerals of those with close connections to it. In July 2009 the cathedral undertook the funeral of Harry Patch, the last British Army veteran of World War I, who died at the age of 111.

 

Three Sunday services are led by the resident choir in school terms and choral services are sung on weekdays. The cathedral hosts visiting choirs and does outreach work with local schools as part of its Chorister Outreach Project. It is also a venue for musical events such as an annual concert by the Somerset Chamber Choir.

 

Each year about 150,000 people attend services and another 300,000 visit as tourists. Entry is free, but visitors are encouraged to make a donation towards the annual running costs of around £1.5 million in 2015.

 

Construction of the cathedral began in about 1175, to the design of an unknown master-mason. Wells is the first cathedral in England to be built, from its foundation, in Gothic style. According to art historian John Harvey, it is the first truly Gothic cathedral in the world, its architects having entirely dispensed with all features that bound the contemporary east end of Canterbury Cathedral and the earlier buildings of France, such as the east end of the Abbey of Saint Denis, to the Romanesque. Unlike these churches, Wells has clustered piers rather than columns and has a gallery of identical pointed arches rather than the typically Romanesque form of paired openings. The style, with its simple lancet arches without tracery and convoluted mouldings, is known as Early English Gothic.

 

From about 1192 to 1230, Adam Lock, the earliest master-mason at Wells for whom a name is known, continued the transept and nave in the same manner as his predecessor. Lock was also the builder of the north porch, to his own design.

 

The Early English west front was commenced around 1230 by Thomas Norreys, with building and sculpture continuing for thirty years. Its south-west tower was begun 100 years later and constructed between 1365 and 1395, and the north-west tower between 1425 and 1435, both in the Perpendicular Gothic style to the design of William Wynford, who also filled many of the cathedral's early English lancet windows with delicate tracery.

 

The undercroft and chapter house were built by unknown architects between 1275 and 1310, the undercroft in the Early English and the chapter house in the Geometric style of Decorated Gothic architecture. In about 1310 work commenced on the Lady Chapel, to the design of Thomas Witney, who also built the central tower from 1315 to 1322 in the Decorated Gothic style. The tower was later braced internally with arches by William Joy. Concurrent with this work, in 1329–45 Joy made alterations and extensions to the choir, joining it to the Lady Chapel with the retrochoir, the latter in the Flowing Decorated style.

 

Later changes include the Perpendicular vault of the tower and construction of Sugar's Chapel, 1475–1490 by William Smyth. Also, Gothic Revival renovations were made to the choir and pulpitum by Benjamin Ferrey and Anthony Salvin, 1842–1857.

 

Wells has a total length of 415 feet (126 m). Like Canterbury, Lincoln and Salisbury cathedrals, it has the distinctly English arrangement of two transepts, with the body of the church divided into distinct parts: nave, choir, and retro-choir, beyond which extends the Lady Chapel. The façade is wide, with its towers extending beyond the transepts on either side. There is a large projecting porch on the north side of the nave forming an entry into the cathedral. To the north-east is the large octagonal chapter house, entered from the north choir aisle by a passage and staircase. To the south of the nave is a large cloister, unusual in that the northern range, that adjacent the cathedral, was never built.

 

In section, the cathedral has the usual arrangement of a large church: a central nave with an aisle on each side, separated by two arcades. The elevation is in three stages, arcade, triforium gallery and clerestory. The nave is 67 feet (20 m) in height, very low compared to the Gothic cathedrals of France. It has a markedly horizontal emphasis, caused by the triforium having a unique form, a series of identical narrow openings, lacking the usual definition of the bays. The triforium is separated from the arcade by a single horizontal string course that runs unbroken the length of the nave. There are no vertical lines linking the three stages, as the shafts supporting the vault rise above the triforium.

 

The exterior of Wells Cathedral presents a relatively tidy and harmonious appearance since the greater part of the building was executed in a single style, Early English Gothic. This is uncommon among English cathedrals where the exterior usually exhibits a plethora of styles. At Wells, later changes in the Perpendicular style were universally applied, such as filling the Early English lancet windows with simple tracery, the construction of a parapet that encircles the roof, and the addition of pinnacles framing each gable, similar to those around the chapter house and on the west front. At the eastern end there is a proliferation of tracery with repeated motifs in the Reticulated style, a stage between Geometric and Flowing Decorated tracery.

 

The west front is 100 feet (30 m) high and 147 feet (45 m) wide, and built of Inferior Oolite of the Middle Jurassic period, which came from the Doulting Stone Quarry, about 8 miles (13 km) to the east. According to the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor, it is "one of the great sights of England".

 

West fronts in general take three distinct forms: those that follow the elevation of the nave and aisles, those that have paired towers at the end of each aisle, framing the nave, and those that screen the form of the building. The west front at Wells has the paired-tower form, unusual in that the towers do not indicate the location of the aisles, but extend well beyond them, screening the dimensions and profile of the building.

 

The west front rises in three distinct stages, each clearly defined by a horizontal course. This horizontal emphasis is counteracted by six strongly projecting buttresses defining the cross-sectional divisions of nave, aisles and towers, and are highly decorated, each having canopied niches containing the largest statues on the façade.

 

At the lowest level of the façade is a plain base, contrasting with and stabilising the ornate arcades that rise above it. The base is penetrated by three doors, which are in stark contrast to the often imposing portals of French Gothic cathedrals. The outer two are of domestic proportion and the central door is ornamented only by a central post, quatrefoil and the fine mouldings of the arch.

 

Above the basement rise two storeys, ornamented with quatrefoils and niches originally holding about four hundred statues, with three hundred surviving until the mid-20th century. Since then, some have been restored or replaced, including the ruined figure of Christ in the gable.

 

The third stages of the flanking towers were both built in the Perpendicular style of the late 14th century, to the design of William Wynford; that on the north-west was not begun until about 1425. The design maintains the general proportions, and continues the strong projection of the buttresses.

 

The finished product has been criticised for its lack of pinnacles, and it is probable that the towers were intended to carry spires which were never built. Despite its lack of spires or pinnacles, the architectural historian Banister Fletcher describes it as "the highest development in English Gothic of this type of façade."

 

The sculptures on the west front at Wells include standing figures, seated figures, half-length angels and narratives in high relief. Many of the figures are life-sized or larger. Together they constitute the finest display of medieval carving in England. The figures and many of the architectural details were painted in bright colours, and the colouring scheme has been deduced from flakes of paint still adhering to some surfaces. The sculptures occupy nine architectural zones stretching horizontally across the entire west front and around the sides and the eastern returns of the towers which extend beyond the aisles. The strongly projecting buttresses have tiers of niches which contain many of the largest figures. Other large figures, including that of Christ, occupy the gable. A single figure stands in one of two later niches high on the northern tower.

 

In 1851 the archaeologist Charles Robert Cockerell published his analysis of the iconography, numbering the nine sculptural divisions from the lowest to the highest. He defined the theme as "a calendar for unlearned men" illustrating the doctrines and history of the Christian faith, its introduction to Britain and its protection by princes and bishops. He likens the arrangement and iconography to the Te Deum.

 

According to Cockerell, the side of the façade that is to the south of the central door is the more sacred and the scheme is divided accordingly. The lowest range of niches each contained a standing figure, of which all but four figures on the west front, two on each side, have been destroyed. More have survived on the northern and eastern sides of the north tower. Cockerell speculates that those to the south of the portal represented prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament while those to the north represented early missionaries to Britain, of which Augustine of Canterbury, St Birinus, and Benedict Biscop are identifiable by their attributes. In the second zone, above each pair of standing figures, is a quatrefoil containing a half-length angel in relief, some of which have survived. Between the gables of the niches are quatrefoils that contain a series of narratives from the Bible, with the Old Testament stories to the south, above the prophets and patriarchs, and those from the New Testament to the north. A horizontal course runs around the west front dividing the architectural storeys at this point.

 

Above the course, zones four and five, as identified by Cockerell, contain figures which represent the Christian Church in Britain, with the spiritual lords such as bishops, abbots, abbesses and saintly founders of monasteries on the south, while kings, queens and princes occupy the north. Many of the figures survive and many have been identified in the light of their various attributes. There is a hierarchy of size, with the more significant figures larger and enthroned in their niches rather than standing. Immediately beneath the upper course are a series of small niches containing dynamic sculptures of the dead coming forth from their tombs on the Day of Judgement. Although naked, some of the dead are defined as royalty by their crowns and others as bishops by their mitres. Some emerge from their graves with joy and hope, and others with despair.

 

The niches in the lowest zone of the gable contain nine angels, of which Cockerell identifies Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. In the next zone are the taller figures of the twelve apostles, some, such as John, Andrew and Bartholomew, clearly identifiable by the attributes that they carry. The uppermost niches of the gable contained the figure of Christ the Judge at the centre, with the Virgin Mary on his right and John the Baptist on his left. The figures all suffered from iconoclasm. A new statue of Jesus was carved for the central niche, but the two side niches now contain cherubim. Christ and the Virgin Mary are also represented by now headless figures in a Coronation of the Virgin in a niche above the central portal. A damaged figure of the Virgin and Christ Child occupies a quatrefoil in the spandrel of the door.

 

The central tower appears to date from the early 13th century. It was substantially reconstructed in the early 14th century during the remodelling of the east end, necessitating the internal bracing of the piers a decade or so later. In the 14th century the tower was given a timber and lead spire which burnt down in 1439. The exterior was then reworked in the Perpendicular style and given the present parapet and pinnacles. Alec Clifton-Taylor describes it as "outstanding even in Somerset, a county famed for the splendour of its church towers".

 

The north porch is described by art historian Nikolaus Pevsner as "sumptuously decorated", and intended as the main entrance. Externally it is simple and rectangular with plain side walls. The entrance is a steeply arched portal framed by rich mouldings of eight shafts with stiff-leaf capitals each encircled by an annular moulding at middle height. Those on the left are figurative, containing images representing the martyrdom of St Edmund the Martyr. The walls are lined with deep niches framed by narrow shafts with capitals and annulets like those of the portal. The path to the north porch is lined by four sculptures in Purbeck stone, each by Mary Spencer Watson, representing the symbols of the Evangelists.

 

The cloisters were built in the late 13th century and largely rebuilt from 1430 to 1508 and have wide openings divided by mullions and transoms, and tracery in the Perpendicular Gothic style. The vault has lierne ribs that form octagons at the centre of each compartment, the joints of each rib having decorative bosses. The eastern range is of two storeys, of which the upper is the library built in the 15th century.

 

Because Wells Cathedral was secular rather than monastic, cloisters were not a practical necessity. They were omitted from several other secular cathedrals but were built here and at Chichester. Explanations for their construction at these two secular cathedrals range from the processional to the aesthetic. As at Chichester, there is no northern range to the cloisters. In monastic cloisters it was the north range, benefiting most from winter sunlight, that was often used as a scriptorium.

 

In 1969, when a large chunk of stone fell from a statue near the main door, it became apparent that there was an urgent need for restoration of the west front. Detailed studies of the stonework and of conservation practices were undertaken under the cathedral architect, Alban D. R. Caroe and a restoration committee formed. The methods selected were those devised by Eve and Robert Baker. W. A. (Bert) Wheeler, clerk of works to the cathedral 1935–1978, had previously experimented with washing and surface treatment of architectural carvings on the building and his techniques were among those tried on the statues.

 

The conservation was carried out between 1974 and 1986, wherever possible using non-invasive procedures such as washing with water and a solution of lime, filling gaps and damaged surfaces with soft mortar to prevent the ingress of water and stabilising statues that were fracturing through corrosion of metal dowels. The surfaces were finished by painting with a thin coat of mortar and silane to resist further erosion and attack by pollutants. The restoration of the façade revealed much paint adhering to the statues and their niches, indicating that it had once been brightly coloured.

 

The particular character of this Early English interior is dependent on the proportions of the simple lancet arches. It is also dependent on the refinement of the architectural details, in particular the mouldings.

 

The arcade, which takes the same form in the nave, choir and transepts, is distinguished by the richness of both mouldings and carvings. Each pier of the arcade has a surface enrichment of 24 slender shafts in eight groups of three, rising beyond the capitals to form the deeply undulating mouldings of the arches. The capitals themselves are remarkable for the vitality of the stylised foliage, in a style known as "stiff-leaf". The liveliness contrasts with the formality of the moulded shafts and the smooth unbroken areas of ashlar masonry in the spandrels. Each capital is different, and some contain small figures illustrating narratives.

 

The vault of the nave rises steeply in a simple quadripartite form, in harmony with the nave arcade. The eastern end of the choir was extended and the whole upper part elaborated in the second quarter of the 14th century by William Joy. The vault has a multiplicity of ribs in a net-like form, which is very different from that of the nave, and is perhaps a recreation in stone of a local type of compartmented wooden roof of which examples remain from the 15th century, including those at St Cuthbert's Church, Wells. The vaults of the aisles of the choir also have a unique pattern.

 

Until the early 14th century, the interior of the cathedral was in a unified style, but it was to undergo two significant changes, to the tower and to the eastern end. Between 1315 and 1322 the central tower was heightened and topped by a spire, which caused the piers that supported it to show signs of stress. In 1338 the mason William Joy employed an unorthodox solution by inserting low arches topped by inverted arches of similar dimensions, forming scissors-like structures. These arches brace the piers of the crossing on three sides, while the easternmost side is braced by a choir screen. The bracing arches are known as "St Andrew's Cross arches", in a reference to the patron saint of the cathedral. They have been described by Wim Swaan – rightly or wrongly – as "brutally massive" and intrusive in an otherwise restrained interior.

 

Wells Cathedral has a square east end to the choir, as is usual, and like several other cathedrals including Salisbury and Lichfield, has a lower Lady Chapel projecting at the eastern end, begun by Thomas Witney in about 1310, possibly before the chapter house was completed. The Lady Chapel seems to have begun as a free-standing structure in the form of an elongated octagon, but the plan changed and it was linked to the eastern end by extension of the choir and construction of a second transept or retrochoir east of the choir, probably by William Joy.

 

The Lady Chapel has a vault of complex and somewhat irregular pattern, as the chapel is not symmetrical about both axes. The main ribs are intersected by additional non-supporting, lierne ribs, which in this case form a star-shaped pattern at the apex of the vault. It is one of the earliest lierne vaults in England. There are five large windows, of which four are filled with fragments of medieval glass. The tracery of the windows is in the style known as Reticulated Gothic, having a pattern of a single repeated shape, in this case a trefoil, giving a "reticulate" or net-like appearance.

 

The retrochoir extends across the east end of the choir and into the east transepts. At its centre the vault is supported by a remarkable structure of angled piers. Two of these are placed as to complete the octagonal shape of the Lady Chapel, a solution described by Francis Bond as "an intuition of Genius". The piers have attached shafts of marble, and, with the vaults that they support, create a vista of great complexity from every angle. The windows of the retrochoir are in the Reticulated style like those of the Lady Chapel, but are fully Flowing Decorated in that the tracery mouldings form ogival curves.

 

The chapter house was begun in the late 13th century and built in two stages, completed about 1310. It is a two-storeyed structure with the main chamber raised on an undercroft. It is entered from a staircase which divides and turns, one branch leading through the upper storey of Chain Gate to Vicars' Close. The Decorated interior is described by Alec Clifton-Taylor as "architecturally the most beautiful in England". It is octagonal, with its ribbed vault supported on a central column. The column is surrounded by shafts of Purbeck Marble, rising to a single continuous rippling foliate capital of stylised oak leaves and acorns, quite different in character from the Early English stiff-leaf foliage. Above the moulding spring 32 ribs of strong profile, giving an effect generally likened to "a great palm tree". The windows are large with Geometric Decorated tracery that is beginning to show an elongation of form, and ogees in the lesser lights that are characteristic of Flowing Decorated tracery. The tracery lights still contain ancient glass. Beneath the windows are 51 stalls, the canopies of which are enlivened by carvings including many heads carved in a light-hearted manner.

 

Wells Cathedral contains one of the most substantial collections of medieval stained glass in England, despite damage by Parliamentary troops in 1642 and 1643. The oldest surviving glass dates from the late 13th century and is in two windows on the west side of the chapter-house staircase. Two windows in the south choir aisle are from 1310 to 1320.

 

The Lady Chapel has five windows, of which four date from 1325 to 1330 and include images of a local saint, Dunstan. The east window was restored to a semblance of its original appearance by Thomas Willement in 1845. The other windows have complete canopies, but the pictorial sections are fragmented.

 

The east window of the choir is a broad, seven-light window dating from 1340 to 1345. It depicts the Tree of Jesse (the genealogy of Christ) and demonstrates the use of silver staining, a new technique that allowed the artist to paint details on the glass in yellow, as well as black. The combination of yellow and green glass and the application of the bright yellow stain gives the window its popular name, the "Golden Window". It is flanked by two windows each side in the clerestory, with large figures of saints, also dated to 1340–45. In 2010 a major conservation programme was undertaken on the Jesse Tree window.

 

The panels in the chapel of St Katherine are attributed to Arnold of Nijmegen and date from about 1520. They were acquired from the destroyed church of Saint-Jean, Rouen, with the last panel having been purchased in 1953.

 

The large triple lancet to the nave west end was glazed at the expense of Dean Creighton at a cost of £140 in 1664. It was repaired in 1813, and the central light was largely replaced to a design by Archibald Keightley Nicholson between 1925 and 1931. The main north and south transept end windows by James Powell and Sons were erected in the early 20th century.

 

The greater part of the stone carving of Wells Cathedral comprises foliate capitals in the stiff-leaf style. They are found ornamenting the piers of the nave, choir and transepts. Stiff-leaf foliage is highly abstract. Though possibly influenced by carvings of acanthus leaves or vine leaves, it cannot be easily identified with any particular plant. Here the carving of the foliage is varied and vigorous, the springing leaves and deep undercuts casting shadows that contrast with the surface of the piers. In the transepts and towards the crossing in the nave the capitals have many small figurative carvings among the leaves. These include a man with toothache and a series of four scenes depicting the "Wages of Sin" in a narrative of fruit stealers who creep into an orchard and are then beaten by the farmer. Another well-known carving is in the north transept aisle: a foliate corbel, on which climbs a lizard, sometimes identified as a salamander, a symbol of eternal life.

 

Carvings in the Decorated Gothic style may be found in the eastern end of the buildings, where there are many carved bosses. In the chapter house, the carvings of the 51 stalls include numerous small heads of great variety, many of them smiling or laughing. A well-known figure is the corbel of the dragon-slaying monk in the chapter house stair. The large continuous capital that encircles the central pillar of the chapter house is markedly different in style to the stiff-leaf of the Early English period. In contrast to the bold projections and undercutting of the earlier work, it has a rippling form and is clearly identifiable as grapevine.

 

The 15th-century cloisters have many small bosses ornamenting the vault. Two in the west cloister, near the gift shop and café, have been called sheela na gigs, i. e. female figures displaying their genitals and variously judged to depict the sin of lust or stem from ancient fertility cults.

 

Wells Cathedral has one of the finest sets of misericords in Britain. Its clergy has a long tradition of singing or reciting from the Book of Psalms each day, along with the customary daily reading of the Holy Office. In medieval times the clergy assembled in the church eight times daily for the canonical hours. As the greater part of the services was recited while standing, many monastic or collegiate churches fitted stalls whose seats tipped up to provide a ledge for the monk or cleric to lean against. These were "misericords" because their installation was an act of mercy. Misericords typically have a carved figurative bracket beneath the ledge framed by two floral motifs known, in heraldic manner, as "supporters".

 

The misericords date from 1330 to 1340. They may have been carved under the direction of Master Carpenter John Strode, although his name is not recorded before 1341. He was assisted by Bartholomew Quarter, who is documented from 1343. They originally numbered 90, of which 65 have survived. Sixty-one are installed in the choir, three are displayed in the cathedral, and one is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. New stalls were ordered when the eastern end of the choir was extended in the early 14th century. The canons complained that they had borne the cost of the rebuilding and ordered the prebendary clerics to pay for their own stalls. When the newly refurbished choir opened in 1339 many misericords were left unfinished, including one-fifth of the surviving 65. Many of the clerics had not paid, having been called to contribute a total sum of £200. The misericords survived better than the other sections of the stalls, which during the Protestant Reformation had their canopies chopped off and galleries inserted above them. One misericord, showing a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, dates from the 17th century. In 1848 came a complete rearrangement of the choir furniture, and 61 of the misericords were reused in the restructured stalls.

 

The subject matter of the carvings of the central brackets as misericords varies, but many themes recur in different churches. Typically the themes are less unified or directly related to the Bible and Christian theology than small sculptures seen elsewhere within churches, such as bosses. This applies at Wells, where none of the misericord carvings is directly based on a Bible story. The subjects, chosen either by the woodcarver, or perhaps by the one paying for the stall, have no overriding theme. The sole unifying elements are the roundels on each side of the pictorial subject, which all show elaborately carved foliage, in most cases formal and stylised in the later Decorated manner, but with several examples of naturalistic foliage, including roses and bindweed. Many of the subjects carry traditional interpretations. The image of the "Pelican in her Piety" (believed to feed her young on her own blood) is a recognised symbol for Christ's love for the Church. A cat playing with a mouse may represent the Devil snaring a human soul. Other subjects illustrate popular fables or sayings such as "When the fox preaches, look to your geese". Many depict animals, some of which may symbolise a human vice or virtue, or an aspect of faith.

 

Twenty-seven of the carvings depict animals: rabbits, dogs, a puppy biting a cat, a ewe feeding a lamb, monkeys, lions, bats, and the Early Christian motif of two doves drinking from a ewer. Eighteen have mythological subjects, including mermaids, dragons and wyverns. Five are clearly narrative, such as the Fox and the Geese, and the story of Alexander the Great being raised to Heaven by griffins. There are three heads: a bishop in a mitre, an angel, and a woman wearing a veil over hair arranged in coils over each ear. Eleven carvings show human figures, among which are several of remarkable design, conceived by the artist specifically for their purpose of supporting a shelf. One figure lies beneath the seat, supporting the shelf with a cheek, a hand and a foot. Another sits in a contorted manner supporting the weight on his elbow, while a further figure squats with his knees wide apart and a strained look on his face.

 

Some of the cathedral's fittings and monuments are hundreds of years old. The brass lectern in the Lady Chapel dates from 1661 and has a moulded stand and foliate crest. In the north transept chapel is a 17th-century oak screen with columns, formerly used in cow stalls, with artisan Ionic capitals and cornice, set forward over the chest tomb of John Godelee. There is a bound oak chest from the 14th century, which was used to store the chapter seal and key documents. The bishop's throne dates from 1340, and has a panelled, canted front and stone doorway, and a deep nodding cusped ogee canopy above it, with three-stepped statue niches and pinnacles. The throne was restored by Anthony Salvin around 1850. Opposite the throne is a 19th-century octagonal pulpit on a coved base with panelled sides, and steps up from the north aisle. The round font in the south transept is from the former Saxon cathedral and has an arcade of round-headed arches, on a round plinth. The font cover was made in 1635 and is decorated with the heads of putti. The Chapel of St Martin is a memorial to every Somerset man who fell in World War I.

 

The monuments and tombs include Gisa, bishop; † 1088; William of Bitton, bishop; † 1274; William of March, bishop; † 1302; John Droxford; † 1329; John Godelee; † 1333; John Middleton, died †1350; Ralph of Shrewsbury, died †; John Harewell, bishop; † 1386; William Bykonyll; † c. 1448; John Bernard; † 1459; Thomas Beckington; † died 1464; John Gunthorpe; † 1498; John Still; † 1607; Robert Creighton; † 1672; Richard Kidder, bishop; † 1703; George Hooper, bishop; † 1727 and Arthur Harvey, bishop; † 1894.

 

In the north transept is Wells Cathedral clock, an astronomical clock from about 1325 believed to be by Peter Lightfoot, a monk of Glastonbury. Its mechanism, dated between 1386 and 1392, was replaced in the 19th century and the original moved to the Science Museum in London, where it still operates. It is the second oldest surviving clock in England after the Salisbury Cathedral clock.

 

The clock has its original medieval face. Apart from the time on a 24-hour dial, it shows the motion of the Sun and Moon, the phases of the Moon, and the time since the last new Moon. The astronomical dial presents a geocentric or pre-Copernican view, with the Sun and Moon revolving round a central fixed Earth, like that of the clock at Ottery St Mary. The quarters are chimed by a quarter jack: a small automaton known as Jack Blandifers, who hits two bells with hammers and two with his heels. At the striking of the clock, jousting knights appear above the clock face.

 

On the outer wall of the transept, opposite Vicars' Hall, is a second clock face of the same clock, placed there just over seventy years after the interior clock and driven by the same mechanism. The second clock face has two quarter jacks (which strike on the quarter-hour) in the form of knights in armour.

 

In 2010 the official clock-winder retired and was replaced by an electric mechanism.

 

The first record of an organ at this church dates from 1310. A smaller organ, probably for the Lady Chapel, was installed in 1415. In 1620 an organ built by Thomas Dallam was installed at a cost of £398 1s 5d.

 

The 1620 organ was destroyed by parliamentary soldiers in 1643. An organ built in 1662 was enlarged in 1786 and again in 1855. In 1909–1910 an organ was built by Harrison & Harrison of Durham, with the best parts of the old organ retained. It has been serviced by the same company ever since.

 

Since November 1996 the cathedral has also had a portable chamber organ, by the Scottish makers, Lammermuir. It is used regularly to accompany performances of Tudor and baroque music.

 

The first recorded organist of Wells was Walter Bagele (or Vageler) in 1416. The post of organist or assistant organist has been held by more than 60 people since. Peter Stanley Lyons was Master of Choristers at Wells Cathedral, and Director of Music at Wells Cathedral School in 1954–1960. The choral conductor James William Webb-Jones, father of Lyons's wife Bridget (whom he married in the cathedral), was Headmaster of Wells Cathedral School in 1955–1960. Malcolm Archer was the appointed Organist and Master of the Choristers from 1996 to 2004. Matthew Owens was the appointed organist from 2005 to 2019.

 

There has been a choir of boy choristers at Wells since 909. Currently there are 18 boy choristers and a similar number of girl choristers, aged from eight to fourteen. The Vicars Choral was formed in the 12th century and the sung liturgy provided by a traditional cathedral choir of men and boys until the formation of an additional choir of girls in 1994. The boys and girls sing alternately with the Vicars Choral and are educated at Wells Cathedral School.

 

The Vicars Choral currently number twelve men, of whom three are choral scholars. Since 1348 the College of Vicars had its own accommodation in a quadrangle converted in the early 15th century to form Vicar's Close. The Vicars Choral generally perform with the choristers, except on Wednesdays, when they sing alone, allowing them to present a different repertoire, in particular plainsong.

 

In December 2010 Wells Cathedral Choir was rated by Gramophone magazine as "the highest ranking choir with children in the world". It continues to provide music for the liturgy at Sunday and weekday services. The choir has made many recordings and toured frequently, including performances in Beijing and Hong Kong in 2012. Its repertoire ranges from the choral music of the Renaissance to recently commissioned works.

 

The Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir is a mixed adult choir of 25 members, formed in 1986 to sing at the midnight service on Christmas Eve, and invited to sing at several other special services. It now sings for about 30 services a year, when the Cathedral Choir is in recess or on tour, and spends one week a year singing as the "choir in residence" at another cathedral. Although primarily liturgical, the choir's repertoire includes other forms of music, as well as performances at engagements such as weddings and funerals.

 

The cathedral is home to Wells Cathedral Oratorio Society (WCOS), founded in 1896. With around 160 voices, the society gives three concerts a year under the direction of Matthew Owens, Organist and Master of the Choristers at the cathedral. Concerts are normally in early November, December (an annual performance of Handel's Messiah) and late March. It performs with a number of specialist orchestras including: Music for Awhile, Chameleon Arts and La Folia.

 

The bells at Wells Cathedral are the heaviest ring of ten bells in the world, the tenor bell (the 10th and largest), known as Harewell, weighing 56.25 long hundredweight (2,858 kg). They are hung for full-circle ringing in the English style of change ringing. These bells are now hung in the south-west tower, although some were originally hung in the central tower.

 

The library above the eastern cloister was built between 1430 and 1508. Its collection is in three parts: early documents housed in the Muniment Room; the collection predating 1800 housed in the Chained Library; and the post-1800 collection housed in the Reading Room. The chapter's earlier collection was destroyed during the Reformation, so that the present library consists chiefly of early printed books, rather than medieval manuscripts. The earlier books in the Chained Library number 2,800 volumes and give an indication of the variety of interests of the members of the cathedral chapter from the Reformation until 1800. The focus of the collection is predominantly theology, but there are volumes on science, medicine, exploration, and languages. Books of particular interest include Pliny's Natural History printed in 1472, an Atlas of the World by Abraham Ortelius, printed in 1606, and a set of the works by Aristotle that once belonged to Erasmus. The library is open to the public at appointed times in the summer and presents a small exhibition of documents and books.

 

Three early registers of the Dean and Chapter edited by W. H. B. Bird for the Historical Manuscripts Commissioners – Liber Albus I (White Book; R I), Liber Albus II (R III) and Liber Ruber (Red Book; R II, section i) – were published in 1907. They contain with some repetition, a cartulary of possessions of the cathedral, with grants of land back to the 8th century, well before hereditary surnames developed in England, and acts of the Dean and Chapter and surveys of their estates, mostly in Somerset.

 

Adjacent to the cathedral is a large lawned area, Cathedral Green, with three ancient gateways: Brown's Gatehouse, Penniless Porch and Chain Gate. On the green is the 12th-century Old Deanery, largely rebuilt in the late 15th century by Dean Gunthorpe and remodelled by Dean Bathurst in the late 17th century. No longer the dean's residence, it is used as diocesan offices.

 

To the south of the cathedral is the moated Bishop's Palace, begun about 1210 by Jocelin of Wells but dating mostly from the 1230s. In the 15th century Thomas Beckington added a north wing, now the bishop's residence. It was restored and extended by Benjamin Ferrey between 1846 and 1854.

 

To the north of the cathedral and connected to it by the Chain Gate is Vicars' Close, a street planned in the 14th century and claimed to be the oldest purely residential street in Europe, with all but one of its original buildings intact. Buildings in the close include the Vicars Hall and gateway at the south end, and the Vicars Chapel and Library at the north end.

 

The Liberty of St Andrew was the historic liberty and parish that encompassed the cathedral and surrounding lands closely associated with it.

 

The English painter J. M. W. Turner visited Wells in 1795, making sketches of the precinct and a water colour of the west front, now in the Tate gallery. Other artists whose paintings of the cathedral are in national collections are Albert Goodwin, John Syer and Ken Howard.

 

The cathedral served to inspire Ken Follett's 1989 novel The Pillars of the Earth and with a modified central tower, featured as the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral at the end of the 2010 television adaptation of that novel. The interior of the cathedral was used for a 2007 Doctor Who episode, "The Lazarus Experiment", while the exterior shots were filmed at Southwark Cathedral.

 

An account of the damage to the cathedral during the Monmouth Rebellion is included in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1889 historical novel Micah Clarke.

 

The cathedral provided scenes for the 2019–2020 television series The Spanish Princess.

I want to unlearn to learn again.

happy.ai // buffalo (2025)

 

Another from my under-the-bridge/highway series. These spaces always catch me off guard—something about their starkness, their oddly desolate feel in the middle of the city.

 

There's a strange peace in the way these places cancel out the outside world, a kind of catharsis I don’t find easily in the chaos I’ve built for myself. Lately, that chaos is just me, deep in the AI waters—learning, unlearning, and watching the tech industry brace for its next transformation.

 

20 years ago, it was the shift to cloud. Tomorrow, it’s personal AI agents—some embedded in your everyday life (TVs, appliances, cars, homes), others fully integrated into the services you already use. Either way, AI is force-multiplying human capability. It’s already making top engineers and architects like me 3x more effective.

 

I see it so clearly. This moment feels like the '90s all over again—if we get it right, it’ll be one hell of a ride. 🚀

 

#BuffaloNY #UrbanExploration #AI #TechEvolution #UnderTheBridge #Cityscape #FutureTech

www.upworthy.com/i-waited-a-while-to-make-sure-that-this-...

 

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/06/south-africa/fuller-text

  

Nelson Mandela (Madiba) may he rest in peace

 

View counts on this image for 2014 ..

01/01/14 is 30,905

07/02/14 is 40,143

13/03/14 is 50,523

01/04/14 is 57,450

30/04/14 is 65,327

30/05/14 is 80,686

 

01/07/14 is 100,301

02/08/14 is 117,465

03/09/14 is 130,349

03/10/14 is 142, 321

01/11/14 is 152,806

01/12/14 is 162,463

 

I have no idea how everyone is finding this !!!

1,061 so far today (31/05/14) / 485 yesterday / 81,748 all time

461 so far today(01/06/14) and it's only 10am here / 1,177 yesterday / 82,324 all time

2015

02/01/15 is 172,615

01/03/15 is 195,240

01/04/15 is 207, 350

01/05/15 is 218, 103

03/06/15 is 228, 987

01/07/15 is 236,797

01/08/15 is ???

01/09/15 is 252,381

01/10/15 is 260,363

01/11/15 is 263,946

01/12/15 is 272, 203

2016

01/01/16 is 279,154

01/03/16 is 295,004

01/04/16 is 304,696

01/05/16 is 313,395

01/06/16 is 321,830

01/07/16 is 330,007

01/08/16 is 336,330

 

I WONDER IS IT A RECORD ON FLICKR TO HAVE THAT MANY VIEWS on one image

 

REPOST

This image had 10,977 views and no comments (7/10/2013).

It had 11,855 and 1 comment on (09/10/2013)

It has 18,123 on (06/12/2013 morning) it has 21,295 (06/12/2013 night) 22,279 so that was1,075 views for the day.

It has 23,675 on (07/12/13) that is 1,175 views for the day

Today is New years Eve (23:59) there are now 30,904 views on this image

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Taken from National Geographic magazine June 2010

 

Mandela's Children

South Africa is a vibrant, multiethnic democracy striving, with mixed success, to fulfill its promise. Photojournalist James Nachtwey offers a vision of contemporary life, and Alexandra Fuller tells an intimate story about the long shadow of apartheid.

 

The Minister

It turns out there is no shortcut, bolt-of-inspiration way to transform a person from layman to minister in the Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa. It takes seven years of rigorous training—seven years of Deon Snyman's youth—which made it all the more distressing when, toward the end of his studies at the University of Pretoria in 1990, Snyman realized he had all the theology a person could possibly need to function in the old South Africa but almost no skills to guide him in the country that had just released Nelson Mandela.

Snyman,- who was born and raised in "a traditional Afrikaans family, in a typical Afrikaans town north of Johannesburg," says that back then he knew no black people, had no black friends, had never even had a meaningful conversation with a black person. "The church was divided into white congregations, Coloured congregations, Indian congregations, and black congregations," he says. He decided that the best way he could avoid waking up one morning a foreigner in his own country was to become the minister of a rural, black congregation.

On the day in February 1992 that Deon Snyman was installed as a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa—the church's black branch—in Nongoma, in the heart of the KwaZulu homeland, his 54-year-old father stood up in front of the congregation, all of whom were Zulus, and said this: "Well, it is clear that South Africa is going to change. But I am an Afrikaner. I do not know if I have the capacity to change. Also, I am an old man. I do not know if I have the skills to change." Then the father indicated his 26-year-old son. "So today, I give you my son. If you can teach him the rules of the new South Africa, he can teach us those rules. If you can give him the skills to live in this new country, he can show us those skills."

In the dozen years Snyman lived among the Zulus as a minister, it became clear that the lesson he had to take back to his own people was this: "Those who supported the system of apartheid need to apologize in a way that will feel sincere. Then they need to make amends in a way that restores some of the dignity and some of the material opportunities that had been eroded under that system." Snyman started to think about the idea of community-led restitution—the creation, he says, of such emblems of remorse as a school, a clinic, or a skills training center. "Something everyone could point to and say, Here is our symbol of true sorryness, here is a symbol of our decision to build a new way to work together. It was a very deep idea in me."

But it would be years before Snyman's imagination was captured by a small Afrikaans farming town in the Western Cape, a community unable to deny that the effects of apartheid had spilled on beyond 1994, when white rule ended and Nelson Mandela became the reborn nation's first president.

 

The Town

Worcester is a somnolent, gingerbread town prickled with white church spires an hour and a half northeast of Cape Town. In winter, the surrounding mountains are snowcapped. In summer, heat holds like hell's breath in the valley and melts the tarmac. The streets are wide and orderly. The houses are gabled and picturesque; lawns are cajoled into neat pockets; there are steroidal roses and trellises hanging grapevines off verandas. It's the sort of town that makes you wish you'd worn a longer skirt and a higher collar.

In the mid-1990s the lines drawn deep in the geography and psyche of the place by apartheid were still evident, but no more so than elsewhere in the country. It is true that blacks still lived mainly in Zwelethemba township—Worcester's undernourished twin across the Hex River—while whites still lived on the dappled streets of the town itself or on farms laid at the feet of the mountains. On the other hand, Worcester had elected its first Coloured (mixed race) mayor and its first black deputy mayor. Also, in June 1996 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)—a courtlike body assembled after the abolition of apartheid—had held a hearing in the town. Victims and perpetrators of torture and abuse under apartheid had stepped forward and testified. The violent past was over, surely.

So it came as a shock when, on a sweltering Christmas Eve afternoon in 1996, two bombs ripped through a shopping area just down the street from the police station and the Dutch Reformed Church. The blasts killed four people—three of them children. Nearly 70 people were injured. All the victims were blacks and Coloureds. The first bomb to go off, around 1:20, hit Olga Macingwane in such a way that her legs swelled instantly to the size of tractor tires. Minutes later, the second bomb went off, and she was blown unconscious.

"For 13 years I never saw the person who did this to me," Macingwane says, speaking from her sitting room in Zwelethemba on a very warm Sunday morning in late November 2009. Macingwane is a profoundly proper woman of a certain age. She is wearing a pink, ankle-length pencil skirt and matching jacket. Outside her home the township is in the midst of open-air church services, and Macingwane has to raise her voice to be heard. She gets up stiffly—it is obviously painful for her to walk—and closes the door to the yard and to the world at large. The singing reaches into her home unabated. "In my head," she continues, as the choirs of at least three churches compete on the torrid air, "I pictured him. In my head he is a man of 50 years old, very big, with a long beard and a very severe face. That is the man who did this thing. That is the person I see in my nightmares."

 

A Turning Point

South Africa's selection to host the 2010 World Cup gave people a surge of confidence. Their nation could now be remembered for bringing the world soccer rather than apartheid. South Africa's modern infrastructure, enviably chic airports, cosmopolitan restaurants—its public face—all support the suggestion that its tragic history is just that, history. Much of Soweto, Johannesburg's infamous township in which apartheid-era violence visible to the foreign media occurred, is now a series of bucolic suburbs: Florida-lite architecture behind smooth lawns, sleek foreign cars in driveways. (Squatter camps encroaching, it is true.) South Africa has a burgeoning black middle class, and since 1994 the government has built almost three million houses. In Johannesburg, just across the road from a casino and an amusement park, tourists can visit the impressive Apartheid Museum.

But scratch the surface of any community, and one way or another there it is, the A-word. In May 2008 more than 60 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced in xenophobic riots targeting mainly Mozambicans and Zimbabweans. Apartheid ensured a deep mistrust of "other" and a sense of resource entitlement—based as much, if not more, on who you were as on what you did—that carries over to this day.

It is impossible to overestimate the reach and brutality of apartheid. Between 1948 and 1994, when the system was dismantled, the Afrikaans National Party applied hyper-segregation of races to every possible facet of life. "Apartheid so effectively enriched a few at the utter debasement of the majority—to say nothing of the imprisonment of so many, the exile, the disappearances, the violent deaths—that a mere end to the system could not begin to repair the damage," Tshepo Madlingozi says. Madlingozi is a 31-year-old senior lecturer of law at the University of Pretoria and an advocacy coordinator for the Khulumani Support Group, an organization of 58,000 victims of political violence, mainly during the apartheid era. "You can say, Everybody is equal now; let's get on with it. That suits those who benefited from the system—but it does nothing to institute restorative justice, and it can't undo generations of habitual racism, palpable hate, or feelings of inadequacy."

 

The Prisoner

Less than a month after the Worcester bombing, 19-year-old Daniel Stephanus "Stefaans" Coetzee phoned the police from his hideout on a farm in the heart of the Great Karoo highlands—a sparsely populated, semiarid region in the central west of the country—and claimed responsibility for his part in the atrocity. Coetzee addressed the police officer in charge with respectful deference: "Oom," he called him. "Uncle." He said he had heard that there were children among the dead, and for that reason he had no choice but to turn himself in. The boy had reserved country manners and a country person's way of keeping himself contained, catlike.

At the time he was taken into custody, and for some years after, Coetzee was a member of nearly every extreme right-wing, white supremacist group in South Africa, including one or two so secret and obscure that not even the people in them seem capable of explaining exactly what they are: Wit Wolwe, Israel Visie, Boere Aanvals Troepe. From prison Coetzee continued to communicate with members of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States and neo-Nazi groups in Germany, encouraging them in their endeavors. He rose up the ranks of the national groups' pseudo-military structures. As white supremacists go, Coetzee was a poster boy. In the pecking order of the Helderstroom Maximum Security Prison in Western Cape Province, however, he was pond life. "I was 19 years old and white. Everyone wanted to rape me," Coetzee says of those first years in overcrowded general cells holding between 60 and 120 men. "I couldn't get a bottom bunk. I couldn't even get a top bunk. I couldn't get any bunk at all." Coetzee slept on the floor. Where he has been held for over a decade, Coetzee has just turned 32. Having not felt the sun for so long, his skin has leached gray, and although he is strikingly young looking, there is a cluster of fine lines around his eyes such as are usually seen only on a much older man. His hair is dark, very short, and downy. The leather belt he uses to hold up his prison-issue orange overalls is pulled to its last hole. It is not a surprise to learn that before his incarceration he was able to run far and fast in blistering heat with very little fuel or water. "I loved to run," he says, as if the words might set his legs free again. "Ja, I could run."

Coetzee - and I sit facing each other, knee to knee, in a large, nondescript, yellow room designed for prison visits. Five or six windows along one wall let in a sluggish light that does nothing to enhance the greenish glow from the fluorescents. It is late morning and raining hard, and has been since early last night. As a result, it is cold, and we're both shivering.

Coetzee tells me he was born in 1977 to a careless mother and a drunken father. He has no memory of his parents being together. At first he lived with his father in the Orange Free State (now the Free State). When he was eight or nine his father burned out. After spending time in an orphanage, Coetzee was sent to live with his mother in Upington in the Northern Cape. For the next six or seven years Coetzee fell through one crack after another and was in and out of welfare homes, until at the age of 15 or 16 he was taken under the wing of a man named Johannes van der Westhuizen. A leader in the ultraright-wing, white supremacist cult Israel Visie, van der Westhuizen was a strict vegetarian, took no drugs, drank no alcohol, and studied a Bible that had been rewritten to bolster the idea that anyone who was not white was an animal of the field. In Coetzee's eyes, van der Westhuizen was roughly the size and age of a father.

If you were to walk more or less 300 miles northeast of Cape Town until the night sky grew so black you could see all the way back to whatever might be the beginning of time, the odds are good that you would be in the Great Karoo highlands. In the early 1800s this is where outlaws, cattle rustlers, and gunrunners hid, in the vast plains below the bruised Nuweveld Range. Even today so few people are tough or crazy enough to coax a living from this flinty, pepper-scented earth that it's considered a perfect destination for stargazers—and those who do not wish the modern world to find them. Its remote secretiveness appealed to van der Westhuizen, a man in deep denial about the reality of post-transition South Africa, and it was on his leased farm in this redoubt that the bombing was planned.

"When I was first in prison, I asked for a Bible," Coetzee says, explaining how he began to dismantle the hatred that had landed him on the floor of a crowded cell in a maximum-security prison. "But the Bible they gave me was not the same Bible I studied when I was with van der Westhuizen. I realized that the Bible I had been reading with him was skewed. That was the first thing." Then Coetzee was transferred to Pretoria Central Prison, where he took classes on anger management and restorative justice. He wrote a letter to the prison authorities asking if they would allow him to apologize to the people and the families he had hurt. (They advised against it.) But although he felt remorse for what he had done, Coetzee was still a racist.

In early 2002, five years after his arrest, he was assigned to a work detail with an older prisoner, Eugene de Kock. Now in his early 60s, de Kock is serving two life sentences plus 212 years for crimes against humanity committed while he was a colonel heading the notorious secret security unit of the South African Police. (His men dubbed him "prime evil," a name adopted by the media.) For hours at a time the two men would be together mopping floors. "Eugene was always telling me, 'Look Stefaans, you have to stop believing you are superior just because of the color of your skin,' " Coetzee says. "He said, 'Take it from me, I've learned the hard way.' I told Eugene, 'Please stop pestering me.' But he never shut up about it. He told me that until I stopped being a racist I'd be in two prisons—one around my body, and another one around my heart."

 

The Conversation

It is true that if every child from a difficult home in South Africa were to grow up and perform an act of brutality, there would be nothing and no one left in the country. As it is, there are 50 murders every day, and 140 reported rapes, although the actual number is believed to be in the hundreds. "Yes, the habit of violence is very deep in this culture," Marjorie Jobson, national director of the Khulumani Support Group, says. "You have to remember, the children who grew up in the atmosphere of apartheid—with all the lessons of that era—those children are now adults."

I have caught a lift with Jobson—a disarmingly mild-mannered doctor in her 50s—from Johannesburg, and we're driving through the outskirts of Pretoria on a blameless summer afternoon in late 2009. From here, South Africa's administrative capital seems all flowering impatience—50,000 jacarandas lend the city a mildly campy glamour, and the streets are lined with beds of agapanthus. Advertisements for the World Cup are everywhere; a high-speed-train track is being built parallel to the road.

"Everyone was exhausted by 1994. I think they just wanted apartheid to go away and the government to fix everything. But that didn't happen," Jobson says. "It's up to each individual South African to participate actively in restitution. You know, the power of one. The power one person has to perpetuate our violent past, or the power one person has to contribute to a just, peaceful society."

In this way our conversation comes back to Coetzee. Sometime in 2004 Jobson received a phone call from Eugene de Kock. Over the years de Kock has tried to help Khulumani locate people who disappeared during the struggle, describing in some detail the manner in which they vanished, mostly because he was responsible for what happened to them. De Kock told Jobson that he had become acquainted over the previous couple of years with a young man called Stefaans Coetzee. "Stefaans wanted to meet with his victims and apologize for what he had done," she says. Jobson wasn't opposed to being helpful. The only problem was that Coet¬zee had no idea who his victims were. He could give no names and—beyond the fact that three of the dead had been children—no identifying characteristics.

 

The Presidents

In 2005 Thabo Mbeki, in his second term as South Africa's president, fired Jacob Zuma, the deputy president. Zuma had been implicated in a corruption scandal involving a five-billion-dollar arms deal. (Charges were dropped in April 2009.) Mbeki must have thought ridding himself of this troublesome high priest of populism was a safe bet. But it turned out to be the political kiss of death, causing a deep split within the ruling party, the African National Congress, or ANC. By the end of the year Zuma's supporters were burning T-shirts with Mbeki's face on them.

Zuma and Mbeki, although both longtime ANC activists, could not be more unalike. Mbeki is a Xhosa from the Eastern Cape, highly educated and emotionally remote. Zuma is a Zulu from KwaZulu-Natal with no formal education who served a decade-long sentence on Robben Island for opposing apartheid. A charismatic man of action, he has three wives and a rape allegation to his name. (He was acquitted in 2006.)

In 2007 Mbeki announced to both houses of parliament that he had authorized a special dispensation for pardon applications for politically motivated crimes that had taken place between 1994 and 1999. Mbeki's official explanation was that he wished to finish the business of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Unofficially the move was seen by some as an effort to gain much needed support for the flagging president. The next year a group with a representative from each of the 15 official political parties recommended 120 prisoners for presidential pardon.

"It was an attempt to reach out politically," Tshepo Madlingozi of the University of Pretoria says. But the process ignored something that had been at the moral, emotional, and political heart of the TRC—the victims would not be consulted before prisoners were granted amnesty. To human rights groups, this special dispensation was not about reconciliation; it was about political expediency, about closing the door and moving on. Eight organizations, including the Khulumani Support Group, filed a lawsuit, which eventually found itself at the Constitutional Court of South Africa, the highest court in the land, on November 10, 2009. By then Mbeki had resigned, and Zuma—JZ as he is popularly known—was president.

 

The Go-Between

On the list of political prisoners identified for possible pardon, one name jumped out at Marjorie Jobson: the man Eugene de Kock had telephoned her about from prison, Stefaans Coetzee. Meanwhile, Khulumani had reached out to the victims, including Olga Macingwane, of those on the list.

A glance through Jobson's modest home in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape reveals books everywhere, piled on furniture in the sitting room, in stacks on the floor, across the dining room table. "On the one hand, the Khulumani group was part of a lawsuit to ensure that the rights of victims were taken into account in this pardoning process," Jobson says, clearing books off the kitchen table so we can eat lunch. "On the other hand, I was getting more calls all the time from Stefaans's social worker and his minister, begging me to see if I could get him together with his victims. Not surprisingly, the victims of the Worcester bombing were skeptical. They had questions. Why does he want to meet us now? How is it going to benefit us? Is he feeling guilty now? Has he really had a change of heart?" Jobson sets a bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of me. In her distraction, she fails to eat at all. "I was interested in justice," she continues, "but I was most interested in the process of reconciliation. It was a conundrum." In the end Jobson appealed for help to a trusted colleague: Tshepo Madlingozi.

On the day I meet him in his law faculty office, Madlingozi is wearing black jeans, a long-sleeved, blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and casual leather sneakers. Our conversation is accompanied by the customary cup of tea. "Rooibos or normal?" Madlingozi had asked, offering either South Africa's native herbal tea or ordinary black tea. Now he blows into his cup and looks at me over the rim. "We made a decision that I should go and see Coetzee and see if he was for real. I was very nervous, very skeptical. I didn't know how I was going to react."

 

A day in mid-April 2009 was set for a meeting between Madlingozi and Coetzee in the social worker's office at Pretoria Central. "I was expecting someone in my imagination that looked very racist, you know, not this guy who walks into the office. I see a boy the same age as me. He's somehow handsome, very diffident. He was surprised too. He was expecting to see an old, radical, militant ANC activist."

Madlingozi shook hands with Coetzee and introduced himself. Coetzee shook Madlingozi's hand and thanked him for coming. The two men sat for a couple of hours and talked. "Mostly about ourselves," Madlingozi says. "What does he miss in prison? How did I become a lawyer? How did he become a prisoner? What do we hope for ourselves? What do we hope for our country?"

Madlingozi is a few months younger than Coetzee. He was born in Mangaung township, the area set aside for blacks outside Bloemfontein in the former Orange Free State—geographically not far from where Coetzee was born but a world away in terms of culture. "It was semidesolate and very violent," he says. Madlingozi's father was a migrant worker in the gold mines. "Migrant labor was one of the most devastating aspects of the system of apartheid," Madlingozi says. "It destroyed families. It destroyed communities. It was a way for the apartheid government to get capitalization, but it emasculated men who couldn't be at home to provide for their families. The fathers couldn't pass on folklore, culture, values. For the families left behind, it meant the father came back after three months and didn't know his place in the family. A lot of men asserted their position through violence."

Madlingozi's father died of a heart attack when his son was 14. "My mom and I had just relocated to a mining town to be near him. We were just becoming friends again. He had a voracious appetite for reading novels, and we read together a lot." Madlingozi finished his schooling in Welkom, a gold-mining town laid out in the late 1940s by the Anglo American Corporation. The mines in and around the town are very deep. Each morning, brackish water is pumped from them into pans on the surface. Flocks of flamingos, Egyptian geese, and sacred ibises congregate on the pans. The air is stung with the scents of salt and bird droppings.

Madlingozi leans forward. "Meeting Stefaans has reignited my faith in the future of South Africa," he says. "My worldview is black consciousness, and that hasn't changed as a result of knowing Stefaans. But it has made me appreciate that even the most ardent racists—even murderers—can change and be humble. Yes, Stefaans's intelligence, humility, acute appreciation of the consequences of his actions and the system of apartheid, as well as his appreciation that reconciliation is not merely about showing goodwill, have greatly inspired me." Madlingozi has both hands under his chin now. "I can see how there might be people criticizing me for selling out. How can I visit this man? How can I have empathy? But this isn't just about winning. It can't be about winning. If we only want to win, then there will always be losers, and how is that so different from the way things were? This has always been about the big picture, about moving on together." Then he laughs and looks at me, almost challengingly. "Mmm, it's complicated, messy—it can be very personal and always in shades of gray. But that's where reality is. That's where we are. That's what we have to work with.

 

The Victim

From Worcester to Pretoria is a two-day drive—16 hours, more or less. Marjorie Jobson has arranged for Olga Ma¬cingwane and three other residents of Zwelethemba to rent a car and drive up for the constitutional court hearing on November 10, 2009. The four of them agree to meet Stefaans Coetzee the day before the hearing, but only on the condition that they are not doing so to forgive him. "I am not there to forgive him," Macingwane says firmly. "I am there to face the man in my head. I want to hear what he has to say for himself. But no, I am not there to forgive him.

Life became difficult for Olga Macingwane after the bombing, and not only for all the obvious reasons. Cadres of the ANC used the funerals for political posturing, racing disabled survivors of the attack through the streets in their wheelchairs, all the while chanting songs made popular during the struggle. Then in 2003 Macingwane's husband died, and without his support, she could no longer afford to raise their three children. They were sent away to live with relatives. A laminated photograph of Ma¬cingwane's husband reveals the exact match you would pick for Olga. He stands before a 1970s polished yellow Datsun in a three-piece suit exuding an aura of conservative reserve. The yellow car is still parked outside Macingwane's house, dormant under a thick gray blanket.

November 9 is a hot day. Macingwane and the other three residents of Zwelethemba—including Harris Sibeko, husband of the deputy mayor at the time of the attack—walk into the social worker's office at Pretoria Central and see Coetzee standing in the corner in his orange jumpsuit stamped with the word "prisoner." "I was shocked," Macingwane says later. "What I see is a boy. Not the man I have had in my mind all these years, but a boy. What is this boy doing here? How did it happen? That is what is inside my head all of a sudden."

Macingwane asks to begin with a prayer. In the ensuing silence she gets to her knees—laboriously, because two days in a rental car have done nothing to help the pain in her legs—and begins to pray in Xhosa. She praises God for his hallowedness. She thanks God for bringing South Africa another day. She asks God to forgive her trespasses, as she will forgive others their trespasses against her. She asks God to see that his will be done in this room today. Then she takes her seat. While her colleagues mop their brows and fan themselves against the heat, Macingwane maintains her composure.

The meeting takes place in a mixture of Xhosa, Afrikaans, and English. Macingwane is mostly silent. "He must explain himself before I speak," she says at the outset.

Coetzee does not talk about his childhood. He speaks about the planning that went into the bombing, how he was chosen for his excellent military skills, the years he has spent in prison. He asks for their questions, and the group responds. How did he learn to hate black people? How did he unlearn this hatred? How does he spend his days now? Is he sorry? And if he is so sorry, what can he give them? Coetzee admits he has nothing material to give the world except the leather belt that holds up his overalls. But, he says, God willing, if he gets out of jail, he can begin to attempt to compensate for what he has done. "There are children now in South Africa," he says, "children without parents. They might be tempted to get into violent gangs, to follow anger instead of love." He says, "I can show them that the first life you have to change is your own."

When Coetzee is asked about the dreams he has for his future, he says he would like to get married. He says he will have to tell his future wife and any children he may have that he is a murderer.

Now Harris Sibeko intervenes. "Listen here, chief, you must wait until a child is old enough to understand what you are telling them, otherwise the child will hate you." Sibeko turns to the group and asks, "Do you really think we can call this young man a murderer? What do you think is a better name for him?" Then Sibeko answers his own question. "I think you should be called a military operative. Yes, that would be better."

The group agrees with Sibeko. Then Sibeko asks Coetzee whether he receives any visitors in jail. Coetzee replies that one former prisoner comes sometimes. Sibeko is shocked. "None of your family visit you?" Coetzee replies, "No."

The interview goes on for two hours. Finally, Olga Macingwane gets to her feet. Unusually, she is fighting with her emotions. She says, "Stefaans, when I see you, I see my sister's son in you, and I cannot hate you." She extends her arms. "Come here, boy," she says in Xhosa. Coetzee walks into her embrace. "I forgive you," Macingwane says softly. "I have heard what you said, and I forgive you."

 

The Law

On that day Daniel Stephanus Coetzee became the only one of the 120 political prisoners eligible for presidential pardon to meet with his victims. The next day, November 10, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, with four new judges appointed by President Zuma, convenes. The first order of business is to hear arguments about whether or not the president should be allowed to pardon any of the political prisoners without a hearing for their victims. Zuma's attorney argues for unfettered pardoning powers. The attorney representing one of the prisoners also argues for such powers. But an attorney for the human rights groups urges that no political criminals be pardoned without the victims of those crimes being heard. (On February 23, 2010, the constitutional court ruled in favor of the victims.)

Present in the court are some three dozen victims of political crimes involving any number of perpetrators. Several of the victims are wearing T-shirts that read, "No reconciliation without truth, reparation, redress." Among them is Olga Macingwane.

"I forgive him, but that does not mean I pardon him," Macingwane tells me afterward. "We are a country of laws now. We are a country who respects the voices of all people. It is up to the laws of my country to decide whether or not to pardon Stefaans."

For too long, separation and suspicion were mandated by South African law. Now the country's constitution upholds the dignity and equality of all people, but its power is only as potent as the people's willingness to live by it. On January 23, 2010—as long envisioned by minister Deon Snyman—representatives of Worcester and of Zwelethemba township gather in Worcester's Dutch Reformed Church. Across the road in a wide, shady park lies a tiny memorial to the four people killed in the 1996 bombing. The proceedings begin with a prayer. Then Macingwane and Sibeko talk about their journey to Pretoria, their meeting with Coetzee, their forgiveness of him. Restitution is discussed—a youth center and a job-creation center are two ideas. The group agrees to invite Coetzee to a church service in Worcester if the prison authorities will allow it. The date for another meeting is set. Olga Macingwane is elected to the steering committee, which will oversee the restitution process in the months and years to come.

"When I forgave Stefaans," Macingwane says, "that label of 'victim' no longer had such power for me. Physically, of course, the pain will always be there. Mentally, I have at last found some peace. I am not Olga the victim. Now I am  Olga. I am Mrs. Olga Macingwane."

  

“My name is Lotte and I’m a plus-size model. I am trying to judge as little as possible, and to unlearn what society has taught me over the years about how people should be, act and look. I’m fighting in the name of body positivity, acceptance and appreciation of all human body types. I believe in body positive representation for all, we need more diversity in bodies and beings in our visual culture and that’s what I stand for. I’m wearing polette because they don’t exclude any body types, they are a brand that comes from diversity, everyone can wear polette."

A Jacksonville Baldwin local with an unlearned train ID ran a little, well... VERY different today. The local usually consisting of two YN3 EMD Standard cabs was today pulled by two YN2 GE engines (which I have never seen on this local before), and the cherry on top was the GP38-2 in third place. So three engines, a four axle, and GEs! Absurd!

Her weight, the unspoken words

of an unlearned tongue.

 

Excerpt from the poem Skirrid Fawr, from the book Skirrid Hill, by Owen Sheers, published by Seren.

Image © All Rights Reserved www.open-aspect.co.uk

Unlearn-Relearn

This is a case of stealth making itself known in a big way… its roar during this high-speed pass rivaled the thunder of its namesake. We brought friends along with us to this year’s Wings Over Wayne (WOW 2019) Air Show at Seymour Johnson AFB in Goldsboro, North Carolina… one noted that with this much noise, it wasn’t too stealthy. I responded to her that when its target hears that noise, it’s too late to do anything about it.

 

This is the F-35A Demo Team out of Luke AFB, Arizona, showing some of the capabilities of the Lightning. It is the Air Force’s latest 5th-generation stealth fighter. While it’s quite proficient at tearing up the sky, it was designed with an enhanced ability to survive in the advanced threat environment of the world today, and much what it can do will never be demonstrated at any air show… but it’s amazing.

 

Early in its test phase, the F-35 was determined to be quite a dud as a fighter. Tested against a 4th-generation F-16, it could barely hold its own in a mock dogfight against the Viper, but what few knew was its capabilities were reined in, much like holding a racehorse back from what it was born to do… run. There was another problem that was unforeseen… pilots of the new F-35 had all previously flown 4th-generation, and they brought with them habits that did not apply to the new system’s stunning flight characteristics. They were just figuring out they had to unlearn what they had trusted for so long flying F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s, also known as Legacy fighters, because the Lightning wasn’t just capable of making mincemeat of any adversary, it was a gamechanger with immediate power, faster response to pilot input, an incredible angle of attack (AOA), and an ability to slow to less than 100 mph rapidly while still maintaining controlled flight to rapidly swing its nose to a target. The funny thing is, that as new pilots graduate flight school without the habits of the older pilots, they’re learning more about what the Lightning can do.

 

All variants of the F-35, A, B, and C models all have advanced integrated avionics giving enhanced situational awareness not just to the pilots, but to every Lightning aircraft on a given mission… what one knows, they all know. Red Flag is somewhat like the Air Force’s version of Navy’s Top Gun, but there’s more to it than what the movie portrays. A Marine pilot new to the program in 2016 was preparing to take off in an F-35B from Luke AFB for a Red Flag exercise… it floored him how much information it provided him from the other members of his squadron who were already airborne. He had a Gods-eye view of the fray before he even left the ground.

 

From a pilot’s own perspective: "You never knew I was there," he said with a smile. "You literally would never know I'm there. I flew the F-35 against other fourth-generation platforms and we killed them, and they never even saw us."

"If you were to engage an F-35 in say, a visual dogfight capability, the capabilities of the F-35 are absolutely eye-watering compared to a fourth-generation fighter. So if it's a long-range contact, you'll never see me and you'll die, and if it's within visual-range contact you'll see me and you're gonna die and you're gonna die very quickly."

"I can tell you that it is by far the best platform I've ever flown in my entire life, and at that, you would have to take me on my word."

– Maj. Gen. Scott Pleus, former CO of 56th Fighter Wing at Luke AFB. 24 years flying the F-16.

 

Makes me proud of my own involvement as an airman of the U.S. Air Force.

In the history of Northumberland, the Battle of Codger Fort is generally ignored as it was a most ignominious 'defeat'. The ‘battle’ took place in 230AD three years after the completion of Hadrian’s Wall - the fort itself lies about 30 miles north of the wall. For years it had been manned by a motely band of wild Votadni from the Ashington area. Needless to say they spent much of their time in idle pleasures (throwing stones and kicking a pig’s bladder around) and most went home early to have a long weekend with their kin folk. Being extremely poorly led, the fort was pretty well deserted from late Friday to late Monday, but all believed that they could rush back in time should any incursion by Rome take place. This folly had not gone unnoticed by the Emperor’s troops stationed on the wall.

 

It was a dark Friday night around the ides of March when a Roman company of around one maniple (160 men) headed north under the command of Atticus of Clausium. Most were legionaries but a few cavalrymen were thought important should the any Votadni try and run away. By early Saturday morning the fort was surrounded and the battle cry was sounded. From the battlements, only the wind declared its defiance, and without further ado the fort was overrun with no loss of life.

Historians believe that Votadni of Ashington had been somewhat befuddled with alcohol on the Friday morning, with each thinking that the other was staying on guard over the weekend. Adding to this confusion, it is now known that their leader, Urgid the Unlearned, had gone home on the Thursday on the pretext of having a bad leg and needing extra time to travel. In short, it was as might be expected a complete military disaster and Rome prevailed over the fort and surrounding area for the next hundred and two years.

 

Ever since that time, the good folk of Ashington have had to live with the knowledge of this embarrassment. As a consequence it is not spoken of much and under better guidance they have largely succeeded in having it expunged from the history books. As a result, most folk who live in Northumberland have never heard or the Battle of Codger Fort.

 

It's taken me a little over 20 years to accept and unlearn the truths of my world but Oh, Bouy do I have a story to tell.

  

A new collection of fine art work investigating rape culture, racism, and the unnerving truths of my experiences as an LGBT Latino.

 

#june30th

7.18

 

you being around felt good

felt special

wondered why?

wondered if the feeling was mutual

may be,may be not...

eventually, who cares?

i know at-least its not you

but you know what?

neither do i...

me caring,won't make any difference

i have learned to unlearn to care

caring is the least thing i want to feel!

 

meet Sarika Siraj, one hell of a crazy person, always ready to do every possible weirdness around and জালায়ে খায়ে :P

Last one month or more I have been plagued with problems one got over another caught up with me ...first it was nerve damage on my foot I went to the bonesetter just once I would massage my feet with mustard oil and apply herbal paste.

I recovered and than got a sty in my eye though in my area everyone was infected by conjunctivitis.

I took anti biotic drops it healed .

Than I got dry bronchial cough I used to have asthama as a child as my mother was asthamatic too I took home remedy turmeric in hot water and antibiotics I did that for a week but when it became too much I went to the doctor I was recovering but as my body had consumed a lot of antibiotics my urine stopped I consulted a kidney specialist he said it might be prostate asked me to take urine routine culture test ...I waited for Sunday to get over as labs are closed I sent a message to the doctor who was treating me for dry cough he prescribed anti bacterial course for 5 days said I don't have to take the urine tests I am recovering...so it has been a terrible time no walks no tennis just chained to the bed watching Quentin Tarantino movies God Father 123 .

So this is my story my granddaughter Zehra comes to see me I take her around listen to her non stop chatter she is 4 and is crazy as she just wants to see my kama head cutting videos ...I don't understand kids but through Zehra I am unlearning the meaning of life my life my Twilight years through her eyes .

  

Plagues happen only to people. Animals can suffer from mass infections, of course, but they experience them as one more bad blow from an unpredictable and predatory natural environment. Only people put mental brackets around a phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic and attempt to give it a name and some historical perspective, some sense of precedence and possibility. The coronavirus, indifferent to individuals, has no creed or moral purpose, but it becomes human when it hits us—neither microscopic nor historic, just the size we are as we experience its effects. As Albert Camus wrote in “The Plague,” the 1947 novel that’s becoming to this disruption what W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” was to the aftermath of 9/11, the microbe has no meaning; we seek to create one in the chaos it brings. The coronavirus has ravaged all of New York City, closing schools, emptying streets and turning stadiums into makeshift hospitals. And data made public by city health officials on Wednesday suggests it is hitting low-income neighborhoods the hardest. The spike glycoproteins give the coronavirus its name. The molecules protrude from the viral envelope like the spikes of a crown. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt are now analysing the structure of this protein. They hope to identify potential targets for antibodies and inhibitors – an important prerequisite for developing new vaccines and drugs against the SARS CoV-2 virus.The coronavirus needs the spike protein to infect a cell. The protein binds primarily to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of human cells. The virus can then fuse with the cell membrane and release its genetic material into the cell. The spike protein is not only the sharpest weapon of the virus but also its Achilles’ heel; its exposed position makes it the preferred point of attack for the immune system. Antibodies can recognize the virus by its spike protein, bind to it, and thus mark it as a target for immune cells. However, the virus has another trick up its sleeve. A sugar coat hides the conserved parts of its spike proteins from the immune cells.The Max Planck researchers are therefore analysing the protective sugar shield and the membrane envelope of the virus in addition to the spike protein. They want to go beyond the existing static structures to calculate how the spike proteins move on the surface of the virus and how they change their shape – with a precision down to the size of an atom. During the first month of the outbreak in the city — the epicenter of America’s coronavirus crisis — many of the neighborhoods with the most confirmed virus cases were in areas with the lowest median incomes, the data shows. The biggest hot spots included communities in the South Bronx and western Queens. The data, collected by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, offers the first snapshot of an outbreak that infected more than 40,000 and killed more than 1,000 in the city in its first month. The increases in flu-related emergency room visits varied widely by neighborhood, with many of the surges occurring among residents of neighborhoods where the typical household income is less than the city median of about $60,000, the data shows.

In Corona, Queens, for example, the median household income is about $48,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That neighborhood is near the Elmhurst Hospital Center, which Mayor Bill de Blasio has cited as the hardest-hit hospital in the city. Doctors in the overwhelmed emergency room there have described the conditions as “apocalyptic.” The coronavirus has spread into virtually every corner of the city, and some wealthier neighborhoods have been overrun with cases, including some parts of Manhattan and Staten Island. But that may be because of the availability of testing in those areas. Nineteen of the 20 neighborhoods with the lowest percentage of positive tests have been in wealthy ZIP codes. The patterns are even more striking when analyzing the data on people who visited the city’s 53 emergency rooms with the “flulike symptoms” that are a hallmark of the coronavirus. Over all, nearly three times as many people with “flulike symptoms” like fever, cough or sore throat visited city emergency rooms this March when compared with the same month in previous years. In the last four years, there were on average 9,250 flu-related visits to emergency rooms in March; this March, the number tripled to about 30,000. These calculations will reveal the tiniest details of the protein structure. But they are extremely complex. “We need the massive computing power of the supercomputers of the Max Planck Society”, explains Gerhard Hummer, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics. With their dynamic model of the spike protein, the researchers hope to identify binding domains to which antibodies can reliably bind. Hummer and his team also hope to discover binding sites for inhibitors. They plan to compare these with the binding properties of existing drugs with the help of computers and thus identify active ingredients that can block the spike protein. “Of course, repurposing drugs that are already on the market is much faster than finding new active ingredients and testing them in lengthy clinical trials”, says Hummer.

 

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/01/nyregion/nyc-coron...

 

The final weekend of semi-ordinary life in New York arrived on Friday the 13th. In the week that followed, New York became a ghost town in a ghost nation on a ghost planet. The gravity and scale of what is happening can overwhelm the details of daily life, in which human beings seek a plateau of normalcy in abnormal times, just as they always have in blitzes and battles. Nobody has any confidence at all about whether we are seeing the first phases of a new normal, the brief calm before a worse storm, or a wise reaction that may allow, not so horribly long from now, for a renewal of common life. Here are some notes on things seen by one walker in the city, and some voices heard among New Yorkers bearing witness, on and off the streets.

 

It happened slowly and then suddenly. On Monday, March 9th, the spectre of a pandemic in New York was still off on the puzzling horizon. By Friday, it was the dominant fact of life. New Yorkers began to adopt a grim new dance of “social distancing.” On a sparsely peopled 5 train, heading down to Grand Central Terminal on Saturday morning, passengers warily tried to achieve an even, strategic spacing, like chess pieces during an endgame: the rook all the way down here, but threatening the king from the back row. Then, when the doors opened, they got off the train one by one, in single, hesitant file, unlearning in a minute New York habits ingrained over lifetimes, the elbowed rush for the door.In the relatively empty subway cars, one can focus on the human details of the riders. A. J. Liebling, in a piece published in these pages some sixty years ago, recounted the tale of a once famous New York murder, in which the headless torso of a man was found wrapped in oilcloth, floating in the East River. The hero of the tale, as Liebling chose to tell it, was a young reporter for the great New York World, who identified the body by type before anyone else did: he saw that the corpse’s fingertips were wrinkled in a way that characterized “rubbers”—masseurs—in Turkish baths. Only someone whose hands were wet that often would have those fingertips. On the subway, in the street, nearly everyone has rubbers’ hands now, with skin shrivelled from excessive washing.

 

The New Yorker’s coronavirus news coverage and analysis are free for all readers.

At the other end of the day, in Central Park late at night, the only people out were the ones walking their dogs. Dogs are still allowed to have proximity, if only to other dogs. They can’t be kept from it. The negotiations of proximity—the dogs demanding it, the owners trying to resist it without being actively rude—are newly arrived in the city. Walking home down the almost empty avenues, you could see the same silhouette, repeated: dogs straining toward dogs on long-stretched leashes, held by watchful owners keeping their distance, a nightly choreography of animal need and human caution.

 

At J.F.K., in Queens, during that strange weekend, people huddled and waited anxiously for the homecoming of family members who had been stranded abroad, with the understanding that homecoming now comes at a cost: arriving passengers have been asked to self-quarantine for two weeks. J.F.K. had been spared some of the nightmarish lines and confusion seen at Dulles, in Washington, and O’Hare, in Chicago, following Donald Trump’s abrupt decision the previous Wednesday (relayed in a garbled announcement) to suspend most travel from Europe. But no one is spared the emotional ambivalence of the moment: every feeling pulled out hard, like an attenuated nerve. Parents are keenly aware that, in bringing their children home to what is meant to be safety, they are bringing them to an increasingly unsafe place.“Barren” was the word that Lisa Cleveland, who lives in New Jersey, used for the normally bustling airport. She spent part of Saturday morning waiting for her teen-age children Zoë and Xander, who had been staying in the Netherlands. Their father is a Dutch citizen. “I’m still trying to understand the risks, but he’s been tracking this for more than two months,” Cleveland said. “He’s that guy.” Getting the kids back to the U.S. before further barriers went up wasn’t easy. “Xander and Zoë—she likes the double dot over her name, otherwise it becomes a Dutch word that rhymes with ‘cow’—were in Amsterdam. We struggled and struggled to find them tickets home. Someone told us that one of the airlines was going to go bankrupt.”

 

When she saw Zoë and Xander at last, Cleveland said, “it was just such an enormous relief. And more emotion than you can easily imagine. This is the first day I’ve been able to smile in weeks. But now they have to do a mandatory self-quarantine for two weeks.”

 

Zoë said, “Not that I’m not glad to be home, but I’ll miss school. The mood on the plane was weird—half the plane was wearing masks.” Because safety masks were sold out in Amsterdam, she and her brother decided to wear masks that their parents had bought them out of an abundance of caution. They were 3M respirators, the kind an industrial worker might wear in the presence of toxic aerosols. “I felt people were judging us,” Zoë said. “It’s a crazy mask. No one else on the plane had on such a serious mask.”

 

Crises take an X-ray of a city’s class structure. After 9/11, it was the Middle Eastern and South Asian taxi-drivers who suddenly became visible, lining their cabs with American flags for fear of being taken for jihadis. Now particular visibility falls on bicycle deliverymen, Mexicans and Indians, the emissaries of Seamless, who modestly shoulder the burden of feeding the middle class. On the East Side, outside a Thai restaurant at 7 p.m. on Saturday, a single deliveryman balanced five bags of food hanging from his handlebars. His livelihood hinges on his getting meals to people who are self-isolating, a luxury he doesn’t have. Although he was grateful for the work, he said, he was a little frightened about his own exposure. Asked how many more sacks he ferries during his shift these days, he shrugged and said at least ten times the usual load.Just as the medical system depends on the lowest paid of the health workers—the orderlies and custodians—the food system, now that restaurants have been limited to takeout and delivery, depends on a whole cadre of men pedalling bicycles. They are literally overburdened, and, that night, this one got off to an unsteady start, like a plane in wartime trying to take off with too large a load of refugees. He glanced up at a high-rise condominium being built on Madison Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street. Construction work continues right through the closures—no letup in the noise and activity, even on the weekend. The workmen, in their puffy vests and hard hats, were side by side, though they didn’t seem particularly worried, or constrained. The exigencies of Manhattan real estate and development are evidently undeterred by the crisis.What’s strange about this energetic construction of more luxury housing is that, in the existing apartment buildings nearby, on the impossibly wealthy blocks of Fifth Avenue, scarcely a light can be seen. Nobody’s home. Most of the truly wealthy have gone, by helicopter or private jet, to the Hamptons or to an island somewhere. There can be something vexing about the thought that those whose wealth relies on the intense, close-ordered entanglement of the city abandon it in its hour of need, or dread, but they do. Still, who would not decamp to a remote island if she had one? “Boccaccio-ing,” someone calls this business of fleeing the city, in honor of the Italian author, who wrote of fleeing Florence during the Black Death, and telling stories with his companions for ten days up in the hillside villas of Fiesole.

 

In West Harlem, Sam Rivera certainly can’t leave. At a residential facility run by the Fortune Society and known as the Castle, his job is to oversee the rooms and the souls of about eighty-five men and women, almost all released from prison not long ago, some as recently as this month. They come in and out of his office all day, seeking help and solace. “It’s crazy, but the system is still churning,” Rivera said. He is a huge man, with a beaming, steady smile. “They’re still discharging people from Rikers and elsewhere, even as we go through all this. So we have a steady inflow of people coming home, even while we’re trying to lock down the people we already have.”This is Rivera’s second plague. Incarcerated himself when H.I.V./aids hit New York’s state prisons, in the nineteen-eighties, he still remembers the shock of working in the isolated wards where those who fell ill with the disease were sequestered: “Everyone was so frightened that they pretty much put on a hazmat suit to go into those places. Except me.” His experience led him, once he was out of prison, to join the aids-care movement, where he met and worked with Anthony Fauci, the current director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Now that Rivera is responsible for the residents of the Castle, he thinks hard about what to do. His memories of the aids epidemic are strong, and they give an oddly positive cast to his take on today’s crisis.

 

“We’ve stockpiled three weeks’ worth of food, and we’re sending staff to screen visitors at Rikers,” he said. (City jails have since suspended in-person visits.) “But it’s not a deadly virus for most people—it’s not as deadly as aids. I think we’ll get to the point where the next announcement will have to be, What are we doing for people who have to manage the elders and those with compromised immune systems? I’m coping two ways. I’m not overthinking it. I expect to get it one day. I’ll feel sick, and I’ll manage it, I’ll come through it, and my body will build immunities to it. And that will be a blessing.”

 

Despite his brio in the face of the virus, Rivera worries about the vulnerable residents in his charge. “We have a number of people in the Castle who are living with H.I.V., and we’re really monitoring where and how they are,” he said. “The problem is that they don’t like following up. Most of them have had bad experiences with the medical system, or sometimes no experience with it. But, if anyone has flu-like symptoms, then we are able to get a test, right now, at Columbia Presbyterian, which is great. All we can do is watch and move forward, day by day.”

 

Panic-buying has been in evidence all over town, if unevenly executed. Many chain supermarkets and food stores are stripped bare of groceries, in a way that calls to mind the days just after 9/11. Back then, people gathered “Armageddon baskets,” filled with expensive things—steak and Perrier. Now they assemble survival kits. Toilet paper and canned beans are treasured. (There is no chance, the grocers assure the city, of running out of either.) Still, there’s a pattern to the emptying of the supermarkets. Every potato, every carrot, every onion in a West Side Citarella is gone, as is every package of pasta and every jar of tomatoes in an uptown Whole Foods. Yet many of the less tony supermarkets, the nearby Key Foods and Gristedes, have remained well stocked and serene throughout the rush.

 

“You realize what this means?” a college student who grew up in New York said, about the depredations of upscale shoppers. “It means they believe that it’s every man for himself. They don’t really believe in community or that people will or can share. Their instinct, despite living in one of the more affluent spots in the world, is that they’re on their own.” The plague, as Camus insisted, exposes existing fractures in societies, in class structure and individual character; under stress, we see who we really are. The secession of the very rich, the isolation of the well-off, the degradation of social capital by inequality: these truths become sharply self-evident now.

 

The current crisis is, in some respects, the mirror image of the post-9/11 moment. That turned out to be a time of retrospective anxiety about a tragedy unforeseen. The anticipatory jitters weren’t entirely unfounded—anthrax killed a hospital worker in Manhattan—but they arose from something that had already happened and wouldn’t be repeated. By contrast, the covid-19 crisis involves worries about something we’ve been warned is on the way. The social remedy is the opposite of the sort of coming together that made the days and weeks after 9/11 endurable for so many, as they shared dinners and embraced friends. That basic human huddling is now forbidden, with the recommendations for “distancing” bearing down ever tighter: no more than five hundred people together, then two hundred and fifty, then fifty, then ten.

 

At the same time, the emphasis on social distancing and even isolation is part of an epidemiological study in statistical probability. If we delay the communication of the virus from patient to patient, the curve of new cases may flatten, so that fewer people at any time will need hospitalization, reducing the stress on the system and keeping health services available for all the other countless ailments that strike a city of eight million. In a way, the self-seclusions are exhibits not of personal panic but of public-minded prudence: we are trying to save the lives, above all, of the most vulnerable. But, of course, the plague-in-progress may progress despite it all.“Love in the Time of Cholera” is Gabriel García Márquez’s great novel of another plague time—with cholera, we’re told, referring to both the name of the terrible disease and the condition of being colérico, angry and impassioned. Love in the time of coronavirus was bound to happen—in crisis and despair is born desire—and it already has. Kids forced to leave college and return home to the city talked about long-sought last-minute assignations on the night before the general expulsion.

 

Sometimes desire in anxiety can be more delicate. In Grand Central Terminal, what some call “the tile telephone”—the whispering gallery in front of the Oyster Bar, under the beautiful basket weave of arches—has never been so clear. The noise of the station is usually so intense that the tiled ceiling turns mute. Now, for the first time in forever, the abatement in the roar and press of people allows couples’ murmured endearments, spoken into one corner, to race up through the solid Guastavino tile and carry all the way over to the diagonally facing corner.A pair of young friends encountered there that Friday weren’t out-of-towners; this was Kyle and Leah, and they’re New Yorkers through and through, who decided that this was the moment, finally, to really see Grand Central. The appetite for the joys of structured sightseeing is indomitable. Another young woman, Amaya—visiting from Durham, North Carolina, and crushed to find the city so inhospitable—stood in the corner, smiling and singing to a friend on the other side.But it was on Saturday, when the sky was blue and the temperature hovered in the fifties, that the irresistible urge to find pleasure brought out flocks of young people to various outdoor spaces. “I’ve noticed that a lot of people my age are headed to Prospect Park and are taking advantage of a beautiful day, a large space where they can mingle,” a thirty-one-year-old woman said, early on Saturday afternoon. “They sort of keep social distance, but also connect.” Many photographs, shared widely on social media, seemed to show the millennials lounging thoughtlessly close, prompting a Twitter uproar.

 

The uproar did seem to reflect a determination on the part of young people in New York to go on living like young people in New York. “Last night I went out to a restaurant,” the same woman said. “And the wait was half an hour. So we went to a different restaurant, and at that one, when the waitress was bringing out drinks, she got confused about where to go, since they had just changed their seating—I think to have more space between tables. ”Like life-hardened Sam Rivera, these younger New Yorkers have touching if perhaps worrying faith in their own invulnerability. “I don’t think people in my cohort are that terrified,” the woman went on. “Most people seem to believe that they will get the virus and they will survive having it. The vibe is pretty much one of acceptance, even a little bit of excitement. I hate to say this, but it’s become a distraction from the election. Also, a lot of my friends are cooking. Like ambitious stockpot recipes—soups and stews—and a lot of baking, too. Pies and cookies. I myself am currently deep-cleaning my apartment, knowing that I’ll be stuck in it.” Meanwhile, she said, “my family is from New York, and my father has been fearlessly going to the gym. I think there’s a bit of yolo fear to it—he wants to make the most of his life. But I have pleaded with him to stop.”

 

That same Saturday, Maggie McGlinchy, a bartender, worked all evening at Bernie’s Restaurant, on the border of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. “It was full,” she said on Sunday. “But it doesn’t take much to fill the restaurant. The actual volume was low, and it seemed as though no one wanted to be seen to be fully enjoying themselves. I sold a lot of Martinis that night—mostly Martinis, or Old-Fashioneds or Manhattans. No wine or artisanal ale. Everyone was trending the spirits.

 

“At Bernie’s, I’m on a first-name basis with possibly a third of the customers—it’s definitely a home base. In the past two nights, a lot of my customers are people who wanted to come in and support us. Most of my tips were over twenty per cent. That’s the other thing about social distancing—so much of what it means to be comforted is to be . . . not distant. Stay positive, I’d say—we’re feeling well right now and let’s hope it stays positive and do you want another drink?” But by Sunday night all the bars and restaurants in the city had been ordered to stop table service in the next few days, an unimaginable act a week earlier, as strange as if the island of Manhattan had floated out to sea.

 

McGlinchy said that she is looking for a new job, but there are no new jobs for bartenders, because there are no bars.“What do I have going forward? I have a month’s rent and a warm e-mail from my former employer,” she said dryly on Tuesday morning. “I’ve had some regulars send me twenty bucks over Venmo. Last tips.”

 

The full weight of the shutdown will fall most heavily on the Maggies of the world, who have little or no financial cushion. (Later, Bernie’s set up a GoFundMe campaign for the staff.) Hundreds of thousands of people in the service and entertainment industries—from bartenders to the “swing” theatre actors who pride themselves on leaping into whatever role has been left open by an unwell lead—are out of work, for a time that has no known limit.There are, as well, the small, crushing disappointments that, though reasonably lost in the larger life-and-death clamor, are very real to the people they have happened to. The actress Ilana Levine had just opened in a new play, “The Perplexed,” by Richard Greenberg—a comeback of sorts for her—when all theatres, concert venues, and night clubs were closed. “You know, I had been on Broadway a lot when I was younger,” she said. “But then came L.A. and children. . . . And out of the blue I got this call to do this play of Richard’s, with the idea that, after all this time, I’d be back on the stage in New York, which I missed desperately. So all of these things I’d been dreaming of happened, and with it came so much fear and anxiety: ‘Can I make it work?’ ” She laughed at the idea of what fear and anxiety meant a few days earlier—having too much to memorize.

 

“The play is about family and struggle and old hurts and people having to be, in this sort of Sartre way, perpetually closed off in the space of one room with each other,” she continued. “So now the play and the reality are one, in ways I could never have imagined. Except I don’t get to do it in this world, with an audience.” The evocative set, designed by Santo Loquasto, of a New York town house, has not yet been struck from the Manhattan Theatre Club stage, she said. “So all of us keep thinking of that set, and how we want to get to it, be on it—the company, even without an audience, just to work together on it. Actors are not people who know how to isolate. We are suddenly physically frozen at this moment.”

 

The young musical-theatre actress Abena Mensah-Bonsu, cast in a significant role in a new show, “Nollywood Dreams,” had been commuting in from New Jersey, feeling all the ancient excitement of a big break. Now she sits at home and is eager to get back to the theatre. “Acting is the opposite of social distancing,” she said, echoing Levine. “Even if you’re introverted, as I am. So, when we sit in place, we long to be engaged with someone.” On Broadway, the theatres are empty, but the lights have still been on, as though the theatres were willing the shows to continue.

 

One irony of this pandemic is that, while it exposes the gaps in our social and medical safety nets, it also punishes people for behaving well. Communities with the healthiest intergenerational relationships seem to be at greater risk than those that sequester older people in nursing homes. Italy, one study shows, has been so hard hit by the coronavirus because there the young and the old have the beautiful habit of mingling together. Grandparents are accustomed to being with their grandchildren.In the days before the shutdown, the Lubavitcher community in Crown Heights became a virus hot spot, perhaps because the Hasidic sects, too, have kept at bay the alienation of generations that is so much part of American life. “Do you want to know how things appear, or how they are?” Mica Soffer, the editor of a Jewish news Web site, said that Sunday. “It’s been extremely hectic. As far as the community itself, I guess we weren’t so much prepared. It’s in China, it’s in Europe—we didn’t realize how quickly it would get here. Our community is so connected. We live in an urban area—you’re always around people. It’s Brooklyn, after all! Late last week, I had a shiva call, a wedding, and an engagement party. Everyone has a million things they need to go to—families are large.”She went on, “Most families here have elderly parents and grandparents—it’s a big part of life. Purim was last weekend—you’re talking about people being exposed. We didn’t realize at first. We didn’t know. There was a lot of contact. Very much part of our day-to-day life—especially with the men going to shul three times a day, and Torah classes every single day. One of the things that’s so amazing is that everybody kicked into high gear to put up yeshivas online within two days.

 

“In Crown Heights, davening still goes on, it always has to be there, within the realm of whatever number the health department says. No more than ten people in Israel. A rabbi told me, ‘Faith is not the absence of reason.’ We don’t give up on the interventions. God blessed us with doctors, not as something apart from us but as something there to help us. My father told me this: God is in charge, and God watches over us. Every time I get really panicky, there’s that sense that God is taking care of us. I’m an anxious person and it’s not easy. But I have to access that. Rabbi Nachum said, ‘Gam zu l’tovah’—‘This, too, shall be for the good.’ ” On Tuesday, rabbis closed the Crown Heights synagogues. “Now,” Soffer said, “many people are praying outdoors, six feet away from each other.”

 

The self-exile of the very wealthy from the city that made them rich is hardly uniform. A feeling of social responsibility, of solidarity, is embodied by Elizabeth Smith, who is the head of the Central Park Conservancy. She and her husband, Rick Cotton, the head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, became among the first public officials in New York known to have covid-19. Now all she wants is to get back to the Park.

“I’ve never been in the tabloids before,” Smith, who is in her late sixties, said from her Manhattan apartment, where she was convalescing, and in her second week of seclusion. “In my family, you’re in the paper when you’re born and again when you marry. And the fact of the matter is that the virus gets . . . very virulent. I wasn’t feeling well on Saturday—all the typical flu symptoms, like a fever, but a relatively mild case of the flu for me. I stayed in bed, had my moments of panic, but I was fortunate to be paired with Rick, who was positive but asymptomatic. And I was well enough to stay in touch with the Conservancy and find out how everyone was faring—the morale and the health of the staff—and the Park itself, too. It has the tremendous power of offering peace and respite to people. The amazing people are the city workers. They keep showing up. They show up at work and they do the right thing. There are lots of selfless people, lots of people who take public service seriously.”

 

Even if she hadn’t fallen ill, Smith said, she would have wanted to stay in the city. “We have a big responsibility to the public,” she said. “You know, when Frederick Law Olmsted made the Park, it was just with that in mind: most people don’t even have a chance of leaving New York. It’s for all those people who couldn’t leave the city, to get to the Adirondacks.” Smith is the chair of the Library of America, which published a collection of Olmsted’s essays, letters, and other reflections in 2015. “Believe it or not, I never quite got through Olmsted’s writings,” she admitted. “He was a genius and a beautiful writer.” She is now immersed in the volume: “I’m not in the Park but I can stay in the Park.”

 

Emptiness and absence contradict the very concept of the city. The point of a city is social proximity; to see people deliberately spaced out, like the walking but never intersecting figures in a Giacometti, is to see what cities aren’t. In a historical sense, cities are always organisms of a kind, like coral reefs, where a lot of people come together to barter spices and exchange ideas and find mates, and endure the recurrent damage of infectious disease.The question is whether the current upheavals could somehow alter New York forever. Some beloved places may stay closed. Some new practices may be perpetuated. The digital trends toward disaggregation of experience may get a boost, at a cost to everything we love about the city. There’s an eerie gap between the raucous and argumentative world of the Internet and the silence of the streets. Outside, new patterns of wider spacing and greater caution assert themselves: Is that masked man contagious and to be avoided by crossing the street? Did we forget to sanitize after touching the gate to the park? And, with them, the terrible self-monitoring of plague times: Do I feel normal? Is my temperature high? Feel my forehead.Until last week, no one ever thought that Camus’s “The Plague” was about the plague. It was the text through which generations of high schoolers were taught how not to read literally. It was always taken as a fable or an allegory, specifically of the German occupation of France. The people in Camus’s plague town of Oran did not in any way deserve to suffer from the disease, but the crisis revealed all the various human responses of cowardice, denial, and courage. The point was not that actual plagues tell us much, but that the pressure of extreme and unexpected events forces the flaws in our common character to the surface.

 

This plague has proved an equal-opportunity evil, striking theocratic states like Iran and authoritarian ones like China, and more open ones like our own and those in Europe. Some hard balance of authority and openness is obviously essential to going on at all, but this is not news. We have always known that having the confidence to act, and the clarity to see if the way we act is good, is vital to our continued existence. Our continued existence! It used to be a kind of metaphor, really meaning “the easy perpetuation of our familiar way of life.” No more.

 

By midweek, even the dance of wariness was muted: New Yorkers, largely sheltering in place, still allowed themselves to walk their dogs, but walked them alone on each street, with the next dog and owner at least a stoplight away. The dogs, puzzled not to have the greetings of others of their animal kind, sniffed doggedly in the dark, though now only at the scent of their solitary owners.

 

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/30/the-coronavirus-cri...

 

Wells Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Wells, Somerset, England, dedicated to St Andrew the Apostle. It is the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, whose cathedra it holds as mother church of the Diocese of Bath and Wells. Built as a Roman Catholic cathedral from around 1175 to replace an earlier church on the site since 705, it became an Anglican cathedral when King Henry VIII split from Rome. It is moderately sized for an English cathedral. Its broad west front and large central tower are dominant features. It has been called "unquestionably one of the most beautiful" and "most poetic" of English cathedrals.

 

Its Gothic architecture is mostly inspired from Early English style of the late 12th to early 13th centuries, lacking the Romanesque work that survives in many other cathedrals. Building began about 1175 at the east end with the choir. Historian John Harvey sees it as Europe's first truly Gothic structure, breaking the last constraints of Romanesque. The stonework of its pointed arcades and fluted piers bears pronounced mouldings and carved capitals in a foliate, "stiff-leaf" style. Its Early English front with 300 sculpted figures is seen as a "supreme triumph of the combined plastic arts in England". The east end retains much ancient stained glass. Unlike many cathedrals of monastic foundation, Wells has many surviving secular buildings linked to its chapter of secular canons, including the Bishop's Palace and the 15th-century residential Vicars' Close It is a Grade I listed building.

 

The earliest remains of a building on the site are of a late-Roman mausoleum, identified during excavations in 1980. An abbey church was built in Wells in 705 by Aldhelm, first bishop of the newly established Diocese of Sherborne during the reign of King Ine of Wessex. It was dedicated to St Andrew and stood at the site of the cathedral's cloisters, where some excavated remains can be seen. The font in the cathedral's south transept is from this church and is the oldest part of the present building. In 766 Cynewulf, King of Wessex, signed a charter endowing the church with eleven hides of land. In 909 the seat of the diocese was moved from Sherborne to Wells.

 

The first bishop of Wells was Athelm (909), who crowned King Æthelstan. Athelm and his nephew Dunstan both became Archbishops of Canterbury. During this period a choir of boys was established to sing the liturgy. Wells Cathedral School, which was established to educate these choirboys, dates its foundation to this point. There is, however, some controversy over this. Following the Norman Conquest, John de Villula moved the seat of the bishop from Wells to Bath in 1090. The church at Wells, no longer a cathedral, had a college of secular clergy.

 

The cathedral is thought to have been conceived and commenced in about 1175 by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, who died in 1191. Although it is clear from its size that from the outset, the church was planned to be the cathedral of the diocese, the seat of the bishop moved between Wells and the abbeys of Glastonbury and Bath, before settling at Wells. In 1197 Reginald's successor, Savaric FitzGeldewin, with the approval of Pope Celestine III, officially moved his seat to Glastonbury Abbey. The title of Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury was used until the Glastonbury claim was abandoned in 1219.

 

Savaric's successor, Jocelin of Wells, again moved the bishop's seat to Bath Abbey, with the title Bishop of Bath. Jocelin was a brother of Hugh (II) of Lincoln and was present at the signing of the Magna Carta. Jocelin continued the building campaign begun by Reginald and was responsible for the Bishop's Palace, the choristers' school, a grammar school, a hospital for travellers and a chapel. He also had a manor house built at Wookey, near Wells. Jocelin saw the church dedicated in 1239 but, despite much lobbying of the Pope by Jocelin's representatives in Rome, did not live to see cathedral status granted. The delay may have been a result of inaction by Pandulf Verraccio, a Roman ecclesiastical politician, papal legate to England and Bishop of Norwich, who was asked by the Pope to investigate the situation but did not respond. Jocelin died at Wells on 19 November 1242 and was buried in the choir of the cathedral; the memorial brass on his tomb is one of the earliest brasses in England. Following his death the monks of Bath unsuccessfully attempted to regain authority over Wells.

 

In 1245 the ongoing dispute over the title of the bishop was resolved by a ruling of Pope Innocent IV, who established the title as the "Bishop of Bath and Wells", which it has remained until this day, with Wells as the principal seat of the bishop. Since the 11th century the church has had a chapter of secular clergy, like the cathedrals of Chichester, Hereford, Lincoln and York. The chapter was endowed with 22 prebends (lands from which finance was drawn) and a provost to manage them. On acquiring cathedral status, in common with other such cathedrals, it had four chief clergy, the dean, precentor, chancellor and sacristan, who were responsible for the spiritual and material care of the cathedral.

 

The building programme, begun by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, Bishop in the 12th century, continued under Jocelin of Wells, who was a canon from 1200, then bishop from 1206. Adam Locke was master mason from about 1192 until 1230. It was designed in the new style with pointed arches, later known as Gothic, which was introduced at about the same time at Canterbury Cathedral. Work was halted between 1209 and 1213 when King John was excommunicated and Jocelin was in exile, but the main parts of the church were complete by the time of the dedication by Jocelin in 1239.

 

By the time the cathedral, including the chapter house, was finished in 1306, it was already too small for the developing liturgy, and unable to accommodate increasingly grand processions of clergy. John Droxford initiated another phase of building under master mason Thomas of Whitney, during which the central tower was heightened and an eight-sided Lady chapel was added at the east end by 1326. Ralph of Shrewsbury followed, continuing the eastward extension of the choir and retrochoir beyond. He oversaw the building of Vicars' Close and the Vicars' Hall, to give the men who were employed to sing in the choir a secure place to live and dine, away from the town and its temptations. He had an uneasy relationship with the citizens of Wells, partly because of his imposition of taxes, and he surrounded his palace with crenellated walls, a moat and a drawbridge.

 

John Harewell raised money for the completion of the west front by William Wynford, who was appointed as master mason in 1365. One of the foremost master masons of his time, Wynford worked for the king at Windsor, Winchester Cathedral and New College, Oxford. At Wells, he designed the western towers of which north-west was not built until the following century. In the 14th century, the central piers of the crossing were found to be sinking under the weight of the crossing tower which had been damaged by an earthquake in the previous century. Strainer arches, sometimes described as scissor arches, were inserted by master mason William Joy to brace and stabilise the piers as a unit.

 

By the reign of Henry VII the cathedral was complete, appearing much as it does today (though the fittings have changed). From 1508 to 1546, the eminent Italian humanist scholar Polydore Vergil was active as the chapter's representative in London. He donated a set of hangings for the choir of the cathedral. While Wells survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries better than the cathedrals of monastic foundation, the abolition of chantries in 1547 resulted in a reduction in its income. Medieval brasses were sold, and a pulpit was placed in the nave for the first time. Between 1551 and 1568, in two periods as dean, William Turner established a herb garden, which was recreated between 2003 and 2010.

 

Elizabeth I gave the chapter and the Vicars Choral a new charter in 1591, creating a new governing body, consisting of a dean and eight residentiary canons with control over the church estates and authority over its affairs, but no longer entitled to elect the dean (that entitlement thenceforward belonged ultimately to the Crown). The stability brought by the new charter ended with the onset of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Local fighting damaged the cathedral's stonework, furniture and windows. The dean, Walter Raleigh, a nephew of the explorer Walter Raleigh, was placed under house arrest after the fall of Bridgwater to the Parliamentarians in 1645, first in the rectory at Chedzoy and then in the deanery at Wells. His jailor, the shoe maker and city constable, David Barrett, caught him writing a letter to his wife. When he refused to surrender it, Barrett ran him through with a sword and he died six weeks later, on 10 October 1646. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the choir before the dean's stall. During the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell no dean was appointed and the cathedral fell into disrepair. The bishop went into retirement and some of the clerics were reduced to performing menial tasks.

 

In 1661, after Charles II was restored to the throne, Robert Creighton, the king's chaplain in exile, was appointed dean and was bishop for two years before his death in 1672. His brass lectern, given in thanksgiving, can be seen in the cathedral. He donated the nave's great west window at a cost of £140. Following Creighton's appointment as bishop, the post of dean went to Ralph Bathurst, who had been chaplain to the king, president of Trinity College, Oxford and fellow of the Royal Society. During Bathurst's long tenure the cathedral was restored, but in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, Puritan soldiers damaged the west front, tore lead from the roof to make bullets, broke the windows, smashed the organ and furnishings, and for a time stabled their horses in the nave.

 

Restoration began again under Thomas Ken who was appointed by the Crown in 1685 and served until 1691. He was one of seven bishops imprisoned for refusing to sign King James II's "Declaration of Indulgence", which would have enabled Catholics to resume positions of political power, but popular support led to their acquittal. Ken refused to take the oath of allegiance to William III and Mary II because James II had not abdicated and with others, known as the Nonjurors, was put out of office. His successor, Richard Kidder, was killed in the Great Storm of 1703 when two chimney stacks on the palace fell on him and his wife, while they were asleep in bed.

 

By the middle of the 19th century, a major restoration programme was needed. Under Dean Goodenough, the monuments were moved to the cloisters and the remaining medieval paint and whitewash removed in an operation known as "the great scrape". Anthony Salvin took charge of the extensive restoration of the choir. Wooden galleries installed in the 16th century were removed and the stalls were given stone canopies and placed further back within the line of the arcade. The medieval stone pulpitum screen was extended in the centre to support a new organ.

 

In 1933 the Friends of Wells Cathedral were formed to support the cathedral's chapter in the maintenance of the fabric, life and work of the cathedral. The late 20th century saw an extensive restoration programme, particularly of the west front. The stained glass is currently under restoration, with a programme underway to conserve the large 14th-century Jesse Tree window at the eastern terminal of the choir.

 

In January 2014, as part of the Bath film festival, the cathedral hosted a special screening of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. This provoked some controversy, but the church defended its decision to allow the screening.

 

In 2021, a contemporary sculpture by Anthony Gormley was unveiled on a temporary plinth outside the cathedral.

 

Since the 13th century, Wells Cathedral has been the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Its governing body, the chapter, is made up of five clerical canons (the dean, the precentor, the canon chancellor, the canon treasurer, and the archdeacon of Wells) and four lay members: the administrator (chief executive), Keeper of the Fabric, Overseer of the Estate and the chairman of the cathedral shop and catering boards. The current bishop of Bath and Wells is Peter Hancock, who was installed in a service in the cathedral on 7 June 2014. John Davies has been Dean of Wells since 2016.

 

Employed staff include the organist and master of choristers, head Verger archivist, librarian and the staff of the shop, café and restaurant. The chapter is advised by specialists such as architects, archaeologists and financial analysts.

 

More than a thousand services are held every year. There are daily services of Matins, Holy Communion and Choral Evensong, as well as major celebrations of Christian festivals such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and saints' days. The cathedral is also used for the baptisms, weddings and funerals of those with close connections to it. In July 2009 the cathedral undertook the funeral of Harry Patch, the last British Army veteran of World War I, who died at the age of 111.

 

Three Sunday services are led by the resident choir in school terms and choral services are sung on weekdays. The cathedral hosts visiting choirs and does outreach work with local schools as part of its Chorister Outreach Project. It is also a venue for musical events such as an annual concert by the Somerset Chamber Choir.

 

Each year about 150,000 people attend services and another 300,000 visit as tourists. Entry is free, but visitors are encouraged to make a donation towards the annual running costs of around £1.5 million in 2015.

 

Construction of the cathedral began in about 1175, to the design of an unknown master-mason. Wells is the first cathedral in England to be built, from its foundation, in Gothic style. According to art historian John Harvey, it is the first truly Gothic cathedral in the world, its architects having entirely dispensed with all features that bound the contemporary east end of Canterbury Cathedral and the earlier buildings of France, such as the east end of the Abbey of Saint Denis, to the Romanesque. Unlike these churches, Wells has clustered piers rather than columns and has a gallery of identical pointed arches rather than the typically Romanesque form of paired openings. The style, with its simple lancet arches without tracery and convoluted mouldings, is known as Early English Gothic.

 

From about 1192 to 1230, Adam Lock, the earliest master-mason at Wells for whom a name is known, continued the transept and nave in the same manner as his predecessor. Lock was also the builder of the north porch, to his own design.

 

The Early English west front was commenced around 1230 by Thomas Norreys, with building and sculpture continuing for thirty years. Its south-west tower was begun 100 years later and constructed between 1365 and 1395, and the north-west tower between 1425 and 1435, both in the Perpendicular Gothic style to the design of William Wynford, who also filled many of the cathedral's early English lancet windows with delicate tracery.

 

The undercroft and chapter house were built by unknown architects between 1275 and 1310, the undercroft in the Early English and the chapter house in the Geometric style of Decorated Gothic architecture. In about 1310 work commenced on the Lady Chapel, to the design of Thomas Witney, who also built the central tower from 1315 to 1322 in the Decorated Gothic style. The tower was later braced internally with arches by William Joy. Concurrent with this work, in 1329–45 Joy made alterations and extensions to the choir, joining it to the Lady Chapel with the retrochoir, the latter in the Flowing Decorated style.

 

Later changes include the Perpendicular vault of the tower and construction of Sugar's Chapel, 1475–1490 by William Smyth. Also, Gothic Revival renovations were made to the choir and pulpitum by Benjamin Ferrey and Anthony Salvin, 1842–1857.

 

Wells has a total length of 415 feet (126 m). Like Canterbury, Lincoln and Salisbury cathedrals, it has the distinctly English arrangement of two transepts, with the body of the church divided into distinct parts: nave, choir, and retro-choir, beyond which extends the Lady Chapel. The façade is wide, with its towers extending beyond the transepts on either side. There is a large projecting porch on the north side of the nave forming an entry into the cathedral. To the north-east is the large octagonal chapter house, entered from the north choir aisle by a passage and staircase. To the south of the nave is a large cloister, unusual in that the northern range, that adjacent the cathedral, was never built.

 

In section, the cathedral has the usual arrangement of a large church: a central nave with an aisle on each side, separated by two arcades. The elevation is in three stages, arcade, triforium gallery and clerestory. The nave is 67 feet (20 m) in height, very low compared to the Gothic cathedrals of France. It has a markedly horizontal emphasis, caused by the triforium having a unique form, a series of identical narrow openings, lacking the usual definition of the bays. The triforium is separated from the arcade by a single horizontal string course that runs unbroken the length of the nave. There are no vertical lines linking the three stages, as the shafts supporting the vault rise above the triforium.

 

The exterior of Wells Cathedral presents a relatively tidy and harmonious appearance since the greater part of the building was executed in a single style, Early English Gothic. This is uncommon among English cathedrals where the exterior usually exhibits a plethora of styles. At Wells, later changes in the Perpendicular style were universally applied, such as filling the Early English lancet windows with simple tracery, the construction of a parapet that encircles the roof, and the addition of pinnacles framing each gable, similar to those around the chapter house and on the west front. At the eastern end there is a proliferation of tracery with repeated motifs in the Reticulated style, a stage between Geometric and Flowing Decorated tracery.

 

The west front is 100 feet (30 m) high and 147 feet (45 m) wide, and built of Inferior Oolite of the Middle Jurassic period, which came from the Doulting Stone Quarry, about 8 miles (13 km) to the east. According to the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor, it is "one of the great sights of England".

 

West fronts in general take three distinct forms: those that follow the elevation of the nave and aisles, those that have paired towers at the end of each aisle, framing the nave, and those that screen the form of the building. The west front at Wells has the paired-tower form, unusual in that the towers do not indicate the location of the aisles, but extend well beyond them, screening the dimensions and profile of the building.

 

The west front rises in three distinct stages, each clearly defined by a horizontal course. This horizontal emphasis is counteracted by six strongly projecting buttresses defining the cross-sectional divisions of nave, aisles and towers, and are highly decorated, each having canopied niches containing the largest statues on the façade.

 

At the lowest level of the façade is a plain base, contrasting with and stabilising the ornate arcades that rise above it. The base is penetrated by three doors, which are in stark contrast to the often imposing portals of French Gothic cathedrals. The outer two are of domestic proportion and the central door is ornamented only by a central post, quatrefoil and the fine mouldings of the arch.

 

Above the basement rise two storeys, ornamented with quatrefoils and niches originally holding about four hundred statues, with three hundred surviving until the mid-20th century. Since then, some have been restored or replaced, including the ruined figure of Christ in the gable.

 

The third stages of the flanking towers were both built in the Perpendicular style of the late 14th century, to the design of William Wynford; that on the north-west was not begun until about 1425. The design maintains the general proportions, and continues the strong projection of the buttresses.

 

The finished product has been criticised for its lack of pinnacles, and it is probable that the towers were intended to carry spires which were never built. Despite its lack of spires or pinnacles, the architectural historian Banister Fletcher describes it as "the highest development in English Gothic of this type of façade."

 

The sculptures on the west front at Wells include standing figures, seated figures, half-length angels and narratives in high relief. Many of the figures are life-sized or larger. Together they constitute the finest display of medieval carving in England. The figures and many of the architectural details were painted in bright colours, and the colouring scheme has been deduced from flakes of paint still adhering to some surfaces. The sculptures occupy nine architectural zones stretching horizontally across the entire west front and around the sides and the eastern returns of the towers which extend beyond the aisles. The strongly projecting buttresses have tiers of niches which contain many of the largest figures. Other large figures, including that of Christ, occupy the gable. A single figure stands in one of two later niches high on the northern tower.

 

In 1851 the archaeologist Charles Robert Cockerell published his analysis of the iconography, numbering the nine sculptural divisions from the lowest to the highest. He defined the theme as "a calendar for unlearned men" illustrating the doctrines and history of the Christian faith, its introduction to Britain and its protection by princes and bishops. He likens the arrangement and iconography to the Te Deum.

 

According to Cockerell, the side of the façade that is to the south of the central door is the more sacred and the scheme is divided accordingly. The lowest range of niches each contained a standing figure, of which all but four figures on the west front, two on each side, have been destroyed. More have survived on the northern and eastern sides of the north tower. Cockerell speculates that those to the south of the portal represented prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament while those to the north represented early missionaries to Britain, of which Augustine of Canterbury, St Birinus, and Benedict Biscop are identifiable by their attributes. In the second zone, above each pair of standing figures, is a quatrefoil containing a half-length angel in relief, some of which have survived. Between the gables of the niches are quatrefoils that contain a series of narratives from the Bible, with the Old Testament stories to the south, above the prophets and patriarchs, and those from the New Testament to the north. A horizontal course runs around the west front dividing the architectural storeys at this point.

 

Above the course, zones four and five, as identified by Cockerell, contain figures which represent the Christian Church in Britain, with the spiritual lords such as bishops, abbots, abbesses and saintly founders of monasteries on the south, while kings, queens and princes occupy the north. Many of the figures survive and many have been identified in the light of their various attributes. There is a hierarchy of size, with the more significant figures larger and enthroned in their niches rather than standing. Immediately beneath the upper course are a series of small niches containing dynamic sculptures of the dead coming forth from their tombs on the Day of Judgement. Although naked, some of the dead are defined as royalty by their crowns and others as bishops by their mitres. Some emerge from their graves with joy and hope, and others with despair.

 

The niches in the lowest zone of the gable contain nine angels, of which Cockerell identifies Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. In the next zone are the taller figures of the twelve apostles, some, such as John, Andrew and Bartholomew, clearly identifiable by the attributes that they carry. The uppermost niches of the gable contained the figure of Christ the Judge at the centre, with the Virgin Mary on his right and John the Baptist on his left. The figures all suffered from iconoclasm. A new statue of Jesus was carved for the central niche, but the two side niches now contain cherubim. Christ and the Virgin Mary are also represented by now headless figures in a Coronation of the Virgin in a niche above the central portal. A damaged figure of the Virgin and Christ Child occupies a quatrefoil in the spandrel of the door.

 

The central tower appears to date from the early 13th century. It was substantially reconstructed in the early 14th century during the remodelling of the east end, necessitating the internal bracing of the piers a decade or so later. In the 14th century the tower was given a timber and lead spire which burnt down in 1439. The exterior was then reworked in the Perpendicular style and given the present parapet and pinnacles. Alec Clifton-Taylor describes it as "outstanding even in Somerset, a county famed for the splendour of its church towers".

 

The north porch is described by art historian Nikolaus Pevsner as "sumptuously decorated", and intended as the main entrance. Externally it is simple and rectangular with plain side walls. The entrance is a steeply arched portal framed by rich mouldings of eight shafts with stiff-leaf capitals each encircled by an annular moulding at middle height. Those on the left are figurative, containing images representing the martyrdom of St Edmund the Martyr. The walls are lined with deep niches framed by narrow shafts with capitals and annulets like those of the portal. The path to the north porch is lined by four sculptures in Purbeck stone, each by Mary Spencer Watson, representing the symbols of the Evangelists.

 

The cloisters were built in the late 13th century and largely rebuilt from 1430 to 1508 and have wide openings divided by mullions and transoms, and tracery in the Perpendicular Gothic style. The vault has lierne ribs that form octagons at the centre of each compartment, the joints of each rib having decorative bosses. The eastern range is of two storeys, of which the upper is the library built in the 15th century.

 

Because Wells Cathedral was secular rather than monastic, cloisters were not a practical necessity. They were omitted from several other secular cathedrals but were built here and at Chichester. Explanations for their construction at these two secular cathedrals range from the processional to the aesthetic. As at Chichester, there is no northern range to the cloisters. In monastic cloisters it was the north range, benefiting most from winter sunlight, that was often used as a scriptorium.

 

In 1969, when a large chunk of stone fell from a statue near the main door, it became apparent that there was an urgent need for restoration of the west front. Detailed studies of the stonework and of conservation practices were undertaken under the cathedral architect, Alban D. R. Caroe and a restoration committee formed. The methods selected were those devised by Eve and Robert Baker. W. A. (Bert) Wheeler, clerk of works to the cathedral 1935–1978, had previously experimented with washing and surface treatment of architectural carvings on the building and his techniques were among those tried on the statues.

 

The conservation was carried out between 1974 and 1986, wherever possible using non-invasive procedures such as washing with water and a solution of lime, filling gaps and damaged surfaces with soft mortar to prevent the ingress of water and stabilising statues that were fracturing through corrosion of metal dowels. The surfaces were finished by painting with a thin coat of mortar and silane to resist further erosion and attack by pollutants. The restoration of the façade revealed much paint adhering to the statues and their niches, indicating that it had once been brightly coloured.

 

The particular character of this Early English interior is dependent on the proportions of the simple lancet arches. It is also dependent on the refinement of the architectural details, in particular the mouldings.

 

The arcade, which takes the same form in the nave, choir and transepts, is distinguished by the richness of both mouldings and carvings. Each pier of the arcade has a surface enrichment of 24 slender shafts in eight groups of three, rising beyond the capitals to form the deeply undulating mouldings of the arches. The capitals themselves are remarkable for the vitality of the stylised foliage, in a style known as "stiff-leaf". The liveliness contrasts with the formality of the moulded shafts and the smooth unbroken areas of ashlar masonry in the spandrels. Each capital is different, and some contain small figures illustrating narratives.

 

The vault of the nave rises steeply in a simple quadripartite form, in harmony with the nave arcade. The eastern end of the choir was extended and the whole upper part elaborated in the second quarter of the 14th century by William Joy. The vault has a multiplicity of ribs in a net-like form, which is very different from that of the nave, and is perhaps a recreation in stone of a local type of compartmented wooden roof of which examples remain from the 15th century, including those at St Cuthbert's Church, Wells. The vaults of the aisles of the choir also have a unique pattern.

 

Until the early 14th century, the interior of the cathedral was in a unified style, but it was to undergo two significant changes, to the tower and to the eastern end. Between 1315 and 1322 the central tower was heightened and topped by a spire, which caused the piers that supported it to show signs of stress. In 1338 the mason William Joy employed an unorthodox solution by inserting low arches topped by inverted arches of similar dimensions, forming scissors-like structures. These arches brace the piers of the crossing on three sides, while the easternmost side is braced by a choir screen. The bracing arches are known as "St Andrew's Cross arches", in a reference to the patron saint of the cathedral. They have been described by Wim Swaan – rightly or wrongly – as "brutally massive" and intrusive in an otherwise restrained interior.

 

Wells Cathedral has a square east end to the choir, as is usual, and like several other cathedrals including Salisbury and Lichfield, has a lower Lady Chapel projecting at the eastern end, begun by Thomas Witney in about 1310, possibly before the chapter house was completed. The Lady Chapel seems to have begun as a free-standing structure in the form of an elongated octagon, but the plan changed and it was linked to the eastern end by extension of the choir and construction of a second transept or retrochoir east of the choir, probably by William Joy.

 

The Lady Chapel has a vault of complex and somewhat irregular pattern, as the chapel is not symmetrical about both axes. The main ribs are intersected by additional non-supporting, lierne ribs, which in this case form a star-shaped pattern at the apex of the vault. It is one of the earliest lierne vaults in England. There are five large windows, of which four are filled with fragments of medieval glass. The tracery of the windows is in the style known as Reticulated Gothic, having a pattern of a single repeated shape, in this case a trefoil, giving a "reticulate" or net-like appearance.

 

The retrochoir extends across the east end of the choir and into the east transepts. At its centre the vault is supported by a remarkable structure of angled piers. Two of these are placed as to complete the octagonal shape of the Lady Chapel, a solution described by Francis Bond as "an intuition of Genius". The piers have attached shafts of marble, and, with the vaults that they support, create a vista of great complexity from every angle. The windows of the retrochoir are in the Reticulated style like those of the Lady Chapel, but are fully Flowing Decorated in that the tracery mouldings form ogival curves.

 

The chapter house was begun in the late 13th century and built in two stages, completed about 1310. It is a two-storeyed structure with the main chamber raised on an undercroft. It is entered from a staircase which divides and turns, one branch leading through the upper storey of Chain Gate to Vicars' Close. The Decorated interior is described by Alec Clifton-Taylor as "architecturally the most beautiful in England". It is octagonal, with its ribbed vault supported on a central column. The column is surrounded by shafts of Purbeck Marble, rising to a single continuous rippling foliate capital of stylised oak leaves and acorns, quite different in character from the Early English stiff-leaf foliage. Above the moulding spring 32 ribs of strong profile, giving an effect generally likened to "a great palm tree". The windows are large with Geometric Decorated tracery that is beginning to show an elongation of form, and ogees in the lesser lights that are characteristic of Flowing Decorated tracery. The tracery lights still contain ancient glass. Beneath the windows are 51 stalls, the canopies of which are enlivened by carvings including many heads carved in a light-hearted manner.

 

Wells Cathedral contains one of the most substantial collections of medieval stained glass in England, despite damage by Parliamentary troops in 1642 and 1643. The oldest surviving glass dates from the late 13th century and is in two windows on the west side of the chapter-house staircase. Two windows in the south choir aisle are from 1310 to 1320.

 

The Lady Chapel has five windows, of which four date from 1325 to 1330 and include images of a local saint, Dunstan. The east window was restored to a semblance of its original appearance by Thomas Willement in 1845. The other windows have complete canopies, but the pictorial sections are fragmented.

 

The east window of the choir is a broad, seven-light window dating from 1340 to 1345. It depicts the Tree of Jesse (the genealogy of Christ) and demonstrates the use of silver staining, a new technique that allowed the artist to paint details on the glass in yellow, as well as black. The combination of yellow and green glass and the application of the bright yellow stain gives the window its popular name, the "Golden Window". It is flanked by two windows each side in the clerestory, with large figures of saints, also dated to 1340–45. In 2010 a major conservation programme was undertaken on the Jesse Tree window.

 

The panels in the chapel of St Katherine are attributed to Arnold of Nijmegen and date from about 1520. They were acquired from the destroyed church of Saint-Jean, Rouen, with the last panel having been purchased in 1953.

 

The large triple lancet to the nave west end was glazed at the expense of Dean Creighton at a cost of £140 in 1664. It was repaired in 1813, and the central light was largely replaced to a design by Archibald Keightley Nicholson between 1925 and 1931. The main north and south transept end windows by James Powell and Sons were erected in the early 20th century.

 

The greater part of the stone carving of Wells Cathedral comprises foliate capitals in the stiff-leaf style. They are found ornamenting the piers of the nave, choir and transepts. Stiff-leaf foliage is highly abstract. Though possibly influenced by carvings of acanthus leaves or vine leaves, it cannot be easily identified with any particular plant. Here the carving of the foliage is varied and vigorous, the springing leaves and deep undercuts casting shadows that contrast with the surface of the piers. In the transepts and towards the crossing in the nave the capitals have many small figurative carvings among the leaves. These include a man with toothache and a series of four scenes depicting the "Wages of Sin" in a narrative of fruit stealers who creep into an orchard and are then beaten by the farmer. Another well-known carving is in the north transept aisle: a foliate corbel, on which climbs a lizard, sometimes identified as a salamander, a symbol of eternal life.

 

Carvings in the Decorated Gothic style may be found in the eastern end of the buildings, where there are many carved bosses. In the chapter house, the carvings of the 51 stalls include numerous small heads of great variety, many of them smiling or laughing. A well-known figure is the corbel of the dragon-slaying monk in the chapter house stair. The large continuous capital that encircles the central pillar of the chapter house is markedly different in style to the stiff-leaf of the Early English period. In contrast to the bold projections and undercutting of the earlier work, it has a rippling form and is clearly identifiable as grapevine.

 

The 15th-century cloisters have many small bosses ornamenting the vault. Two in the west cloister, near the gift shop and café, have been called sheela na gigs, i. e. female figures displaying their genitals and variously judged to depict the sin of lust or stem from ancient fertility cults.

 

Wells Cathedral has one of the finest sets of misericords in Britain. Its clergy has a long tradition of singing or reciting from the Book of Psalms each day, along with the customary daily reading of the Holy Office. In medieval times the clergy assembled in the church eight times daily for the canonical hours. As the greater part of the services was recited while standing, many monastic or collegiate churches fitted stalls whose seats tipped up to provide a ledge for the monk or cleric to lean against. These were "misericords" because their installation was an act of mercy. Misericords typically have a carved figurative bracket beneath the ledge framed by two floral motifs known, in heraldic manner, as "supporters".

 

The misericords date from 1330 to 1340. They may have been carved under the direction of Master Carpenter John Strode, although his name is not recorded before 1341. He was assisted by Bartholomew Quarter, who is documented from 1343. They originally numbered 90, of which 65 have survived. Sixty-one are installed in the choir, three are displayed in the cathedral, and one is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. New stalls were ordered when the eastern end of the choir was extended in the early 14th century. The canons complained that they had borne the cost of the rebuilding and ordered the prebendary clerics to pay for their own stalls. When the newly refurbished choir opened in 1339 many misericords were left unfinished, including one-fifth of the surviving 65. Many of the clerics had not paid, having been called to contribute a total sum of £200. The misericords survived better than the other sections of the stalls, which during the Protestant Reformation had their canopies chopped off and galleries inserted above them. One misericord, showing a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, dates from the 17th century. In 1848 came a complete rearrangement of the choir furniture, and 61 of the misericords were reused in the restructured stalls.

 

The subject matter of the carvings of the central brackets as misericords varies, but many themes recur in different churches. Typically the themes are less unified or directly related to the Bible and Christian theology than small sculptures seen elsewhere within churches, such as bosses. This applies at Wells, where none of the misericord carvings is directly based on a Bible story. The subjects, chosen either by the woodcarver, or perhaps by the one paying for the stall, have no overriding theme. The sole unifying elements are the roundels on each side of the pictorial subject, which all show elaborately carved foliage, in most cases formal and stylised in the later Decorated manner, but with several examples of naturalistic foliage, including roses and bindweed. Many of the subjects carry traditional interpretations. The image of the "Pelican in her Piety" (believed to feed her young on her own blood) is a recognised symbol for Christ's love for the Church. A cat playing with a mouse may represent the Devil snaring a human soul. Other subjects illustrate popular fables or sayings such as "When the fox preaches, look to your geese". Many depict animals, some of which may symbolise a human vice or virtue, or an aspect of faith.

 

Twenty-seven of the carvings depict animals: rabbits, dogs, a puppy biting a cat, a ewe feeding a lamb, monkeys, lions, bats, and the Early Christian motif of two doves drinking from a ewer. Eighteen have mythological subjects, including mermaids, dragons and wyverns. Five are clearly narrative, such as the Fox and the Geese, and the story of Alexander the Great being raised to Heaven by griffins. There are three heads: a bishop in a mitre, an angel, and a woman wearing a veil over hair arranged in coils over each ear. Eleven carvings show human figures, among which are several of remarkable design, conceived by the artist specifically for their purpose of supporting a shelf. One figure lies beneath the seat, supporting the shelf with a cheek, a hand and a foot. Another sits in a contorted manner supporting the weight on his elbow, while a further figure squats with his knees wide apart and a strained look on his face.

 

Some of the cathedral's fittings and monuments are hundreds of years old. The brass lectern in the Lady Chapel dates from 1661 and has a moulded stand and foliate crest. In the north transept chapel is a 17th-century oak screen with columns, formerly used in cow stalls, with artisan Ionic capitals and cornice, set forward over the chest tomb of John Godelee. There is a bound oak chest from the 14th century, which was used to store the chapter seal and key documents. The bishop's throne dates from 1340, and has a panelled, canted front and stone doorway, and a deep nodding cusped ogee canopy above it, with three-stepped statue niches and pinnacles. The throne was restored by Anthony Salvin around 1850. Opposite the throne is a 19th-century octagonal pulpit on a coved base with panelled sides, and steps up from the north aisle. The round font in the south transept is from the former Saxon cathedral and has an arcade of round-headed arches, on a round plinth. The font cover was made in 1635 and is decorated with the heads of putti. The Chapel of St Martin is a memorial to every Somerset man who fell in World War I.

 

The monuments and tombs include Gisa, bishop; † 1088; William of Bitton, bishop; † 1274; William of March, bishop; † 1302; John Droxford; † 1329; John Godelee; † 1333; John Middleton, died †1350; Ralph of Shrewsbury, died †; John Harewell, bishop; † 1386; William Bykonyll; † c. 1448; John Bernard; † 1459; Thomas Beckington; † died 1464; John Gunthorpe; † 1498; John Still; † 1607; Robert Creighton; † 1672; Richard Kidder, bishop; † 1703; George Hooper, bishop; † 1727 and Arthur Harvey, bishop; † 1894.

 

In the north transept is Wells Cathedral clock, an astronomical clock from about 1325 believed to be by Peter Lightfoot, a monk of Glastonbury. Its mechanism, dated between 1386 and 1392, was replaced in the 19th century and the original moved to the Science Museum in London, where it still operates. It is the second oldest surviving clock in England after the Salisbury Cathedral clock.

 

The clock has its original medieval face. Apart from the time on a 24-hour dial, it shows the motion of the Sun and Moon, the phases of the Moon, and the time since the last new Moon. The astronomical dial presents a geocentric or pre-Copernican view, with the Sun and Moon revolving round a central fixed Earth, like that of the clock at Ottery St Mary. The quarters are chimed by a quarter jack: a small automaton known as Jack Blandifers, who hits two bells with hammers and two with his heels. At the striking of the clock, jousting knights appear above the clock face.

 

On the outer wall of the transept, opposite Vicars' Hall, is a second clock face of the same clock, placed there just over seventy years after the interior clock and driven by the same mechanism. The second clock face has two quarter jacks (which strike on the quarter-hour) in the form of knights in armour.

 

In 2010 the official clock-winder retired and was replaced by an electric mechanism.

 

The first record of an organ at this church dates from 1310. A smaller organ, probably for the Lady Chapel, was installed in 1415. In 1620 an organ built by Thomas Dallam was installed at a cost of £398 1s 5d.

 

The 1620 organ was destroyed by parliamentary soldiers in 1643. An organ built in 1662 was enlarged in 1786 and again in 1855. In 1909–1910 an organ was built by Harrison & Harrison of Durham, with the best parts of the old organ retained. It has been serviced by the same company ever since.

 

Since November 1996 the cathedral has also had a portable chamber organ, by the Scottish makers, Lammermuir. It is used regularly to accompany performances of Tudor and baroque music.

 

The first recorded organist of Wells was Walter Bagele (or Vageler) in 1416. The post of organist or assistant organist has been held by more than 60 people since. Peter Stanley Lyons was Master of Choristers at Wells Cathedral, and Director of Music at Wells Cathedral School in 1954–1960. The choral conductor James William Webb-Jones, father of Lyons's wife Bridget (whom he married in the cathedral), was Headmaster of Wells Cathedral School in 1955–1960. Malcolm Archer was the appointed Organist and Master of the Choristers from 1996 to 2004. Matthew Owens was the appointed organist from 2005 to 2019.

 

There has been a choir of boy choristers at Wells since 909. Currently there are 18 boy choristers and a similar number of girl choristers, aged from eight to fourteen. The Vicars Choral was formed in the 12th century and the sung liturgy provided by a traditional cathedral choir of men and boys until the formation of an additional choir of girls in 1994. The boys and girls sing alternately with the Vicars Choral and are educated at Wells Cathedral School.

 

The Vicars Choral currently number twelve men, of whom three are choral scholars. Since 1348 the College of Vicars had its own accommodation in a quadrangle converted in the early 15th century to form Vicar's Close. The Vicars Choral generally perform with the choristers, except on Wednesdays, when they sing alone, allowing them to present a different repertoire, in particular plainsong.

 

In December 2010 Wells Cathedral Choir was rated by Gramophone magazine as "the highest ranking choir with children in the world". It continues to provide music for the liturgy at Sunday and weekday services. The choir has made many recordings and toured frequently, including performances in Beijing and Hong Kong in 2012. Its repertoire ranges from the choral music of the Renaissance to recently commissioned works.

 

The Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir is a mixed adult choir of 25 members, formed in 1986 to sing at the midnight service on Christmas Eve, and invited to sing at several other special services. It now sings for about 30 services a year, when the Cathedral Choir is in recess or on tour, and spends one week a year singing as the "choir in residence" at another cathedral. Although primarily liturgical, the choir's repertoire includes other forms of music, as well as performances at engagements such as weddings and funerals.

 

The cathedral is home to Wells Cathedral Oratorio Society (WCOS), founded in 1896. With around 160 voices, the society gives three concerts a year under the direction of Matthew Owens, Organist and Master of the Choristers at the cathedral. Concerts are normally in early November, December (an annual performance of Handel's Messiah) and late March. It performs with a number of specialist orchestras including: Music for Awhile, Chameleon Arts and La Folia.

 

The bells at Wells Cathedral are the heaviest ring of ten bells in the world, the tenor bell (the 10th and largest), known as Harewell, weighing 56.25 long hundredweight (2,858 kg). They are hung for full-circle ringing in the English style of change ringing. These bells are now hung in the south-west tower, although some were originally hung in the central tower.

 

The library above the eastern cloister was built between 1430 and 1508. Its collection is in three parts: early documents housed in the Muniment Room; the collection predating 1800 housed in the Chained Library; and the post-1800 collection housed in the Reading Room. The chapter's earlier collection was destroyed during the Reformation, so that the present library consists chiefly of early printed books, rather than medieval manuscripts. The earlier books in the Chained Library number 2,800 volumes and give an indication of the variety of interests of the members of the cathedral chapter from the Reformation until 1800. The focus of the collection is predominantly theology, but there are volumes on science, medicine, exploration, and languages. Books of particular interest include Pliny's Natural History printed in 1472, an Atlas of the World by Abraham Ortelius, printed in 1606, and a set of the works by Aristotle that once belonged to Erasmus. The library is open to the public at appointed times in the summer and presents a small exhibition of documents and books.

 

Three early registers of the Dean and Chapter edited by W. H. B. Bird for the Historical Manuscripts Commissioners – Liber Albus I (White Book; R I), Liber Albus II (R III) and Liber Ruber (Red Book; R II, section i) – were published in 1907. They contain with some repetition, a cartulary of possessions of the cathedral, with grants of land back to the 8th century, well before hereditary surnames developed in England, and acts of the Dean and Chapter and surveys of their estates, mostly in Somerset.

 

Adjacent to the cathedral is a large lawned area, Cathedral Green, with three ancient gateways: Brown's Gatehouse, Penniless Porch and Chain Gate. On the green is the 12th-century Old Deanery, largely rebuilt in the late 15th century by Dean Gunthorpe and remodelled by Dean Bathurst in the late 17th century. No longer the dean's residence, it is used as diocesan offices.

 

To the south of the cathedral is the moated Bishop's Palace, begun about 1210 by Jocelin of Wells but dating mostly from the 1230s. In the 15th century Thomas Beckington added a north wing, now the bishop's residence. It was restored and extended by Benjamin Ferrey between 1846 and 1854.

 

To the north of the cathedral and connected to it by the Chain Gate is Vicars' Close, a street planned in the 14th century and claimed to be the oldest purely residential street in Europe, with all but one of its original buildings intact. Buildings in the close include the Vicars Hall and gateway at the south end, and the Vicars Chapel and Library at the north end.

 

The Liberty of St Andrew was the historic liberty and parish that encompassed the cathedral and surrounding lands closely associated with it.

 

The English painter J. M. W. Turner visited Wells in 1795, making sketches of the precinct and a water colour of the west front, now in the Tate gallery. Other artists whose paintings of the cathedral are in national collections are Albert Goodwin, John Syer and Ken Howard.

 

The cathedral served to inspire Ken Follett's 1989 novel The Pillars of the Earth and with a modified central tower, featured as the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral at the end of the 2010 television adaptation of that novel. The interior of the cathedral was used for a 2007 Doctor Who episode, "The Lazarus Experiment", while the exterior shots were filmed at Southwark Cathedral.

 

An account of the damage to the cathedral during the Monmouth Rebellion is included in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1889 historical novel Micah Clarke.

 

The cathedral provided scenes for the 2019–2020 television series The Spanish Princess.

Perfect Peace Through Divine Freedom and Purity

 

☾⋆⁺₊✦ 🔮 ✧ ☽⟡○⟡☾ ✦ ✦ ⟆️⟅ ✦ ✦ ✴︎🌙✴︎

 

I’ve grown tired of kings & queens with crowns of smoke,

 

Who speak in mirrors, every word a cloak.

 

Their truths are hollow drums in halls of glass,

 

Echoing praises with no soul.

  

I’ve danced with peacocks drunk on their own shine,

 

Each feather loud, but none of it divine.

 

Their eyes—black wells that never saw a sky,

 

Too lost in self to ever wonder why.

  

The gardens where their vanity now grows

 

Choke every root that honest silence knows.

 

No bloom of grace, no scent of sacred thought—

 

Just thorns of pride that empathy forgot.

  

I crave the hush where quiet hearts reside,

 

Where depth walks humbly, far from swollen pride.

 

Let me unlearn their noise, unsee their game,

 

And light my fire with a gentler flame.

 

☾⋆⁺₊✦ 🔮 ✧ ☽⟡○⟡☾ ✦ ✦ ⟆️⟅ ✦ ✦ ✴︎🌙✴︎

"Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build the big bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks

 

You that never done nothin'

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it's your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly

 

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain

 

You fasten the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you set back and watch

When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion

As young people's blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud

 

You've thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

Fear to bring children

Into the world

For threatening my baby

Unborn and unnamed

You ain't worth the blood

That runs in your veins

 

How much do I know

To talk out of turn

You might say that I'm young

You might say I'm unlearned

But there's one thing I know

Though I'm younger than you

Even Jesus would never

Forgive what you do

 

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul

 

And I hope that you die

And your death'll come soon

I will follow your casket

In the pale afternoon

And I'll watch while you're lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I'll stand o'er your grave

'Til I'm sure that you're dead"

- "Masters of War" by Bob Dylan

 

Its a sad state of affairs when this song is still as relevant as ever. The Industrial Military Complex now gets contracts to rebuild the things they destroy.

 

The absurdity has come full circle.

 

Is there any chance we can ever get out from under their grip? Not as long as we elect politicians that can be bought and sold on the "free market".

 

When a war-mongering coward can win over a war-hero, when we spend more money rebuilding places we've destoryed half-way across the globe than we do in our own backyard on the bayou, something has gone horribly wrong.

 

Theres an important election coming up.

 

Vote Change. Vote Obama. Vote.

The concept of this picture is based off the books/papers “Queering Anarchism,” “Priests of the Goddess: Gender Transgression in Ancient Religion, History of Religions,” “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival,” and “Trans-Spirit: Religion, Spirituality and Transhumanism.”

 

“Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel: With Satan I have struck my deal.” – Karl Marx

 

Anarchism is another denomination of the religion of Karl Marx. That is why, when all the denominations of Marx gather together to evangelize in protest, they all put forth the same basic tenets of faith. When they unite as one in the spirit of Marx, they all look the same, they all act the same, and they all sound the same. That is why Anarchism looks at the neo-Marxist doctrine of gender/queer theory through a lens of the oppressed vs the oppressor, intersectionality, and collectivism. Indeed, Marxism is a Machiavellian religion.

 

Gender theory is a communist manual on how to break down the family and societal norms in order to destroy capitalism and democracy. Marxism is a faith based religion: Jesus shed His blood to bring salvation to humanity, yet in communism the bloodshed of millions brings salvation for humanity. Its salvation is obtained through revolution. The end justifies the means to gain their heaven on earth. Its prophet is Karl Marx. (Like Cain, Marx was bitter and angry). Its apostles are activists. Its disciples must spread their gospel of socialism to the entire world and make disciples from all nations. They cast out the demons of capitalism. They baptize their converts into socialism. These converts were capitalists, but now they are born again (woke) socialists. They have seen the light of socialism! If one backslides from the faith, they will be excommunicated! They have replaced sainthood with victimhood. They have replaced sinners with capitalists. Their trinity is Marx, Mao, and Marcuse. They have the moral conviction that they are right.

 

Gulags 5:22-23 “But the fruit of Marx is hate, anger, envy, bitterness, selfishness, narcissism, covetousness, violence, murder.”

 

Indeed, the anarchist religion is the only true religion. Its moral laws are the truth: Thou shalt abolish all hierarchies! Thou shalt abolish capitalism! Thou shalt abolish private property! Thou shalt abolish the state! As you can see, they have their universal battle between good and evil. They are righteous crusaders for their cause. They fight their crusade against “the tyranny of the state, religion, and society.” They “challenge dominant forms of social organization including the state, marriage, capitalism, parenting, love relationships, friendships, and families.” They do all these things in the hope of obtaining their utopian heaven on earth. It is a religion of decadence.

 

“Anarchism is the only philosophy that brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man.” – Emma Goldman

 

Now, let’s move on and take a look at the definition of Queer:

 

“UNLIKE GAY identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer,’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices.” – David Halperin

 

In the book Queering Anarchism, they also use David Halperin’s definition of queer. They particularly concentrate on “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant.” Now, for those who want to learn more about this subject, here are some excerpts from Queering Anarchism:

 

“Queer liberation is the destruction of straightness.” “The subjective interpretations of sexuality within Queer theory subvert any monolithic traditional notion of sex, sex roles, gender, and even sexual orientation.” “We need to oppose the institution of state-sanctioned marriage because it strengthens the nuclear family as the consumptive and reproductive unit of capitalism.” “The nuclear family, for example, perpetuates capitalism.” “The struggle against sexual and gender oppression is an important component of a larger struggle to transform and establish a new society.” “The destruction of straightness would mean a world in which all of our bodies, all of our desires, all of our genders, all of our consensual sexualities, would be honored and viable.” “All of us have an obligation to unlearn straightness—to unlearn the ways we have been socialized into straightness, much like the ways in which we have been socialized into capitalism.” “The struggle for queer liberation, and the struggle to abolish straightness; these are inseparable from anti-capitalist and anti-statist struggle.” “The entire capitalist patriarchal white supremacy that structures our world unequally, and indeed preys on unequal relations of power, requires heteronormative relationships. Break down those kinds of relationships, and we are also starting to break down patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.”

 

“Queer theory understands people in relation to the normal and the deviant, creating infinite possibilities for resistance. Queer theory seeks to disrupt the ‘normal.’” “In other words, a queer critique of capitalism based on an analysis of commodity fetishism would do the following: it would have to recognize that the heterosexual matrix based on the gendered division of labor is not so much an extension of patriarchy into capitalism but rather a genuine product of it. Capitalism does not only assign men and women different roles within its realm, it also creates the modern notion of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’” “Queer theory shows that gendered identities as well as sexualities are not fixed and ‘natural’ but rather that they are socially constructed, fluid, and changeable—both socially and with regard to physical bodies. Gender and sexuality, in this view, are not something we are born with but something we do—or ‘perform’—on a daily basis. Queer politics therefore calls for a subversion of fixed identities such as ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ ‘straight,’ ‘homosexual,’ and so on by exploring individual performances that break out of these categories altogether.” “The heteronormative, hierarchical two-gender system in its current form is a result, rather than a predecessor, of modern capitalism.” “Biological and medical discourses about gender and sexuality shift historically.” “The transition to capitalism was indeed a main driving force of the conquest over different forms of gender expression and sexuality, enforcing a strict gender/sex binary.” “Gender is socially and not biologically constructed.” “Instead, gender is a product of social norms, individual behaviors, and institutional power.” “From the very moment of birth, our bodies are fit into a social system in which there are two genders, built upon the myth that the two sexes are ‘natural.’” “We are imprisoned by a gender binary.” “To achieve liberation, we must reject the binary gender system, which divides us into two mutually exclusive categories.” “I argue not that gender transgression or deviance is in itself revolutionary, but that we must transcend or destroy the gender-based power relations, as part of a sort of decolonizing.” “Our liberation from heteropatriarchy is intimately tied to the struggle to dismantle racism, capitalism, and an authoritarian state. In other words, our movements need to understand and confront how systems of oppression—capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy—intersect, and reproduce one another.”

 

“I have often pointed out the importance of considering the essential role played by pleasure in drug use—even in the most chaotic use—and its life-endorsing ‘usefulness,’ as well as the need to draw on the parallels between the gay liberation and the drug users’ rights movements.”

 

“When it is operating at its best, anarchism is tearing down the borders of nation states, smashing the borders of capitalist control, and transgressing all borders of oppression and authoritarianism. When queer(ness) is operating at its best it is tearing down the borders of gender, smashing the confines of compulsory monogamy, and transgressing the moralism of sex and sexuality. When abolition is at its best it is tearing down the prison walls, smashing the police state, and transgressing the power of punishment while instituting new forms of transformative justice.”

 

“The trans community defies the ‘accepted’ social constructs of sex and gender, of free market capitalism, and the state with its need for society’s adherence to strict social norms/constructs in order to maintain its operating systems of power, keeping its focus on assimilation within a system that by definition constrains the core concept of trans.” “So a key tenet of trans liberation lies within the liberation of one’s self (and others) from the tyranny of the state, religion, and society; and equally important—from our own self-imposed tyranny.” “It is our promiscuity that will save us.” “Without justice, there can be no pleasure. After all, what we are protecting is a right to social imagination that rejects both paternalism and positivism, while opening spaces for alternative social relations and ways of embracing experience outside the realm of the rational experience.” “To do away with shame and the repression it fuels, pleasure activists push to transform the social order.”

 

These anarchists seem to confuse hedonism with love. If I were to say that they desire hedonism, they would say that they desire love.

 

“If they can discredit capitalism, they can consider themselves free to pursue their own impractical vicious morality.” – Ayn Rand

 

Their goal is to queer society. Queer movements, however, are nothing new. They have been around since ancient times:

 

The Galli were priests of the gods Cybele and Attis. This cult became popular in Roman. The goddess Cybele was a Hermaphrodite. She had her male parts castrated, turning her into a female. The god Attis castrated himself, thus the Galli also practiced self-castration. The Galli earned money by begging. It appears that they also made money through prostitution.

 

The Gala were priests of the goddess Inanna/Ishtar in ancient Mesopotamia. There’s a Sumerian saying: “To destroy, to build up, to tear out and to settle are yours, Inanna,” and, “To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna.” Since Ishtar could transcend categories, her followers where emboldened to defy and redefine social boundaries, especially those related to gender. An ancient Sumerian proverb said: “When the Gala wiped off his ass [he said], ‘I must not arouse that which belongs to my mistress (Inanna/Ishtar).’” They spelled the word “Gala” with the cymbals of “penis + anus.” It appears that they also made money through prostitution.

 

The Hijra of India worship the goddess Bahuchara Mata. Bahuchara Mata cut off her breasts, thus cursing a bandit named Bapiya with impotency. The castration of the Hijra removes both the penis and testicles. While they are being castrated, they chant the name of their goddess. The Hijra earn money by begging and prostitution. They consider themselves to be neither man nor women, though they generally wear women’s clothing in public. There are many striking parallels between the Galli and Hijra.

 

“The goddesses who stand at the head of these cults—Cybele, Bahuchara Mata, and Inanna/Ishtar—also share important traits. All three are credited with the power to inspire divine madness, which can include the transformation of gender.” These kinds of gender cults also spread beyond India into Southeast Asia, Borneo, and Sulawesi.

 

In alchemy the Androgyne, or Rebis (“god” self), signifies the union of opposites, such as spirit and matter, soul and body, light and dark, male and female, human and divine. Androgyne is a gender identity on the queer gender spectrum; it is a blending of both genders or somewhere in between. “The Rebis, meaning duality, is the divine fruit that grows from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, the Rebis is actually the true and complete form of the divine fruit and largely considered to be the end result between harmony and discord.”

 

“Adam ate the apple and anti-pleasure religious doctrine took a foundation that we are still grappling with today.” – Queering Anarchism

 

“Transfeminism builds on the work that came out of the multiracial feminist movement, and in particular, the work of black feminists.” Feminism, which has played a large role in birthing the modern-day transgender movement, has its roots in the occult. A while back, when I was looking into the first wave feminist movement, I found that many of its writers were occultists. You can even do a Google or YouTube search for “feminism and the occult.” It’s easy to find! Guess what group has been deeply ingrained in both the feminist and transgender movements? Marxists, the ones who want to abolish the family.

 

Sexual immorality is one of many vices that cause an empire to decline. If we examine the fall of empires in history, we can see many parallels with our society today. In the early stages of an empire, according to Sir John Glubb, boys are expected to be tough and manly. They are expected to tell the truth, because lying is cowardly. They must courageously face their fears like men. They must have honor and duty. Decline starts when the people start to seek wealth. The desire for money gradually replaces loyalty and self-sacrifice. People go from service to selfishness. Students no longer go to college for learning and virtue, but they go to obtain degrees that will gain them the highest salaries. Once the nation becomes wealthy, it desires to protect its wealth and luxury. The citizens become cowardly, and they consider the conquest of their forefathers as immoral. Their ancestors were heroes, but they are inferior. So they vilify their empire as evil, which gives them a feeling of moral superiority. Since these people lack physical toughness, they chase after academic honours. Knowledge spreads and intellectualism grows. This leads to lots of discussion and debates. These arguments are not very fruitful, and produce men of little action. Their forefathers were men of action, but they are not. They have become cowardly, lazy and weak. In their intellectual pride, they think that they can solve the world’s problems. Yet they lack selflessness, dedication and service. The people become more and more politically divided. As the nation grows weaker, it becomes less unified.

 

In the first stages of an empire the people are homogeneous, so they have strong feelings of solidarity. However, as the empire declines, it increasingly brings in foreigners. These immigrants form their own communities, in order to protect their own interests. When the crap hits the fan, they are less likely to sacrifice their lives and prosperity for the empire. They come from different cultures and tend to cause cracks and divisions over time. As the nation further declines, it employs cheap foreign workers to perform menial tasks. The empire becomes sympathetic to other races and generously bestows the rights of citizenship on every race, proclaiming equality for mankind.

 

The influence of women in public life is often connected with decline. The empire starts to loosen it morals and abandons sexual morality. It becomes indifferent to religion and becomes increasingly materialistic. The politicians become more and more corrupt, enriching themselves. The government spends lavishly on its own benevolence. Music becomes increasingly erotic. Obscene language, which would not have been tolerated in the past, becomes normal. People also spend more time on leisure, amusement, and sports.

 

“Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease, resulting from too long a period of wealth and power, producing cynicism, decline of religion, pessimism and frivolity. The citizens of such a nation will no longer make an effort to save themselves, because they are not convinced that anything in life is worth saving.” – Sir John Glubb

 

In a declining empire, as people become more educated, new technologies are discovered. We see the same thing in our decadent society. Artificial intelligence is growing by leaps and bounds. Soon there will be machine learning systems around the world that will be linked to digital biometric IDs, central bank digital currencies, and social credit score systems. The natural world and the digital world are merging ever-increasingly. And the future is heading towards transhumanism.

 

“Trans-Spirit researchers” want to gain a complete understanding of religious and spiritual phenomena, so that they can manipulate and control them for the supposed good of society. They want to induce spiritual experiences and altered states of consciousness, using all technologies at their disposal. This includes transcranial electro-magnetic stimulation, visual and auditory stimulation, and chemical agents. Once they fully understand the operations of the neurological mechanisms of the brain, then the brain “can be monitored, manipulated and managed benevolently as a living art.” Creepy! Can anyone say: modern day MK-Ultra!?! “Transhumanist spirituality will be possible without mythology or religious belief. It will be highly personalized, and based on spiritual practices that have scientifically verified value. Transhumanist spirituality will be the ultimate fruit of the Trans-Spirit research program.” The author of this transhumanist paper kept using the word “rational” when talking about transhumanism. Why, then, are these rational transhumanists so irrational? They are mad scientists with a god complex! They want to manipulate and control the human brain, specifically in a religious context. As the last sentence of this academic paper states: “Transhumanist spirituality will be the ultimate fruit of the Trans-Spirit research program.”

 

The Bible warns about the transhumanist spirituality of the Beast. 666: you will be transitioned into a transhuman! The Beast system will include worship of Caesar, thus an idol of the Antichrist will be erected. This Image of the Beast will be given life (artificial intelligence) to speak. This AI Image will be the brains of the Beast surveillance system (the internet of all things). By law, all people must worship the Beast. The Image of the Beast will know who does not worship the Beast. The brains of those who have the Mark will be manipulated, and they will worship the Beast. Through technology, they will have a feel-good spiritual experience. Those without the Mark of the Beast will not worship the Beast. They will not have the Digital Biometric Mark that connects them to the Beast system. Those who refuse to worship the Beast will be arrested and sentenced to death.

 

Society is being steered towards these things. The LGBTQ movement has the support of governments, multinational corporations, billionaires, and banks. It is no coincidence that sperm counts and testosterone levels have been decreasing in men over the years. Transhumanists talk about producing a genderless transhuman society, where people evolve with future technologies into non-human super beings. The logical conclusion of transhumanism is the end of the human race. Their agenda is anti-human, and they are advocating for the extinction of mankind. They want to play God, just like their father the Devil; for the Devil desires to be God. “And if you eat the apple, you too will be like God.” Humans are indeed rebellious sinners, and sin ends in destruction and death. Yet through Christ Jesus there is salvation!

  

Day 184 of the 365 Journey.

Basic instinct, known to most as your unlearned reactions. Ever walk to you car late at night and get that strange feeling? Have you ever looked across the room to notice someone staring at you? How about meeting someone, thinking they were a jerk and then soon thereafter realizing you were correct in your impression. All of these situations can be wrapped up into your basic instincts trying to take over to alert you of the circumstances. These reactions were never taught, they’re just known and understood. Flinch, scream, cry, laugh, yawn, smell, these are all examples of just a few of our basic instincts. Although most of our instincts can be ignored, it’s in our best interests to LISTEN to them loud and clear. They may not always be right, however they’re call instincts for a good reason!

Listen to the voice of Instinct!

 

Thanks ABE for the Awesome shot idea! YOU ROCK!

www.flickr.com/photos/thenovys/3804188111/

 

Strobist:

Shutter Speed 1/100

Aperture 5

ISO 125

Lens – Canon 70-200 2.8 IS

Focal Length –140mm

White Bal – Auto

 

Flashpoint 1820 moonlight with 30’ softbox aimed at background approx 5 ft from background at 1/2 power. The softbox was angled just enough at the background as to not allow over spill on to subject.

Flashpoint 1220 moonlight with 30’ softbox aimed at subject approx 5 ft away at 1/8 power (slightly camera right)

 

“Rushing into action, you fail.

Trying to grasp things, you lose them.

Forcing a project to completion,

you ruin what was almost ripe.

 

Therefore the Master takes action

by letting things take their course.

He remains as calm at the end

as at the beginning.

He has nothing,

thus has nothing to lose.

What he desires is non-desire;

what he learns is to unlearn.

He simply reminds people

of who they have always been.

He cares about nothing but the Tao.

Thus he can care for all things.”

― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Benjamin Balderson warms at the fire.

 

This is a scene from a retreat in the Catskills. Nineteen visionaries spend a week at work on new projects and strategies for wholesome and sovereign living.

Time lingers in the past

Evanescent truth never lasts

In the moment our lots are cast

Yet eternity still looms so vast

 

Come the night we question all

Darkness looms, the faithful fall

Through it all Truth still evolves

And renewal calls us home

 

Failure’s lesson, a past unlearned

The quest for truth in hearts still burns

 

The Aghori (Sanskrit aghora)[2] are ascetic Shaiva sadhus. The Aghori are known to engage in post-mortem rituals. They often dwell in charnel grounds, have been witnessed smearing cremation ashes on their bodies, and have been known to use bones from human corpses for crafting kapalas (skullcups which Shiva and other Hindu deities are often iconically depicted holding or using) and jewelry. Because of their practices that are contradictory to orthodox Hinduism, they are generally opposed by other Hindus.[3][4]

 

Many Aghori gurus command great reverence from rural populations as they are supposed to possess healing powers gained through their intensely eremitic rites and practices of renunciation and tápasya.

 

Contents [hide]

1Beliefs and doctrines

2History

3Adherents

4Spiritual headquarters

5Medicine

6In popular culture

7References

8Further reading

Beliefs and doctrines[edit]

Aghoris are devotees of Shiva manifested as Bhairava,[5] are monists who seek moksha from the cycle of reincarnation or saṃsāra. This freedom is a realization of the self's identity with the absolute. Because of this monistic doctrine, the Aghoris maintain that all opposites are ultimately illusory. The purpose of embracing pollution and degradation through various customs is the realization of non-duality (advaita) through transcending social taboos, attaining what is essentially an altered state of consciousness and perceiving the illusory nature of all conventional categories.

 

Aghoris are not to be confused with Shivnetras, who are also ardent devotees of Shiva but do not indulge in extreme, tamasic ritual practices. Although the Aghoris enjoy close ties with the Shivnetras, the two groups are quite distinct, Shivnetras engaging in sattvic worship.

 

Aghoris base their beliefs on two principles common to broader Shaiva beliefs: that Shiva is perfect (having omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence) and that Shiva is responsible for everything that occurs – all conditions, causes and effects. Consequently, everything that exists must be perfect and to deny the perfection of anything would be to deny the sacredness of all life in its full manifestation, as well as to deny the Supreme Being.

 

Aghoris believe that every person's soul is Shiva but is covered by aṣṭamahāpāśa "eight great nooses or bonds" - sensual pleasure, anger, greed, obsession, fear and hatred. The practices of the Aghoris are centered around the removal of these bonds. Sādhanā in cremation grounds destroys fear; sexual practices with certain riders and controls help release one from sexual desire; being naked destroys shame. On release from all the eight bonds the soul becomes sadāśiva and obtains moksha.[citation needed]

 

History[edit]

 

Aghori in Satopant.

 

An Aghori man in Badrinath smoking hashish or Cannabis from a chillum in 2011.

Although akin to the Kapalika ascetics of medieval Kashmir, as well as the Kalamukhas, with whom there may be a historical connection, the Aghoris trace their origin to Baba Keenaram, an ascetic who is said to have lived 150 years, dying during the second half of the 18th century.[6] Dattatreya the avadhuta, to whom has been attributed the esteemed nondual medieval song, the Avadhuta Gita, was a founding adi guru of the Aghor tradition according to Barrett (2008: p. 33):

 

Lord Dattatreya, an antinomian form of Shiva closely associated with the cremation ground, who appeared to Baba Keenaram atop Girnar Mountain in Gujarat. Considered to be the adi guru (ancient spiritual teacher) and founding deity of Aghor, Lord Dattatreya offered his own flesh to the young ascetic as prasād (a kind of blessing), conferring upon him the power of clairvoyance and establishing a guru-disciple relationship between them.[7]

 

Aghoris also hold sacred the Hindu deity Dattatreya as a predecessor to the Aghori Tantric tradition. Dattatreya was believed to be an incarnation of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva united in the same singular physical body. Dattatreya is revered in all schools of Tantra, which is the philosophy followed by the Aghora tradition, and he is often depicted in Hindu artwork and its holy scriptures of folk narratives, the Puranas, indulging in Aghori "left-hand" Tantric worship as his prime practice.

 

An aghori believes in getting into total darkness by all means, and then getting into light or self realizing. Though this is a different approach from other Hindu sects, they believe it to be effective. They are infamously known for their rituals that include such as shava samskara or shava sadhana (ritual worship incorporating the use of a corpse as the altar) to invoke the mother goddess in her form as Smashan Tara (Tara of the Cremation Grounds).

 

In Hindu iconography, Tara, like Kali, is one of the ten Mahavidyas (wisdom goddesses) and once invoked can bless the Aghori with supernatural powers. The most popular of the ten Mahavidyas who are worshiped by Aghoris are Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, and Bhairavi. The male Hindu deities primarily worshiped by Aghoris for supernatural powers are manifestations of Shiva, including Mahākāla, Bhairava, Virabhadra, Avadhuti, and others.

 

Barrett (2008: p. 161) discusses the "charnel ground sādhanā" of the Aghora in both its left and right-handed proclivities and identifies it as principally cutting through attachments and aversion and foregrounding primordiality; a view uncultured, undomesticated:

 

The gurus and disciples of Aghor believe their state to be primordial and universal. They believe that all human beings are natural-born Aghori. Hari Baba has said on several occasions that human babies of all societies are without discrimination, that they will play as much in their own filth as with the toys around them. Children become progressively discriminating as they grow older and learn the culturally specific attachments and aversions of their parents. Children become increasingly aware of their mortality as they bump their heads and fall to the ground. They come to fear their mortality and then palliate this fear by finding ways to deny it altogether.[8]

 

In this sense, the Aghora sādhanā is a process of unlearning deeply internalized cultural models. When this sādhanā takes the form of charnel ground sādhanā, the Aghori faces death as a very young child, simultaneously meditating on the totality of life at its two extremes. This ideal example serves as a prototype for other Aghor practices, both left and right, in ritual and in daily life."[9]

 

Adherents[edit]

Though Aghoris are prevalent in cremation grounds across India, Nepal, and even sparsely across cremation grounds in South East Asia, the secrecy of this religious sect leaves no desire for practitioners to aspire for social recognition and notoriety. [1]

 

Spiritual headquarters[edit]

Hinglaj Mata is the Kuladevata (patron goddess) of the Aghori. The main Aghori pilgrimage centre is Kina Ram's hermitage or ashram in Ravindrapuri, Varanasi.[10] The full name of this place is Baba Keenaram Sthal, Krim-Kund. Here, Kina Ram is buried in a tomb or samadhi which is a centre of pilgrimage for Aghoris and Aghori devotees. Present head (Abbot), since 1978, of Baba Keenaram Sthal is Baba Siddharth Gautam Ram.

 

According to Devotees, Baba Siddharth Gautam Ram is reincarnation of Baba Keenaram himself. Apart from this, any cremation ground would be a holy place for an Aghori ascetic. The cremation grounds near the yoni pithas, 51 holy centers for worship of the Hindu Mother Goddess scattered across South Asia and the Himalayan terrain, are key locations preferred for performing sadhana by the Aghoris. They are also known to meditate and perform sadhana in haunted houses.

 

Medicine[edit]

Aghori practice healing through purification as a pillar of their ritual. Their patients believe the Aghoris are able to transfer pollution and health to and from patients as a form of "transformative healing", due to the believed superior state of body and mind of the Aghori.[11][verification needed]

 

In popular culture[edit]

This is an incomplete list of prominent Aghori recognition.

 

The Aghoris and their spiritual home Varanasi heavily influenced the 2016 British suspense thriller film Feast of Varanasi (2016 film) where a reclusive priest called NANA, who lives on the outskirts of Varanasi plays a significant role in film. The character was played by Indian Actor Ashwath Bhatt.

The Aghoris were referred to in the 2016 horror film The Other Side of the Door and were portrayed as a creepy tribe that seem to pop up multiple times to foreshadow otherwordly incidents.

The Aghoris were featured on the first episode of the new Ripley's Believe It Or Not television series, hosted by Dean Cain. The program highlighted the Aghori's rituals.

In Tad Williams' Otherland series, the main member of the resistance group the Circle, Nandi Paradivash, spent several years as an Aghori ascetic while preparing for the final confrontation with the Brotherhood.

In 2006 a Greek documentary by the name of "Shiva's Flesh" shows a Varanasi Aghori by name Black Boom Boom Baba and the existing faith around Aghoris in Varanasi.

The television program Wildboyz starring Steve-O and Chris Pontius featured a segment in which the duo learned about the Aghori culture firsthand. Chris and Steve-O were given the ritualistic alcohol from a skull and were covered in remains of a corpse in the form of ashes. One Aghori also demonstrated the drinking of urine. They hinted that more was filmed but censored when Steve-O remarked "Now imagine what we weren't allowed to show you."

Director Jeff Tremaine, responsible for the Wildboyz, Jackass, etc. felt the bit on the Wildboyz was so successful he wanted to re-shoot it for Jackass Number Two. This time they sent in Dave England, Chris Pontius, and Steve-O. When an Aghori started mutilating his own leg, and jumped at Dave England with the blood everyone decided it was far more than they had planned on, and wanted out. This 'bit' ended up in Jackass 2.5, as Johnny Knoxville foreshadows in the taping of the 'bit'.

On the Dirty Sanchez TV show, in a season called "Sanchez Get High", Welshmen Matthew Pritchard and Lee Dainton meet up with an Aghori ascetic, and shows Pritchard drinking alcohol from a skull.

In popular Finnish Television series Madventures protagonists Riku Rantala and Tuomas Milonoff encounter Aghoris at Varanasi and indulge rituals with them. This segment can be seen in Season 3 of the show.

In the Tamil film Naan Kadavul by Bala, Arya essays the role of an Aghori which won him 2 National awards.

In the Hindi film Raaz: The Mystery Continues by Mohit Suri, J. Brandon Hill plays the role of an American executive who becomes an Aghori.

In the block-buster Telugu film Arundhati, Sonu Sood, the antagonist is a converted Aghora.

A popular novel in Kannada Aghorigala naduve (Life with Agoris) was published in 1980. In that novel one of the popular sites for Aghoris in south India is near Chamundi Hills at Mysore, Karnataka state.

British death metal band The Rotted wrote the lyrics to the song Just Add Nauseam about the Aghori, and the cover of the album it features on Ad Nauseam features a six-armed, three-faced demonic figure loosely based on Indian artwork.

An Aghori was the main character in an episode of Adaalat, an Indian courtroom drama television series. The episode was called "Qatil Aghori", meaning "Murderer Aghori".

An Indian psy-trance DJ and Composer known as Aghori Tantric of Sonic Tantra Records plays dark psy tracks usually over 180BPM.

Swedish Black Metal band Dissection has a song "Maha Kali" which is a dark prayer to the Goddess Kali, the final stage of

she is no more chubby or curly haired

through the camera my life she repaired

her vision blown up as hope i shared

where angels fear she dared ..

a crazy grand father a sane grand daughter

god accidentally paired ...through his karmic

blessings both of us within the camera

got ensnared ..i am unlearning street

photography through her cosmic eye

her vision her flair ..my inheritance

my heir ..nerjis asif shakir ..

a malang ..who heals through

her holistic stare ...god lives

within the soul of a child

he is the power of air ..

 

#beggarpoet

#firozeshakir

#nerjisasifshakir

 

Wells Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Wells, Somerset, England, dedicated to St Andrew the Apostle. It is the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, whose cathedra it holds as mother church of the Diocese of Bath and Wells. Built as a Roman Catholic cathedral from around 1175 to replace an earlier church on the site since 705, it became an Anglican cathedral when King Henry VIII split from Rome. It is moderately sized for an English cathedral. Its broad west front and large central tower are dominant features. It has been called "unquestionably one of the most beautiful" and "most poetic" of English cathedrals.

 

Its Gothic architecture is mostly inspired from Early English style of the late 12th to early 13th centuries, lacking the Romanesque work that survives in many other cathedrals. Building began about 1175 at the east end with the choir. Historian John Harvey sees it as Europe's first truly Gothic structure, breaking the last constraints of Romanesque. The stonework of its pointed arcades and fluted piers bears pronounced mouldings and carved capitals in a foliate, "stiff-leaf" style. Its Early English front with 300 sculpted figures is seen as a "supreme triumph of the combined plastic arts in England". The east end retains much ancient stained glass. Unlike many cathedrals of monastic foundation, Wells has many surviving secular buildings linked to its chapter of secular canons, including the Bishop's Palace and the 15th-century residential Vicars' Close It is a Grade I listed building.

 

The earliest remains of a building on the site are of a late-Roman mausoleum, identified during excavations in 1980. An abbey church was built in Wells in 705 by Aldhelm, first bishop of the newly established Diocese of Sherborne during the reign of King Ine of Wessex. It was dedicated to St Andrew and stood at the site of the cathedral's cloisters, where some excavated remains can be seen. The font in the cathedral's south transept is from this church and is the oldest part of the present building. In 766 Cynewulf, King of Wessex, signed a charter endowing the church with eleven hides of land. In 909 the seat of the diocese was moved from Sherborne to Wells.

 

The first bishop of Wells was Athelm (909), who crowned King Æthelstan. Athelm and his nephew Dunstan both became Archbishops of Canterbury. During this period a choir of boys was established to sing the liturgy. Wells Cathedral School, which was established to educate these choirboys, dates its foundation to this point. There is, however, some controversy over this. Following the Norman Conquest, John de Villula moved the seat of the bishop from Wells to Bath in 1090. The church at Wells, no longer a cathedral, had a college of secular clergy.

 

The cathedral is thought to have been conceived and commenced in about 1175 by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, who died in 1191. Although it is clear from its size that from the outset, the church was planned to be the cathedral of the diocese, the seat of the bishop moved between Wells and the abbeys of Glastonbury and Bath, before settling at Wells. In 1197 Reginald's successor, Savaric FitzGeldewin, with the approval of Pope Celestine III, officially moved his seat to Glastonbury Abbey. The title of Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury was used until the Glastonbury claim was abandoned in 1219.

 

Savaric's successor, Jocelin of Wells, again moved the bishop's seat to Bath Abbey, with the title Bishop of Bath. Jocelin was a brother of Hugh (II) of Lincoln and was present at the signing of the Magna Carta. Jocelin continued the building campaign begun by Reginald and was responsible for the Bishop's Palace, the choristers' school, a grammar school, a hospital for travellers and a chapel. He also had a manor house built at Wookey, near Wells. Jocelin saw the church dedicated in 1239 but, despite much lobbying of the Pope by Jocelin's representatives in Rome, did not live to see cathedral status granted. The delay may have been a result of inaction by Pandulf Verraccio, a Roman ecclesiastical politician, papal legate to England and Bishop of Norwich, who was asked by the Pope to investigate the situation but did not respond. Jocelin died at Wells on 19 November 1242 and was buried in the choir of the cathedral; the memorial brass on his tomb is one of the earliest brasses in England. Following his death the monks of Bath unsuccessfully attempted to regain authority over Wells.

 

In 1245 the ongoing dispute over the title of the bishop was resolved by a ruling of Pope Innocent IV, who established the title as the "Bishop of Bath and Wells", which it has remained until this day, with Wells as the principal seat of the bishop. Since the 11th century the church has had a chapter of secular clergy, like the cathedrals of Chichester, Hereford, Lincoln and York. The chapter was endowed with 22 prebends (lands from which finance was drawn) and a provost to manage them. On acquiring cathedral status, in common with other such cathedrals, it had four chief clergy, the dean, precentor, chancellor and sacristan, who were responsible for the spiritual and material care of the cathedral.

 

The building programme, begun by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, Bishop in the 12th century, continued under Jocelin of Wells, who was a canon from 1200, then bishop from 1206. Adam Locke was master mason from about 1192 until 1230. It was designed in the new style with pointed arches, later known as Gothic, which was introduced at about the same time at Canterbury Cathedral. Work was halted between 1209 and 1213 when King John was excommunicated and Jocelin was in exile, but the main parts of the church were complete by the time of the dedication by Jocelin in 1239.

 

By the time the cathedral, including the chapter house, was finished in 1306, it was already too small for the developing liturgy, and unable to accommodate increasingly grand processions of clergy. John Droxford initiated another phase of building under master mason Thomas of Whitney, during which the central tower was heightened and an eight-sided Lady chapel was added at the east end by 1326. Ralph of Shrewsbury followed, continuing the eastward extension of the choir and retrochoir beyond. He oversaw the building of Vicars' Close and the Vicars' Hall, to give the men who were employed to sing in the choir a secure place to live and dine, away from the town and its temptations. He had an uneasy relationship with the citizens of Wells, partly because of his imposition of taxes, and he surrounded his palace with crenellated walls, a moat and a drawbridge.

 

John Harewell raised money for the completion of the west front by William Wynford, who was appointed as master mason in 1365. One of the foremost master masons of his time, Wynford worked for the king at Windsor, Winchester Cathedral and New College, Oxford. At Wells, he designed the western towers of which north-west was not built until the following century. In the 14th century, the central piers of the crossing were found to be sinking under the weight of the crossing tower which had been damaged by an earthquake in the previous century. Strainer arches, sometimes described as scissor arches, were inserted by master mason William Joy to brace and stabilise the piers as a unit.

 

By the reign of Henry VII the cathedral was complete, appearing much as it does today (though the fittings have changed). From 1508 to 1546, the eminent Italian humanist scholar Polydore Vergil was active as the chapter's representative in London. He donated a set of hangings for the choir of the cathedral. While Wells survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries better than the cathedrals of monastic foundation, the abolition of chantries in 1547 resulted in a reduction in its income. Medieval brasses were sold, and a pulpit was placed in the nave for the first time. Between 1551 and 1568, in two periods as dean, William Turner established a herb garden, which was recreated between 2003 and 2010.

 

Elizabeth I gave the chapter and the Vicars Choral a new charter in 1591, creating a new governing body, consisting of a dean and eight residentiary canons with control over the church estates and authority over its affairs, but no longer entitled to elect the dean (that entitlement thenceforward belonged ultimately to the Crown). The stability brought by the new charter ended with the onset of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Local fighting damaged the cathedral's stonework, furniture and windows. The dean, Walter Raleigh, a nephew of the explorer Walter Raleigh, was placed under house arrest after the fall of Bridgwater to the Parliamentarians in 1645, first in the rectory at Chedzoy and then in the deanery at Wells. His jailor, the shoe maker and city constable, David Barrett, caught him writing a letter to his wife. When he refused to surrender it, Barrett ran him through with a sword and he died six weeks later, on 10 October 1646. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the choir before the dean's stall. During the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell no dean was appointed and the cathedral fell into disrepair. The bishop went into retirement and some of the clerics were reduced to performing menial tasks.

 

In 1661, after Charles II was restored to the throne, Robert Creighton, the king's chaplain in exile, was appointed dean and was bishop for two years before his death in 1672. His brass lectern, given in thanksgiving, can be seen in the cathedral. He donated the nave's great west window at a cost of £140. Following Creighton's appointment as bishop, the post of dean went to Ralph Bathurst, who had been chaplain to the king, president of Trinity College, Oxford and fellow of the Royal Society. During Bathurst's long tenure the cathedral was restored, but in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, Puritan soldiers damaged the west front, tore lead from the roof to make bullets, broke the windows, smashed the organ and furnishings, and for a time stabled their horses in the nave.

 

Restoration began again under Thomas Ken who was appointed by the Crown in 1685 and served until 1691. He was one of seven bishops imprisoned for refusing to sign King James II's "Declaration of Indulgence", which would have enabled Catholics to resume positions of political power, but popular support led to their acquittal. Ken refused to take the oath of allegiance to William III and Mary II because James II had not abdicated and with others, known as the Nonjurors, was put out of office. His successor, Richard Kidder, was killed in the Great Storm of 1703 when two chimney stacks on the palace fell on him and his wife, while they were asleep in bed.

 

By the middle of the 19th century, a major restoration programme was needed. Under Dean Goodenough, the monuments were moved to the cloisters and the remaining medieval paint and whitewash removed in an operation known as "the great scrape". Anthony Salvin took charge of the extensive restoration of the choir. Wooden galleries installed in the 16th century were removed and the stalls were given stone canopies and placed further back within the line of the arcade. The medieval stone pulpitum screen was extended in the centre to support a new organ.

 

In 1933 the Friends of Wells Cathedral were formed to support the cathedral's chapter in the maintenance of the fabric, life and work of the cathedral. The late 20th century saw an extensive restoration programme, particularly of the west front. The stained glass is currently under restoration, with a programme underway to conserve the large 14th-century Jesse Tree window at the eastern terminal of the choir.

 

In January 2014, as part of the Bath film festival, the cathedral hosted a special screening of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. This provoked some controversy, but the church defended its decision to allow the screening.

 

In 2021, a contemporary sculpture by Anthony Gormley was unveiled on a temporary plinth outside the cathedral.

 

Since the 13th century, Wells Cathedral has been the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Its governing body, the chapter, is made up of five clerical canons (the dean, the precentor, the canon chancellor, the canon treasurer, and the archdeacon of Wells) and four lay members: the administrator (chief executive), Keeper of the Fabric, Overseer of the Estate and the chairman of the cathedral shop and catering boards. The current bishop of Bath and Wells is Peter Hancock, who was installed in a service in the cathedral on 7 June 2014. John Davies has been Dean of Wells since 2016.

 

Employed staff include the organist and master of choristers, head Verger archivist, librarian and the staff of the shop, café and restaurant. The chapter is advised by specialists such as architects, archaeologists and financial analysts.

 

More than a thousand services are held every year. There are daily services of Matins, Holy Communion and Choral Evensong, as well as major celebrations of Christian festivals such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and saints' days. The cathedral is also used for the baptisms, weddings and funerals of those with close connections to it. In July 2009 the cathedral undertook the funeral of Harry Patch, the last British Army veteran of World War I, who died at the age of 111.

 

Three Sunday services are led by the resident choir in school terms and choral services are sung on weekdays. The cathedral hosts visiting choirs and does outreach work with local schools as part of its Chorister Outreach Project. It is also a venue for musical events such as an annual concert by the Somerset Chamber Choir.

 

Each year about 150,000 people attend services and another 300,000 visit as tourists. Entry is free, but visitors are encouraged to make a donation towards the annual running costs of around £1.5 million in 2015.

 

Construction of the cathedral began in about 1175, to the design of an unknown master-mason. Wells is the first cathedral in England to be built, from its foundation, in Gothic style. According to art historian John Harvey, it is the first truly Gothic cathedral in the world, its architects having entirely dispensed with all features that bound the contemporary east end of Canterbury Cathedral and the earlier buildings of France, such as the east end of the Abbey of Saint Denis, to the Romanesque. Unlike these churches, Wells has clustered piers rather than columns and has a gallery of identical pointed arches rather than the typically Romanesque form of paired openings. The style, with its simple lancet arches without tracery and convoluted mouldings, is known as Early English Gothic.

 

From about 1192 to 1230, Adam Lock, the earliest master-mason at Wells for whom a name is known, continued the transept and nave in the same manner as his predecessor. Lock was also the builder of the north porch, to his own design.

 

The Early English west front was commenced around 1230 by Thomas Norreys, with building and sculpture continuing for thirty years. Its south-west tower was begun 100 years later and constructed between 1365 and 1395, and the north-west tower between 1425 and 1435, both in the Perpendicular Gothic style to the design of William Wynford, who also filled many of the cathedral's early English lancet windows with delicate tracery.

 

The undercroft and chapter house were built by unknown architects between 1275 and 1310, the undercroft in the Early English and the chapter house in the Geometric style of Decorated Gothic architecture. In about 1310 work commenced on the Lady Chapel, to the design of Thomas Witney, who also built the central tower from 1315 to 1322 in the Decorated Gothic style. The tower was later braced internally with arches by William Joy. Concurrent with this work, in 1329–45 Joy made alterations and extensions to the choir, joining it to the Lady Chapel with the retrochoir, the latter in the Flowing Decorated style.

 

Later changes include the Perpendicular vault of the tower and construction of Sugar's Chapel, 1475–1490 by William Smyth. Also, Gothic Revival renovations were made to the choir and pulpitum by Benjamin Ferrey and Anthony Salvin, 1842–1857.

 

Wells has a total length of 415 feet (126 m). Like Canterbury, Lincoln and Salisbury cathedrals, it has the distinctly English arrangement of two transepts, with the body of the church divided into distinct parts: nave, choir, and retro-choir, beyond which extends the Lady Chapel. The façade is wide, with its towers extending beyond the transepts on either side. There is a large projecting porch on the north side of the nave forming an entry into the cathedral. To the north-east is the large octagonal chapter house, entered from the north choir aisle by a passage and staircase. To the south of the nave is a large cloister, unusual in that the northern range, that adjacent the cathedral, was never built.

 

In section, the cathedral has the usual arrangement of a large church: a central nave with an aisle on each side, separated by two arcades. The elevation is in three stages, arcade, triforium gallery and clerestory. The nave is 67 feet (20 m) in height, very low compared to the Gothic cathedrals of France. It has a markedly horizontal emphasis, caused by the triforium having a unique form, a series of identical narrow openings, lacking the usual definition of the bays. The triforium is separated from the arcade by a single horizontal string course that runs unbroken the length of the nave. There are no vertical lines linking the three stages, as the shafts supporting the vault rise above the triforium.

 

The exterior of Wells Cathedral presents a relatively tidy and harmonious appearance since the greater part of the building was executed in a single style, Early English Gothic. This is uncommon among English cathedrals where the exterior usually exhibits a plethora of styles. At Wells, later changes in the Perpendicular style were universally applied, such as filling the Early English lancet windows with simple tracery, the construction of a parapet that encircles the roof, and the addition of pinnacles framing each gable, similar to those around the chapter house and on the west front. At the eastern end there is a proliferation of tracery with repeated motifs in the Reticulated style, a stage between Geometric and Flowing Decorated tracery.

 

The west front is 100 feet (30 m) high and 147 feet (45 m) wide, and built of Inferior Oolite of the Middle Jurassic period, which came from the Doulting Stone Quarry, about 8 miles (13 km) to the east. According to the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor, it is "one of the great sights of England".

 

West fronts in general take three distinct forms: those that follow the elevation of the nave and aisles, those that have paired towers at the end of each aisle, framing the nave, and those that screen the form of the building. The west front at Wells has the paired-tower form, unusual in that the towers do not indicate the location of the aisles, but extend well beyond them, screening the dimensions and profile of the building.

 

The west front rises in three distinct stages, each clearly defined by a horizontal course. This horizontal emphasis is counteracted by six strongly projecting buttresses defining the cross-sectional divisions of nave, aisles and towers, and are highly decorated, each having canopied niches containing the largest statues on the façade.

 

At the lowest level of the façade is a plain base, contrasting with and stabilising the ornate arcades that rise above it. The base is penetrated by three doors, which are in stark contrast to the often imposing portals of French Gothic cathedrals. The outer two are of domestic proportion and the central door is ornamented only by a central post, quatrefoil and the fine mouldings of the arch.

 

Above the basement rise two storeys, ornamented with quatrefoils and niches originally holding about four hundred statues, with three hundred surviving until the mid-20th century. Since then, some have been restored or replaced, including the ruined figure of Christ in the gable.

 

The third stages of the flanking towers were both built in the Perpendicular style of the late 14th century, to the design of William Wynford; that on the north-west was not begun until about 1425. The design maintains the general proportions, and continues the strong projection of the buttresses.

 

The finished product has been criticised for its lack of pinnacles, and it is probable that the towers were intended to carry spires which were never built. Despite its lack of spires or pinnacles, the architectural historian Banister Fletcher describes it as "the highest development in English Gothic of this type of façade."

 

The sculptures on the west front at Wells include standing figures, seated figures, half-length angels and narratives in high relief. Many of the figures are life-sized or larger. Together they constitute the finest display of medieval carving in England. The figures and many of the architectural details were painted in bright colours, and the colouring scheme has been deduced from flakes of paint still adhering to some surfaces. The sculptures occupy nine architectural zones stretching horizontally across the entire west front and around the sides and the eastern returns of the towers which extend beyond the aisles. The strongly projecting buttresses have tiers of niches which contain many of the largest figures. Other large figures, including that of Christ, occupy the gable. A single figure stands in one of two later niches high on the northern tower.

 

In 1851 the archaeologist Charles Robert Cockerell published his analysis of the iconography, numbering the nine sculptural divisions from the lowest to the highest. He defined the theme as "a calendar for unlearned men" illustrating the doctrines and history of the Christian faith, its introduction to Britain and its protection by princes and bishops. He likens the arrangement and iconography to the Te Deum.

 

According to Cockerell, the side of the façade that is to the south of the central door is the more sacred and the scheme is divided accordingly. The lowest range of niches each contained a standing figure, of which all but four figures on the west front, two on each side, have been destroyed. More have survived on the northern and eastern sides of the north tower. Cockerell speculates that those to the south of the portal represented prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament while those to the north represented early missionaries to Britain, of which Augustine of Canterbury, St Birinus, and Benedict Biscop are identifiable by their attributes. In the second zone, above each pair of standing figures, is a quatrefoil containing a half-length angel in relief, some of which have survived. Between the gables of the niches are quatrefoils that contain a series of narratives from the Bible, with the Old Testament stories to the south, above the prophets and patriarchs, and those from the New Testament to the north. A horizontal course runs around the west front dividing the architectural storeys at this point.

 

Above the course, zones four and five, as identified by Cockerell, contain figures which represent the Christian Church in Britain, with the spiritual lords such as bishops, abbots, abbesses and saintly founders of monasteries on the south, while kings, queens and princes occupy the north. Many of the figures survive and many have been identified in the light of their various attributes. There is a hierarchy of size, with the more significant figures larger and enthroned in their niches rather than standing. Immediately beneath the upper course are a series of small niches containing dynamic sculptures of the dead coming forth from their tombs on the Day of Judgement. Although naked, some of the dead are defined as royalty by their crowns and others as bishops by their mitres. Some emerge from their graves with joy and hope, and others with despair.

 

The niches in the lowest zone of the gable contain nine angels, of which Cockerell identifies Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. In the next zone are the taller figures of the twelve apostles, some, such as John, Andrew and Bartholomew, clearly identifiable by the attributes that they carry. The uppermost niches of the gable contained the figure of Christ the Judge at the centre, with the Virgin Mary on his right and John the Baptist on his left. The figures all suffered from iconoclasm. A new statue of Jesus was carved for the central niche, but the two side niches now contain cherubim. Christ and the Virgin Mary are also represented by now headless figures in a Coronation of the Virgin in a niche above the central portal. A damaged figure of the Virgin and Christ Child occupies a quatrefoil in the spandrel of the door.

 

The central tower appears to date from the early 13th century. It was substantially reconstructed in the early 14th century during the remodelling of the east end, necessitating the internal bracing of the piers a decade or so later. In the 14th century the tower was given a timber and lead spire which burnt down in 1439. The exterior was then reworked in the Perpendicular style and given the present parapet and pinnacles. Alec Clifton-Taylor describes it as "outstanding even in Somerset, a county famed for the splendour of its church towers".

 

The north porch is described by art historian Nikolaus Pevsner as "sumptuously decorated", and intended as the main entrance. Externally it is simple and rectangular with plain side walls. The entrance is a steeply arched portal framed by rich mouldings of eight shafts with stiff-leaf capitals each encircled by an annular moulding at middle height. Those on the left are figurative, containing images representing the martyrdom of St Edmund the Martyr. The walls are lined with deep niches framed by narrow shafts with capitals and annulets like those of the portal. The path to the north porch is lined by four sculptures in Purbeck stone, each by Mary Spencer Watson, representing the symbols of the Evangelists.

 

The cloisters were built in the late 13th century and largely rebuilt from 1430 to 1508 and have wide openings divided by mullions and transoms, and tracery in the Perpendicular Gothic style. The vault has lierne ribs that form octagons at the centre of each compartment, the joints of each rib having decorative bosses. The eastern range is of two storeys, of which the upper is the library built in the 15th century.

 

Because Wells Cathedral was secular rather than monastic, cloisters were not a practical necessity. They were omitted from several other secular cathedrals but were built here and at Chichester. Explanations for their construction at these two secular cathedrals range from the processional to the aesthetic. As at Chichester, there is no northern range to the cloisters. In monastic cloisters it was the north range, benefiting most from winter sunlight, that was often used as a scriptorium.

 

In 1969, when a large chunk of stone fell from a statue near the main door, it became apparent that there was an urgent need for restoration of the west front. Detailed studies of the stonework and of conservation practices were undertaken under the cathedral architect, Alban D. R. Caroe and a restoration committee formed. The methods selected were those devised by Eve and Robert Baker. W. A. (Bert) Wheeler, clerk of works to the cathedral 1935–1978, had previously experimented with washing and surface treatment of architectural carvings on the building and his techniques were among those tried on the statues.

 

The conservation was carried out between 1974 and 1986, wherever possible using non-invasive procedures such as washing with water and a solution of lime, filling gaps and damaged surfaces with soft mortar to prevent the ingress of water and stabilising statues that were fracturing through corrosion of metal dowels. The surfaces were finished by painting with a thin coat of mortar and silane to resist further erosion and attack by pollutants. The restoration of the façade revealed much paint adhering to the statues and their niches, indicating that it had once been brightly coloured.

 

The particular character of this Early English interior is dependent on the proportions of the simple lancet arches. It is also dependent on the refinement of the architectural details, in particular the mouldings.

 

The arcade, which takes the same form in the nave, choir and transepts, is distinguished by the richness of both mouldings and carvings. Each pier of the arcade has a surface enrichment of 24 slender shafts in eight groups of three, rising beyond the capitals to form the deeply undulating mouldings of the arches. The capitals themselves are remarkable for the vitality of the stylised foliage, in a style known as "stiff-leaf". The liveliness contrasts with the formality of the moulded shafts and the smooth unbroken areas of ashlar masonry in the spandrels. Each capital is different, and some contain small figures illustrating narratives.

 

The vault of the nave rises steeply in a simple quadripartite form, in harmony with the nave arcade. The eastern end of the choir was extended and the whole upper part elaborated in the second quarter of the 14th century by William Joy. The vault has a multiplicity of ribs in a net-like form, which is very different from that of the nave, and is perhaps a recreation in stone of a local type of compartmented wooden roof of which examples remain from the 15th century, including those at St Cuthbert's Church, Wells. The vaults of the aisles of the choir also have a unique pattern.

 

Until the early 14th century, the interior of the cathedral was in a unified style, but it was to undergo two significant changes, to the tower and to the eastern end. Between 1315 and 1322 the central tower was heightened and topped by a spire, which caused the piers that supported it to show signs of stress. In 1338 the mason William Joy employed an unorthodox solution by inserting low arches topped by inverted arches of similar dimensions, forming scissors-like structures. These arches brace the piers of the crossing on three sides, while the easternmost side is braced by a choir screen. The bracing arches are known as "St Andrew's Cross arches", in a reference to the patron saint of the cathedral. They have been described by Wim Swaan – rightly or wrongly – as "brutally massive" and intrusive in an otherwise restrained interior.

 

Wells Cathedral has a square east end to the choir, as is usual, and like several other cathedrals including Salisbury and Lichfield, has a lower Lady Chapel projecting at the eastern end, begun by Thomas Witney in about 1310, possibly before the chapter house was completed. The Lady Chapel seems to have begun as a free-standing structure in the form of an elongated octagon, but the plan changed and it was linked to the eastern end by extension of the choir and construction of a second transept or retrochoir east of the choir, probably by William Joy.

 

The Lady Chapel has a vault of complex and somewhat irregular pattern, as the chapel is not symmetrical about both axes. The main ribs are intersected by additional non-supporting, lierne ribs, which in this case form a star-shaped pattern at the apex of the vault. It is one of the earliest lierne vaults in England. There are five large windows, of which four are filled with fragments of medieval glass. The tracery of the windows is in the style known as Reticulated Gothic, having a pattern of a single repeated shape, in this case a trefoil, giving a "reticulate" or net-like appearance.

 

The retrochoir extends across the east end of the choir and into the east transepts. At its centre the vault is supported by a remarkable structure of angled piers. Two of these are placed as to complete the octagonal shape of the Lady Chapel, a solution described by Francis Bond as "an intuition of Genius". The piers have attached shafts of marble, and, with the vaults that they support, create a vista of great complexity from every angle. The windows of the retrochoir are in the Reticulated style like those of the Lady Chapel, but are fully Flowing Decorated in that the tracery mouldings form ogival curves.

 

The chapter house was begun in the late 13th century and built in two stages, completed about 1310. It is a two-storeyed structure with the main chamber raised on an undercroft. It is entered from a staircase which divides and turns, one branch leading through the upper storey of Chain Gate to Vicars' Close. The Decorated interior is described by Alec Clifton-Taylor as "architecturally the most beautiful in England". It is octagonal, with its ribbed vault supported on a central column. The column is surrounded by shafts of Purbeck Marble, rising to a single continuous rippling foliate capital of stylised oak leaves and acorns, quite different in character from the Early English stiff-leaf foliage. Above the moulding spring 32 ribs of strong profile, giving an effect generally likened to "a great palm tree". The windows are large with Geometric Decorated tracery that is beginning to show an elongation of form, and ogees in the lesser lights that are characteristic of Flowing Decorated tracery. The tracery lights still contain ancient glass. Beneath the windows are 51 stalls, the canopies of which are enlivened by carvings including many heads carved in a light-hearted manner.

 

Wells Cathedral contains one of the most substantial collections of medieval stained glass in England, despite damage by Parliamentary troops in 1642 and 1643. The oldest surviving glass dates from the late 13th century and is in two windows on the west side of the chapter-house staircase. Two windows in the south choir aisle are from 1310 to 1320.

 

The Lady Chapel has five windows, of which four date from 1325 to 1330 and include images of a local saint, Dunstan. The east window was restored to a semblance of its original appearance by Thomas Willement in 1845. The other windows have complete canopies, but the pictorial sections are fragmented.

 

The east window of the choir is a broad, seven-light window dating from 1340 to 1345. It depicts the Tree of Jesse (the genealogy of Christ) and demonstrates the use of silver staining, a new technique that allowed the artist to paint details on the glass in yellow, as well as black. The combination of yellow and green glass and the application of the bright yellow stain gives the window its popular name, the "Golden Window". It is flanked by two windows each side in the clerestory, with large figures of saints, also dated to 1340–45. In 2010 a major conservation programme was undertaken on the Jesse Tree window.

 

The panels in the chapel of St Katherine are attributed to Arnold of Nijmegen and date from about 1520. They were acquired from the destroyed church of Saint-Jean, Rouen, with the last panel having been purchased in 1953.

 

The large triple lancet to the nave west end was glazed at the expense of Dean Creighton at a cost of £140 in 1664. It was repaired in 1813, and the central light was largely replaced to a design by Archibald Keightley Nicholson between 1925 and 1931. The main north and south transept end windows by James Powell and Sons were erected in the early 20th century.

 

The greater part of the stone carving of Wells Cathedral comprises foliate capitals in the stiff-leaf style. They are found ornamenting the piers of the nave, choir and transepts. Stiff-leaf foliage is highly abstract. Though possibly influenced by carvings of acanthus leaves or vine leaves, it cannot be easily identified with any particular plant. Here the carving of the foliage is varied and vigorous, the springing leaves and deep undercuts casting shadows that contrast with the surface of the piers. In the transepts and towards the crossing in the nave the capitals have many small figurative carvings among the leaves. These include a man with toothache and a series of four scenes depicting the "Wages of Sin" in a narrative of fruit stealers who creep into an orchard and are then beaten by the farmer. Another well-known carving is in the north transept aisle: a foliate corbel, on which climbs a lizard, sometimes identified as a salamander, a symbol of eternal life.

 

Carvings in the Decorated Gothic style may be found in the eastern end of the buildings, where there are many carved bosses. In the chapter house, the carvings of the 51 stalls include numerous small heads of great variety, many of them smiling or laughing. A well-known figure is the corbel of the dragon-slaying monk in the chapter house stair. The large continuous capital that encircles the central pillar of the chapter house is markedly different in style to the stiff-leaf of the Early English period. In contrast to the bold projections and undercutting of the earlier work, it has a rippling form and is clearly identifiable as grapevine.

 

The 15th-century cloisters have many small bosses ornamenting the vault. Two in the west cloister, near the gift shop and café, have been called sheela na gigs, i. e. female figures displaying their genitals and variously judged to depict the sin of lust or stem from ancient fertility cults.

 

Wells Cathedral has one of the finest sets of misericords in Britain. Its clergy has a long tradition of singing or reciting from the Book of Psalms each day, along with the customary daily reading of the Holy Office. In medieval times the clergy assembled in the church eight times daily for the canonical hours. As the greater part of the services was recited while standing, many monastic or collegiate churches fitted stalls whose seats tipped up to provide a ledge for the monk or cleric to lean against. These were "misericords" because their installation was an act of mercy. Misericords typically have a carved figurative bracket beneath the ledge framed by two floral motifs known, in heraldic manner, as "supporters".

 

The misericords date from 1330 to 1340. They may have been carved under the direction of Master Carpenter John Strode, although his name is not recorded before 1341. He was assisted by Bartholomew Quarter, who is documented from 1343. They originally numbered 90, of which 65 have survived. Sixty-one are installed in the choir, three are displayed in the cathedral, and one is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. New stalls were ordered when the eastern end of the choir was extended in the early 14th century. The canons complained that they had borne the cost of the rebuilding and ordered the prebendary clerics to pay for their own stalls. When the newly refurbished choir opened in 1339 many misericords were left unfinished, including one-fifth of the surviving 65. Many of the clerics had not paid, having been called to contribute a total sum of £200. The misericords survived better than the other sections of the stalls, which during the Protestant Reformation had their canopies chopped off and galleries inserted above them. One misericord, showing a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, dates from the 17th century. In 1848 came a complete rearrangement of the choir furniture, and 61 of the misericords were reused in the restructured stalls.

 

The subject matter of the carvings of the central brackets as misericords varies, but many themes recur in different churches. Typically the themes are less unified or directly related to the Bible and Christian theology than small sculptures seen elsewhere within churches, such as bosses. This applies at Wells, where none of the misericord carvings is directly based on a Bible story. The subjects, chosen either by the woodcarver, or perhaps by the one paying for the stall, have no overriding theme. The sole unifying elements are the roundels on each side of the pictorial subject, which all show elaborately carved foliage, in most cases formal and stylised in the later Decorated manner, but with several examples of naturalistic foliage, including roses and bindweed. Many of the subjects carry traditional interpretations. The image of the "Pelican in her Piety" (believed to feed her young on her own blood) is a recognised symbol for Christ's love for the Church. A cat playing with a mouse may represent the Devil snaring a human soul. Other subjects illustrate popular fables or sayings such as "When the fox preaches, look to your geese". Many depict animals, some of which may symbolise a human vice or virtue, or an aspect of faith.

 

Twenty-seven of the carvings depict animals: rabbits, dogs, a puppy biting a cat, a ewe feeding a lamb, monkeys, lions, bats, and the Early Christian motif of two doves drinking from a ewer. Eighteen have mythological subjects, including mermaids, dragons and wyverns. Five are clearly narrative, such as the Fox and the Geese, and the story of Alexander the Great being raised to Heaven by griffins. There are three heads: a bishop in a mitre, an angel, and a woman wearing a veil over hair arranged in coils over each ear. Eleven carvings show human figures, among which are several of remarkable design, conceived by the artist specifically for their purpose of supporting a shelf. One figure lies beneath the seat, supporting the shelf with a cheek, a hand and a foot. Another sits in a contorted manner supporting the weight on his elbow, while a further figure squats with his knees wide apart and a strained look on his face.

 

Some of the cathedral's fittings and monuments are hundreds of years old. The brass lectern in the Lady Chapel dates from 1661 and has a moulded stand and foliate crest. In the north transept chapel is a 17th-century oak screen with columns, formerly used in cow stalls, with artisan Ionic capitals and cornice, set forward over the chest tomb of John Godelee. There is a bound oak chest from the 14th century, which was used to store the chapter seal and key documents. The bishop's throne dates from 1340, and has a panelled, canted front and stone doorway, and a deep nodding cusped ogee canopy above it, with three-stepped statue niches and pinnacles. The throne was restored by Anthony Salvin around 1850. Opposite the throne is a 19th-century octagonal pulpit on a coved base with panelled sides, and steps up from the north aisle. The round font in the south transept is from the former Saxon cathedral and has an arcade of round-headed arches, on a round plinth. The font cover was made in 1635 and is decorated with the heads of putti. The Chapel of St Martin is a memorial to every Somerset man who fell in World War I.

 

The monuments and tombs include Gisa, bishop; † 1088; William of Bitton, bishop; † 1274; William of March, bishop; † 1302; John Droxford; † 1329; John Godelee; † 1333; John Middleton, died †1350; Ralph of Shrewsbury, died †; John Harewell, bishop; † 1386; William Bykonyll; † c. 1448; John Bernard; † 1459; Thomas Beckington; † died 1464; John Gunthorpe; † 1498; John Still; † 1607; Robert Creighton; † 1672; Richard Kidder, bishop; † 1703; George Hooper, bishop; † 1727 and Arthur Harvey, bishop; † 1894.

 

In the north transept is Wells Cathedral clock, an astronomical clock from about 1325 believed to be by Peter Lightfoot, a monk of Glastonbury. Its mechanism, dated between 1386 and 1392, was replaced in the 19th century and the original moved to the Science Museum in London, where it still operates. It is the second oldest surviving clock in England after the Salisbury Cathedral clock.

 

The clock has its original medieval face. Apart from the time on a 24-hour dial, it shows the motion of the Sun and Moon, the phases of the Moon, and the time since the last new Moon. The astronomical dial presents a geocentric or pre-Copernican view, with the Sun and Moon revolving round a central fixed Earth, like that of the clock at Ottery St Mary. The quarters are chimed by a quarter jack: a small automaton known as Jack Blandifers, who hits two bells with hammers and two with his heels. At the striking of the clock, jousting knights appear above the clock face.

 

On the outer wall of the transept, opposite Vicars' Hall, is a second clock face of the same clock, placed there just over seventy years after the interior clock and driven by the same mechanism. The second clock face has two quarter jacks (which strike on the quarter-hour) in the form of knights in armour.

 

In 2010 the official clock-winder retired and was replaced by an electric mechanism.

 

The first record of an organ at this church dates from 1310. A smaller organ, probably for the Lady Chapel, was installed in 1415. In 1620 an organ built by Thomas Dallam was installed at a cost of £398 1s 5d.

 

The 1620 organ was destroyed by parliamentary soldiers in 1643. An organ built in 1662 was enlarged in 1786 and again in 1855. In 1909–1910 an organ was built by Harrison & Harrison of Durham, with the best parts of the old organ retained. It has been serviced by the same company ever since.

 

Since November 1996 the cathedral has also had a portable chamber organ, by the Scottish makers, Lammermuir. It is used regularly to accompany performances of Tudor and baroque music.

 

The first recorded organist of Wells was Walter Bagele (or Vageler) in 1416. The post of organist or assistant organist has been held by more than 60 people since. Peter Stanley Lyons was Master of Choristers at Wells Cathedral, and Director of Music at Wells Cathedral School in 1954–1960. The choral conductor James William Webb-Jones, father of Lyons's wife Bridget (whom he married in the cathedral), was Headmaster of Wells Cathedral School in 1955–1960. Malcolm Archer was the appointed Organist and Master of the Choristers from 1996 to 2004. Matthew Owens was the appointed organist from 2005 to 2019.

 

There has been a choir of boy choristers at Wells since 909. Currently there are 18 boy choristers and a similar number of girl choristers, aged from eight to fourteen. The Vicars Choral was formed in the 12th century and the sung liturgy provided by a traditional cathedral choir of men and boys until the formation of an additional choir of girls in 1994. The boys and girls sing alternately with the Vicars Choral and are educated at Wells Cathedral School.

 

The Vicars Choral currently number twelve men, of whom three are choral scholars. Since 1348 the College of Vicars had its own accommodation in a quadrangle converted in the early 15th century to form Vicar's Close. The Vicars Choral generally perform with the choristers, except on Wednesdays, when they sing alone, allowing them to present a different repertoire, in particular plainsong.

 

In December 2010 Wells Cathedral Choir was rated by Gramophone magazine as "the highest ranking choir with children in the world". It continues to provide music for the liturgy at Sunday and weekday services. The choir has made many recordings and toured frequently, including performances in Beijing and Hong Kong in 2012. Its repertoire ranges from the choral music of the Renaissance to recently commissioned works.

 

The Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir is a mixed adult choir of 25 members, formed in 1986 to sing at the midnight service on Christmas Eve, and invited to sing at several other special services. It now sings for about 30 services a year, when the Cathedral Choir is in recess or on tour, and spends one week a year singing as the "choir in residence" at another cathedral. Although primarily liturgical, the choir's repertoire includes other forms of music, as well as performances at engagements such as weddings and funerals.

 

The cathedral is home to Wells Cathedral Oratorio Society (WCOS), founded in 1896. With around 160 voices, the society gives three concerts a year under the direction of Matthew Owens, Organist and Master of the Choristers at the cathedral. Concerts are normally in early November, December (an annual performance of Handel's Messiah) and late March. It performs with a number of specialist orchestras including: Music for Awhile, Chameleon Arts and La Folia.

 

The bells at Wells Cathedral are the heaviest ring of ten bells in the world, the tenor bell (the 10th and largest), known as Harewell, weighing 56.25 long hundredweight (2,858 kg). They are hung for full-circle ringing in the English style of change ringing. These bells are now hung in the south-west tower, although some were originally hung in the central tower.

 

The library above the eastern cloister was built between 1430 and 1508. Its collection is in three parts: early documents housed in the Muniment Room; the collection predating 1800 housed in the Chained Library; and the post-1800 collection housed in the Reading Room. The chapter's earlier collection was destroyed during the Reformation, so that the present library consists chiefly of early printed books, rather than medieval manuscripts. The earlier books in the Chained Library number 2,800 volumes and give an indication of the variety of interests of the members of the cathedral chapter from the Reformation until 1800. The focus of the collection is predominantly theology, but there are volumes on science, medicine, exploration, and languages. Books of particular interest include Pliny's Natural History printed in 1472, an Atlas of the World by Abraham Ortelius, printed in 1606, and a set of the works by Aristotle that once belonged to Erasmus. The library is open to the public at appointed times in the summer and presents a small exhibition of documents and books.

 

Three early registers of the Dean and Chapter edited by W. H. B. Bird for the Historical Manuscripts Commissioners – Liber Albus I (White Book; R I), Liber Albus II (R III) and Liber Ruber (Red Book; R II, section i) – were published in 1907. They contain with some repetition, a cartulary of possessions of the cathedral, with grants of land back to the 8th century, well before hereditary surnames developed in England, and acts of the Dean and Chapter and surveys of their estates, mostly in Somerset.

 

Adjacent to the cathedral is a large lawned area, Cathedral Green, with three ancient gateways: Brown's Gatehouse, Penniless Porch and Chain Gate. On the green is the 12th-century Old Deanery, largely rebuilt in the late 15th century by Dean Gunthorpe and remodelled by Dean Bathurst in the late 17th century. No longer the dean's residence, it is used as diocesan offices.

 

To the south of the cathedral is the moated Bishop's Palace, begun about 1210 by Jocelin of Wells but dating mostly from the 1230s. In the 15th century Thomas Beckington added a north wing, now the bishop's residence. It was restored and extended by Benjamin Ferrey between 1846 and 1854.

 

To the north of the cathedral and connected to it by the Chain Gate is Vicars' Close, a street planned in the 14th century and claimed to be the oldest purely residential street in Europe, with all but one of its original buildings intact. Buildings in the close include the Vicars Hall and gateway at the south end, and the Vicars Chapel and Library at the north end.

 

The Liberty of St Andrew was the historic liberty and parish that encompassed the cathedral and surrounding lands closely associated with it.

 

The English painter J. M. W. Turner visited Wells in 1795, making sketches of the precinct and a water colour of the west front, now in the Tate gallery. Other artists whose paintings of the cathedral are in national collections are Albert Goodwin, John Syer and Ken Howard.

 

The cathedral served to inspire Ken Follett's 1989 novel The Pillars of the Earth and with a modified central tower, featured as the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral at the end of the 2010 television adaptation of that novel. The interior of the cathedral was used for a 2007 Doctor Who episode, "The Lazarus Experiment", while the exterior shots were filmed at Southwark Cathedral.

 

An account of the damage to the cathedral during the Monmouth Rebellion is included in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1889 historical novel Micah Clarke.

 

The cathedral provided scenes for the 2019–2020 television series The Spanish Princess.

This forest floor collage features a sheet of Birch bark from a Birch tree, a thin-leaved deciduous hardwood tree of the genus Betula.

 

The strong and water-resistant cardboard-like bark can be easily cut, bent, and sewn. It is valued as a building, crafting, and writing material.

 

Hand-crafted containers made of Birch bark such as wrappings, bags, baskets, boxes, or quivers have been a staple for forest societies across the Appalachian mountain range for millennia.

 

Photographed in a rural forest at Ulster County, NY in the Catskills.

It has taken me ages to learn how to love myself, to unlearn self-deprecation from religious practices, to stop seeking validation from others.

 

It tore me apart.

 

Inspired by both The Fallen Angel by Alexandre Cabanel and Self-Love Is A Process by alexbstoddard

 

P.s. yes, those are real tears.

 

This is also a real photo. A photo of a photo haha.

Scenes from a retreat in the Catskills. Nineteen visionaries spend a week at work on new projects and strategies for wholesome and sovereign living.

Scenes from a retreat in the Catskills. Nineteen visionaries spend a week at work on new projects and strategies for wholesome and sovereign living.

 

This is a photo captured on a hike into the surrounding forests.

Scenes from a retreat in the Catskills near Reinbeck. Nineteen visionaries spend a week at work on new phrojects and strategies for wholesome and sovereign living.

SOOC

there are moments to learn and moments to unlearn

in between you be yourself

that is the moment you feel relieved.

Wells Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Wells, Somerset, England, dedicated to St Andrew the Apostle. It is the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, whose cathedra it holds as mother church of the Diocese of Bath and Wells. Built as a Roman Catholic cathedral from around 1175 to replace an earlier church on the site since 705, it became an Anglican cathedral when King Henry VIII split from Rome. It is moderately sized for an English cathedral. Its broad west front and large central tower are dominant features. It has been called "unquestionably one of the most beautiful" and "most poetic" of English cathedrals.

 

Its Gothic architecture is mostly inspired from Early English style of the late 12th to early 13th centuries, lacking the Romanesque work that survives in many other cathedrals. Building began about 1175 at the east end with the choir. Historian John Harvey sees it as Europe's first truly Gothic structure, breaking the last constraints of Romanesque. The stonework of its pointed arcades and fluted piers bears pronounced mouldings and carved capitals in a foliate, "stiff-leaf" style. Its Early English front with 300 sculpted figures is seen as a "supreme triumph of the combined plastic arts in England". The east end retains much ancient stained glass. Unlike many cathedrals of monastic foundation, Wells has many surviving secular buildings linked to its chapter of secular canons, including the Bishop's Palace and the 15th-century residential Vicars' Close It is a Grade I listed building.

 

The earliest remains of a building on the site are of a late-Roman mausoleum, identified during excavations in 1980. An abbey church was built in Wells in 705 by Aldhelm, first bishop of the newly established Diocese of Sherborne during the reign of King Ine of Wessex. It was dedicated to St Andrew and stood at the site of the cathedral's cloisters, where some excavated remains can be seen. The font in the cathedral's south transept is from this church and is the oldest part of the present building. In 766 Cynewulf, King of Wessex, signed a charter endowing the church with eleven hides of land. In 909 the seat of the diocese was moved from Sherborne to Wells.

 

The first bishop of Wells was Athelm (909), who crowned King Æthelstan. Athelm and his nephew Dunstan both became Archbishops of Canterbury. During this period a choir of boys was established to sing the liturgy. Wells Cathedral School, which was established to educate these choirboys, dates its foundation to this point. There is, however, some controversy over this. Following the Norman Conquest, John de Villula moved the seat of the bishop from Wells to Bath in 1090. The church at Wells, no longer a cathedral, had a college of secular clergy.

 

The cathedral is thought to have been conceived and commenced in about 1175 by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, who died in 1191. Although it is clear from its size that from the outset, the church was planned to be the cathedral of the diocese, the seat of the bishop moved between Wells and the abbeys of Glastonbury and Bath, before settling at Wells. In 1197 Reginald's successor, Savaric FitzGeldewin, with the approval of Pope Celestine III, officially moved his seat to Glastonbury Abbey. The title of Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury was used until the Glastonbury claim was abandoned in 1219.

 

Savaric's successor, Jocelin of Wells, again moved the bishop's seat to Bath Abbey, with the title Bishop of Bath. Jocelin was a brother of Hugh (II) of Lincoln and was present at the signing of the Magna Carta. Jocelin continued the building campaign begun by Reginald and was responsible for the Bishop's Palace, the choristers' school, a grammar school, a hospital for travellers and a chapel. He also had a manor house built at Wookey, near Wells. Jocelin saw the church dedicated in 1239 but, despite much lobbying of the Pope by Jocelin's representatives in Rome, did not live to see cathedral status granted. The delay may have been a result of inaction by Pandulf Verraccio, a Roman ecclesiastical politician, papal legate to England and Bishop of Norwich, who was asked by the Pope to investigate the situation but did not respond. Jocelin died at Wells on 19 November 1242 and was buried in the choir of the cathedral; the memorial brass on his tomb is one of the earliest brasses in England. Following his death the monks of Bath unsuccessfully attempted to regain authority over Wells.

 

In 1245 the ongoing dispute over the title of the bishop was resolved by a ruling of Pope Innocent IV, who established the title as the "Bishop of Bath and Wells", which it has remained until this day, with Wells as the principal seat of the bishop. Since the 11th century the church has had a chapter of secular clergy, like the cathedrals of Chichester, Hereford, Lincoln and York. The chapter was endowed with 22 prebends (lands from which finance was drawn) and a provost to manage them. On acquiring cathedral status, in common with other such cathedrals, it had four chief clergy, the dean, precentor, chancellor and sacristan, who were responsible for the spiritual and material care of the cathedral.

 

The building programme, begun by Reginald Fitz Jocelin, Bishop in the 12th century, continued under Jocelin of Wells, who was a canon from 1200, then bishop from 1206. Adam Locke was master mason from about 1192 until 1230. It was designed in the new style with pointed arches, later known as Gothic, which was introduced at about the same time at Canterbury Cathedral. Work was halted between 1209 and 1213 when King John was excommunicated and Jocelin was in exile, but the main parts of the church were complete by the time of the dedication by Jocelin in 1239.

 

By the time the cathedral, including the chapter house, was finished in 1306, it was already too small for the developing liturgy, and unable to accommodate increasingly grand processions of clergy. John Droxford initiated another phase of building under master mason Thomas of Whitney, during which the central tower was heightened and an eight-sided Lady chapel was added at the east end by 1326. Ralph of Shrewsbury followed, continuing the eastward extension of the choir and retrochoir beyond. He oversaw the building of Vicars' Close and the Vicars' Hall, to give the men who were employed to sing in the choir a secure place to live and dine, away from the town and its temptations. He had an uneasy relationship with the citizens of Wells, partly because of his imposition of taxes, and he surrounded his palace with crenellated walls, a moat and a drawbridge.

 

John Harewell raised money for the completion of the west front by William Wynford, who was appointed as master mason in 1365. One of the foremost master masons of his time, Wynford worked for the king at Windsor, Winchester Cathedral and New College, Oxford. At Wells, he designed the western towers of which north-west was not built until the following century. In the 14th century, the central piers of the crossing were found to be sinking under the weight of the crossing tower which had been damaged by an earthquake in the previous century. Strainer arches, sometimes described as scissor arches, were inserted by master mason William Joy to brace and stabilise the piers as a unit.

 

By the reign of Henry VII the cathedral was complete, appearing much as it does today (though the fittings have changed). From 1508 to 1546, the eminent Italian humanist scholar Polydore Vergil was active as the chapter's representative in London. He donated a set of hangings for the choir of the cathedral. While Wells survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries better than the cathedrals of monastic foundation, the abolition of chantries in 1547 resulted in a reduction in its income. Medieval brasses were sold, and a pulpit was placed in the nave for the first time. Between 1551 and 1568, in two periods as dean, William Turner established a herb garden, which was recreated between 2003 and 2010.

 

Elizabeth I gave the chapter and the Vicars Choral a new charter in 1591, creating a new governing body, consisting of a dean and eight residentiary canons with control over the church estates and authority over its affairs, but no longer entitled to elect the dean (that entitlement thenceforward belonged ultimately to the Crown). The stability brought by the new charter ended with the onset of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I. Local fighting damaged the cathedral's stonework, furniture and windows. The dean, Walter Raleigh, a nephew of the explorer Walter Raleigh, was placed under house arrest after the fall of Bridgwater to the Parliamentarians in 1645, first in the rectory at Chedzoy and then in the deanery at Wells. His jailor, the shoe maker and city constable, David Barrett, caught him writing a letter to his wife. When he refused to surrender it, Barrett ran him through with a sword and he died six weeks later, on 10 October 1646. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the choir before the dean's stall. During the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell no dean was appointed and the cathedral fell into disrepair. The bishop went into retirement and some of the clerics were reduced to performing menial tasks.

 

In 1661, after Charles II was restored to the throne, Robert Creighton, the king's chaplain in exile, was appointed dean and was bishop for two years before his death in 1672. His brass lectern, given in thanksgiving, can be seen in the cathedral. He donated the nave's great west window at a cost of £140. Following Creighton's appointment as bishop, the post of dean went to Ralph Bathurst, who had been chaplain to the king, president of Trinity College, Oxford and fellow of the Royal Society. During Bathurst's long tenure the cathedral was restored, but in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685, Puritan soldiers damaged the west front, tore lead from the roof to make bullets, broke the windows, smashed the organ and furnishings, and for a time stabled their horses in the nave.

 

Restoration began again under Thomas Ken who was appointed by the Crown in 1685 and served until 1691. He was one of seven bishops imprisoned for refusing to sign King James II's "Declaration of Indulgence", which would have enabled Catholics to resume positions of political power, but popular support led to their acquittal. Ken refused to take the oath of allegiance to William III and Mary II because James II had not abdicated and with others, known as the Nonjurors, was put out of office. His successor, Richard Kidder, was killed in the Great Storm of 1703 when two chimney stacks on the palace fell on him and his wife, while they were asleep in bed.

 

By the middle of the 19th century, a major restoration programme was needed. Under Dean Goodenough, the monuments were moved to the cloisters and the remaining medieval paint and whitewash removed in an operation known as "the great scrape". Anthony Salvin took charge of the extensive restoration of the choir. Wooden galleries installed in the 16th century were removed and the stalls were given stone canopies and placed further back within the line of the arcade. The medieval stone pulpitum screen was extended in the centre to support a new organ.

 

In 1933 the Friends of Wells Cathedral were formed to support the cathedral's chapter in the maintenance of the fabric, life and work of the cathedral. The late 20th century saw an extensive restoration programme, particularly of the west front. The stained glass is currently under restoration, with a programme underway to conserve the large 14th-century Jesse Tree window at the eastern terminal of the choir.

 

In January 2014, as part of the Bath film festival, the cathedral hosted a special screening of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. This provoked some controversy, but the church defended its decision to allow the screening.

 

In 2021, a contemporary sculpture by Anthony Gormley was unveiled on a temporary plinth outside the cathedral.

 

Since the 13th century, Wells Cathedral has been the seat of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Its governing body, the chapter, is made up of five clerical canons (the dean, the precentor, the canon chancellor, the canon treasurer, and the archdeacon of Wells) and four lay members: the administrator (chief executive), Keeper of the Fabric, Overseer of the Estate and the chairman of the cathedral shop and catering boards. The current bishop of Bath and Wells is Peter Hancock, who was installed in a service in the cathedral on 7 June 2014. John Davies has been Dean of Wells since 2016.

 

Employed staff include the organist and master of choristers, head Verger archivist, librarian and the staff of the shop, café and restaurant. The chapter is advised by specialists such as architects, archaeologists and financial analysts.

 

More than a thousand services are held every year. There are daily services of Matins, Holy Communion and Choral Evensong, as well as major celebrations of Christian festivals such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and saints' days. The cathedral is also used for the baptisms, weddings and funerals of those with close connections to it. In July 2009 the cathedral undertook the funeral of Harry Patch, the last British Army veteran of World War I, who died at the age of 111.

 

Three Sunday services are led by the resident choir in school terms and choral services are sung on weekdays. The cathedral hosts visiting choirs and does outreach work with local schools as part of its Chorister Outreach Project. It is also a venue for musical events such as an annual concert by the Somerset Chamber Choir.

 

Each year about 150,000 people attend services and another 300,000 visit as tourists. Entry is free, but visitors are encouraged to make a donation towards the annual running costs of around £1.5 million in 2015.

 

Construction of the cathedral began in about 1175, to the design of an unknown master-mason. Wells is the first cathedral in England to be built, from its foundation, in Gothic style. According to art historian John Harvey, it is the first truly Gothic cathedral in the world, its architects having entirely dispensed with all features that bound the contemporary east end of Canterbury Cathedral and the earlier buildings of France, such as the east end of the Abbey of Saint Denis, to the Romanesque. Unlike these churches, Wells has clustered piers rather than columns and has a gallery of identical pointed arches rather than the typically Romanesque form of paired openings. The style, with its simple lancet arches without tracery and convoluted mouldings, is known as Early English Gothic.

 

From about 1192 to 1230, Adam Lock, the earliest master-mason at Wells for whom a name is known, continued the transept and nave in the same manner as his predecessor. Lock was also the builder of the north porch, to his own design.

 

The Early English west front was commenced around 1230 by Thomas Norreys, with building and sculpture continuing for thirty years. Its south-west tower was begun 100 years later and constructed between 1365 and 1395, and the north-west tower between 1425 and 1435, both in the Perpendicular Gothic style to the design of William Wynford, who also filled many of the cathedral's early English lancet windows with delicate tracery.

 

The undercroft and chapter house were built by unknown architects between 1275 and 1310, the undercroft in the Early English and the chapter house in the Geometric style of Decorated Gothic architecture. In about 1310 work commenced on the Lady Chapel, to the design of Thomas Witney, who also built the central tower from 1315 to 1322 in the Decorated Gothic style. The tower was later braced internally with arches by William Joy. Concurrent with this work, in 1329–45 Joy made alterations and extensions to the choir, joining it to the Lady Chapel with the retrochoir, the latter in the Flowing Decorated style.

 

Later changes include the Perpendicular vault of the tower and construction of Sugar's Chapel, 1475–1490 by William Smyth. Also, Gothic Revival renovations were made to the choir and pulpitum by Benjamin Ferrey and Anthony Salvin, 1842–1857.

 

Wells has a total length of 415 feet (126 m). Like Canterbury, Lincoln and Salisbury cathedrals, it has the distinctly English arrangement of two transepts, with the body of the church divided into distinct parts: nave, choir, and retro-choir, beyond which extends the Lady Chapel. The façade is wide, with its towers extending beyond the transepts on either side. There is a large projecting porch on the north side of the nave forming an entry into the cathedral. To the north-east is the large octagonal chapter house, entered from the north choir aisle by a passage and staircase. To the south of the nave is a large cloister, unusual in that the northern range, that adjacent the cathedral, was never built.

 

In section, the cathedral has the usual arrangement of a large church: a central nave with an aisle on each side, separated by two arcades. The elevation is in three stages, arcade, triforium gallery and clerestory. The nave is 67 feet (20 m) in height, very low compared to the Gothic cathedrals of France. It has a markedly horizontal emphasis, caused by the triforium having a unique form, a series of identical narrow openings, lacking the usual definition of the bays. The triforium is separated from the arcade by a single horizontal string course that runs unbroken the length of the nave. There are no vertical lines linking the three stages, as the shafts supporting the vault rise above the triforium.

 

The exterior of Wells Cathedral presents a relatively tidy and harmonious appearance since the greater part of the building was executed in a single style, Early English Gothic. This is uncommon among English cathedrals where the exterior usually exhibits a plethora of styles. At Wells, later changes in the Perpendicular style were universally applied, such as filling the Early English lancet windows with simple tracery, the construction of a parapet that encircles the roof, and the addition of pinnacles framing each gable, similar to those around the chapter house and on the west front. At the eastern end there is a proliferation of tracery with repeated motifs in the Reticulated style, a stage between Geometric and Flowing Decorated tracery.

 

The west front is 100 feet (30 m) high and 147 feet (45 m) wide, and built of Inferior Oolite of the Middle Jurassic period, which came from the Doulting Stone Quarry, about 8 miles (13 km) to the east. According to the architectural historian Alec Clifton-Taylor, it is "one of the great sights of England".

 

West fronts in general take three distinct forms: those that follow the elevation of the nave and aisles, those that have paired towers at the end of each aisle, framing the nave, and those that screen the form of the building. The west front at Wells has the paired-tower form, unusual in that the towers do not indicate the location of the aisles, but extend well beyond them, screening the dimensions and profile of the building.

 

The west front rises in three distinct stages, each clearly defined by a horizontal course. This horizontal emphasis is counteracted by six strongly projecting buttresses defining the cross-sectional divisions of nave, aisles and towers, and are highly decorated, each having canopied niches containing the largest statues on the façade.

 

At the lowest level of the façade is a plain base, contrasting with and stabilising the ornate arcades that rise above it. The base is penetrated by three doors, which are in stark contrast to the often imposing portals of French Gothic cathedrals. The outer two are of domestic proportion and the central door is ornamented only by a central post, quatrefoil and the fine mouldings of the arch.

 

Above the basement rise two storeys, ornamented with quatrefoils and niches originally holding about four hundred statues, with three hundred surviving until the mid-20th century. Since then, some have been restored or replaced, including the ruined figure of Christ in the gable.

 

The third stages of the flanking towers were both built in the Perpendicular style of the late 14th century, to the design of William Wynford; that on the north-west was not begun until about 1425. The design maintains the general proportions, and continues the strong projection of the buttresses.

 

The finished product has been criticised for its lack of pinnacles, and it is probable that the towers were intended to carry spires which were never built. Despite its lack of spires or pinnacles, the architectural historian Banister Fletcher describes it as "the highest development in English Gothic of this type of façade."

 

The sculptures on the west front at Wells include standing figures, seated figures, half-length angels and narratives in high relief. Many of the figures are life-sized or larger. Together they constitute the finest display of medieval carving in England. The figures and many of the architectural details were painted in bright colours, and the colouring scheme has been deduced from flakes of paint still adhering to some surfaces. The sculptures occupy nine architectural zones stretching horizontally across the entire west front and around the sides and the eastern returns of the towers which extend beyond the aisles. The strongly projecting buttresses have tiers of niches which contain many of the largest figures. Other large figures, including that of Christ, occupy the gable. A single figure stands in one of two later niches high on the northern tower.

 

In 1851 the archaeologist Charles Robert Cockerell published his analysis of the iconography, numbering the nine sculptural divisions from the lowest to the highest. He defined the theme as "a calendar for unlearned men" illustrating the doctrines and history of the Christian faith, its introduction to Britain and its protection by princes and bishops. He likens the arrangement and iconography to the Te Deum.

 

According to Cockerell, the side of the façade that is to the south of the central door is the more sacred and the scheme is divided accordingly. The lowest range of niches each contained a standing figure, of which all but four figures on the west front, two on each side, have been destroyed. More have survived on the northern and eastern sides of the north tower. Cockerell speculates that those to the south of the portal represented prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament while those to the north represented early missionaries to Britain, of which Augustine of Canterbury, St Birinus, and Benedict Biscop are identifiable by their attributes. In the second zone, above each pair of standing figures, is a quatrefoil containing a half-length angel in relief, some of which have survived. Between the gables of the niches are quatrefoils that contain a series of narratives from the Bible, with the Old Testament stories to the south, above the prophets and patriarchs, and those from the New Testament to the north. A horizontal course runs around the west front dividing the architectural storeys at this point.

 

Above the course, zones four and five, as identified by Cockerell, contain figures which represent the Christian Church in Britain, with the spiritual lords such as bishops, abbots, abbesses and saintly founders of monasteries on the south, while kings, queens and princes occupy the north. Many of the figures survive and many have been identified in the light of their various attributes. There is a hierarchy of size, with the more significant figures larger and enthroned in their niches rather than standing. Immediately beneath the upper course are a series of small niches containing dynamic sculptures of the dead coming forth from their tombs on the Day of Judgement. Although naked, some of the dead are defined as royalty by their crowns and others as bishops by their mitres. Some emerge from their graves with joy and hope, and others with despair.

 

The niches in the lowest zone of the gable contain nine angels, of which Cockerell identifies Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. In the next zone are the taller figures of the twelve apostles, some, such as John, Andrew and Bartholomew, clearly identifiable by the attributes that they carry. The uppermost niches of the gable contained the figure of Christ the Judge at the centre, with the Virgin Mary on his right and John the Baptist on his left. The figures all suffered from iconoclasm. A new statue of Jesus was carved for the central niche, but the two side niches now contain cherubim. Christ and the Virgin Mary are also represented by now headless figures in a Coronation of the Virgin in a niche above the central portal. A damaged figure of the Virgin and Christ Child occupies a quatrefoil in the spandrel of the door.

 

The central tower appears to date from the early 13th century. It was substantially reconstructed in the early 14th century during the remodelling of the east end, necessitating the internal bracing of the piers a decade or so later. In the 14th century the tower was given a timber and lead spire which burnt down in 1439. The exterior was then reworked in the Perpendicular style and given the present parapet and pinnacles. Alec Clifton-Taylor describes it as "outstanding even in Somerset, a county famed for the splendour of its church towers".

 

The north porch is described by art historian Nikolaus Pevsner as "sumptuously decorated", and intended as the main entrance. Externally it is simple and rectangular with plain side walls. The entrance is a steeply arched portal framed by rich mouldings of eight shafts with stiff-leaf capitals each encircled by an annular moulding at middle height. Those on the left are figurative, containing images representing the martyrdom of St Edmund the Martyr. The walls are lined with deep niches framed by narrow shafts with capitals and annulets like those of the portal. The path to the north porch is lined by four sculptures in Purbeck stone, each by Mary Spencer Watson, representing the symbols of the Evangelists.

 

The cloisters were built in the late 13th century and largely rebuilt from 1430 to 1508 and have wide openings divided by mullions and transoms, and tracery in the Perpendicular Gothic style. The vault has lierne ribs that form octagons at the centre of each compartment, the joints of each rib having decorative bosses. The eastern range is of two storeys, of which the upper is the library built in the 15th century.

 

Because Wells Cathedral was secular rather than monastic, cloisters were not a practical necessity. They were omitted from several other secular cathedrals but were built here and at Chichester. Explanations for their construction at these two secular cathedrals range from the processional to the aesthetic. As at Chichester, there is no northern range to the cloisters. In monastic cloisters it was the north range, benefiting most from winter sunlight, that was often used as a scriptorium.

 

In 1969, when a large chunk of stone fell from a statue near the main door, it became apparent that there was an urgent need for restoration of the west front. Detailed studies of the stonework and of conservation practices were undertaken under the cathedral architect, Alban D. R. Caroe and a restoration committee formed. The methods selected were those devised by Eve and Robert Baker. W. A. (Bert) Wheeler, clerk of works to the cathedral 1935–1978, had previously experimented with washing and surface treatment of architectural carvings on the building and his techniques were among those tried on the statues.

 

The conservation was carried out between 1974 and 1986, wherever possible using non-invasive procedures such as washing with water and a solution of lime, filling gaps and damaged surfaces with soft mortar to prevent the ingress of water and stabilising statues that were fracturing through corrosion of metal dowels. The surfaces were finished by painting with a thin coat of mortar and silane to resist further erosion and attack by pollutants. The restoration of the façade revealed much paint adhering to the statues and their niches, indicating that it had once been brightly coloured.

 

The particular character of this Early English interior is dependent on the proportions of the simple lancet arches. It is also dependent on the refinement of the architectural details, in particular the mouldings.

 

The arcade, which takes the same form in the nave, choir and transepts, is distinguished by the richness of both mouldings and carvings. Each pier of the arcade has a surface enrichment of 24 slender shafts in eight groups of three, rising beyond the capitals to form the deeply undulating mouldings of the arches. The capitals themselves are remarkable for the vitality of the stylised foliage, in a style known as "stiff-leaf". The liveliness contrasts with the formality of the moulded shafts and the smooth unbroken areas of ashlar masonry in the spandrels. Each capital is different, and some contain small figures illustrating narratives.

 

The vault of the nave rises steeply in a simple quadripartite form, in harmony with the nave arcade. The eastern end of the choir was extended and the whole upper part elaborated in the second quarter of the 14th century by William Joy. The vault has a multiplicity of ribs in a net-like form, which is very different from that of the nave, and is perhaps a recreation in stone of a local type of compartmented wooden roof of which examples remain from the 15th century, including those at St Cuthbert's Church, Wells. The vaults of the aisles of the choir also have a unique pattern.

 

Until the early 14th century, the interior of the cathedral was in a unified style, but it was to undergo two significant changes, to the tower and to the eastern end. Between 1315 and 1322 the central tower was heightened and topped by a spire, which caused the piers that supported it to show signs of stress. In 1338 the mason William Joy employed an unorthodox solution by inserting low arches topped by inverted arches of similar dimensions, forming scissors-like structures. These arches brace the piers of the crossing on three sides, while the easternmost side is braced by a choir screen. The bracing arches are known as "St Andrew's Cross arches", in a reference to the patron saint of the cathedral. They have been described by Wim Swaan – rightly or wrongly – as "brutally massive" and intrusive in an otherwise restrained interior.

 

Wells Cathedral has a square east end to the choir, as is usual, and like several other cathedrals including Salisbury and Lichfield, has a lower Lady Chapel projecting at the eastern end, begun by Thomas Witney in about 1310, possibly before the chapter house was completed. The Lady Chapel seems to have begun as a free-standing structure in the form of an elongated octagon, but the plan changed and it was linked to the eastern end by extension of the choir and construction of a second transept or retrochoir east of the choir, probably by William Joy.

 

The Lady Chapel has a vault of complex and somewhat irregular pattern, as the chapel is not symmetrical about both axes. The main ribs are intersected by additional non-supporting, lierne ribs, which in this case form a star-shaped pattern at the apex of the vault. It is one of the earliest lierne vaults in England. There are five large windows, of which four are filled with fragments of medieval glass. The tracery of the windows is in the style known as Reticulated Gothic, having a pattern of a single repeated shape, in this case a trefoil, giving a "reticulate" or net-like appearance.

 

The retrochoir extends across the east end of the choir and into the east transepts. At its centre the vault is supported by a remarkable structure of angled piers. Two of these are placed as to complete the octagonal shape of the Lady Chapel, a solution described by Francis Bond as "an intuition of Genius". The piers have attached shafts of marble, and, with the vaults that they support, create a vista of great complexity from every angle. The windows of the retrochoir are in the Reticulated style like those of the Lady Chapel, but are fully Flowing Decorated in that the tracery mouldings form ogival curves.

 

The chapter house was begun in the late 13th century and built in two stages, completed about 1310. It is a two-storeyed structure with the main chamber raised on an undercroft. It is entered from a staircase which divides and turns, one branch leading through the upper storey of Chain Gate to Vicars' Close. The Decorated interior is described by Alec Clifton-Taylor as "architecturally the most beautiful in England". It is octagonal, with its ribbed vault supported on a central column. The column is surrounded by shafts of Purbeck Marble, rising to a single continuous rippling foliate capital of stylised oak leaves and acorns, quite different in character from the Early English stiff-leaf foliage. Above the moulding spring 32 ribs of strong profile, giving an effect generally likened to "a great palm tree". The windows are large with Geometric Decorated tracery that is beginning to show an elongation of form, and ogees in the lesser lights that are characteristic of Flowing Decorated tracery. The tracery lights still contain ancient glass. Beneath the windows are 51 stalls, the canopies of which are enlivened by carvings including many heads carved in a light-hearted manner.

 

Wells Cathedral contains one of the most substantial collections of medieval stained glass in England, despite damage by Parliamentary troops in 1642 and 1643. The oldest surviving glass dates from the late 13th century and is in two windows on the west side of the chapter-house staircase. Two windows in the south choir aisle are from 1310 to 1320.

 

The Lady Chapel has five windows, of which four date from 1325 to 1330 and include images of a local saint, Dunstan. The east window was restored to a semblance of its original appearance by Thomas Willement in 1845. The other windows have complete canopies, but the pictorial sections are fragmented.

 

The east window of the choir is a broad, seven-light window dating from 1340 to 1345. It depicts the Tree of Jesse (the genealogy of Christ) and demonstrates the use of silver staining, a new technique that allowed the artist to paint details on the glass in yellow, as well as black. The combination of yellow and green glass and the application of the bright yellow stain gives the window its popular name, the "Golden Window". It is flanked by two windows each side in the clerestory, with large figures of saints, also dated to 1340–45. In 2010 a major conservation programme was undertaken on the Jesse Tree window.

 

The panels in the chapel of St Katherine are attributed to Arnold of Nijmegen and date from about 1520. They were acquired from the destroyed church of Saint-Jean, Rouen, with the last panel having been purchased in 1953.

 

The large triple lancet to the nave west end was glazed at the expense of Dean Creighton at a cost of £140 in 1664. It was repaired in 1813, and the central light was largely replaced to a design by Archibald Keightley Nicholson between 1925 and 1931. The main north and south transept end windows by James Powell and Sons were erected in the early 20th century.

 

The greater part of the stone carving of Wells Cathedral comprises foliate capitals in the stiff-leaf style. They are found ornamenting the piers of the nave, choir and transepts. Stiff-leaf foliage is highly abstract. Though possibly influenced by carvings of acanthus leaves or vine leaves, it cannot be easily identified with any particular plant. Here the carving of the foliage is varied and vigorous, the springing leaves and deep undercuts casting shadows that contrast with the surface of the piers. In the transepts and towards the crossing in the nave the capitals have many small figurative carvings among the leaves. These include a man with toothache and a series of four scenes depicting the "Wages of Sin" in a narrative of fruit stealers who creep into an orchard and are then beaten by the farmer. Another well-known carving is in the north transept aisle: a foliate corbel, on which climbs a lizard, sometimes identified as a salamander, a symbol of eternal life.

 

Carvings in the Decorated Gothic style may be found in the eastern end of the buildings, where there are many carved bosses. In the chapter house, the carvings of the 51 stalls include numerous small heads of great variety, many of them smiling or laughing. A well-known figure is the corbel of the dragon-slaying monk in the chapter house stair. The large continuous capital that encircles the central pillar of the chapter house is markedly different in style to the stiff-leaf of the Early English period. In contrast to the bold projections and undercutting of the earlier work, it has a rippling form and is clearly identifiable as grapevine.

 

The 15th-century cloisters have many small bosses ornamenting the vault. Two in the west cloister, near the gift shop and café, have been called sheela na gigs, i. e. female figures displaying their genitals and variously judged to depict the sin of lust or stem from ancient fertility cults.

 

Wells Cathedral has one of the finest sets of misericords in Britain. Its clergy has a long tradition of singing or reciting from the Book of Psalms each day, along with the customary daily reading of the Holy Office. In medieval times the clergy assembled in the church eight times daily for the canonical hours. As the greater part of the services was recited while standing, many monastic or collegiate churches fitted stalls whose seats tipped up to provide a ledge for the monk or cleric to lean against. These were "misericords" because their installation was an act of mercy. Misericords typically have a carved figurative bracket beneath the ledge framed by two floral motifs known, in heraldic manner, as "supporters".

 

The misericords date from 1330 to 1340. They may have been carved under the direction of Master Carpenter John Strode, although his name is not recorded before 1341. He was assisted by Bartholomew Quarter, who is documented from 1343. They originally numbered 90, of which 65 have survived. Sixty-one are installed in the choir, three are displayed in the cathedral, and one is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. New stalls were ordered when the eastern end of the choir was extended in the early 14th century. The canons complained that they had borne the cost of the rebuilding and ordered the prebendary clerics to pay for their own stalls. When the newly refurbished choir opened in 1339 many misericords were left unfinished, including one-fifth of the surviving 65. Many of the clerics had not paid, having been called to contribute a total sum of £200. The misericords survived better than the other sections of the stalls, which during the Protestant Reformation had their canopies chopped off and galleries inserted above them. One misericord, showing a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, dates from the 17th century. In 1848 came a complete rearrangement of the choir furniture, and 61 of the misericords were reused in the restructured stalls.

 

The subject matter of the carvings of the central brackets as misericords varies, but many themes recur in different churches. Typically the themes are less unified or directly related to the Bible and Christian theology than small sculptures seen elsewhere within churches, such as bosses. This applies at Wells, where none of the misericord carvings is directly based on a Bible story. The subjects, chosen either by the woodcarver, or perhaps by the one paying for the stall, have no overriding theme. The sole unifying elements are the roundels on each side of the pictorial subject, which all show elaborately carved foliage, in most cases formal and stylised in the later Decorated manner, but with several examples of naturalistic foliage, including roses and bindweed. Many of the subjects carry traditional interpretations. The image of the "Pelican in her Piety" (believed to feed her young on her own blood) is a recognised symbol for Christ's love for the Church. A cat playing with a mouse may represent the Devil snaring a human soul. Other subjects illustrate popular fables or sayings such as "When the fox preaches, look to your geese". Many depict animals, some of which may symbolise a human vice or virtue, or an aspect of faith.

 

Twenty-seven of the carvings depict animals: rabbits, dogs, a puppy biting a cat, a ewe feeding a lamb, monkeys, lions, bats, and the Early Christian motif of two doves drinking from a ewer. Eighteen have mythological subjects, including mermaids, dragons and wyverns. Five are clearly narrative, such as the Fox and the Geese, and the story of Alexander the Great being raised to Heaven by griffins. There are three heads: a bishop in a mitre, an angel, and a woman wearing a veil over hair arranged in coils over each ear. Eleven carvings show human figures, among which are several of remarkable design, conceived by the artist specifically for their purpose of supporting a shelf. One figure lies beneath the seat, supporting the shelf with a cheek, a hand and a foot. Another sits in a contorted manner supporting the weight on his elbow, while a further figure squats with his knees wide apart and a strained look on his face.

 

Some of the cathedral's fittings and monuments are hundreds of years old. The brass lectern in the Lady Chapel dates from 1661 and has a moulded stand and foliate crest. In the north transept chapel is a 17th-century oak screen with columns, formerly used in cow stalls, with artisan Ionic capitals and cornice, set forward over the chest tomb of John Godelee. There is a bound oak chest from the 14th century, which was used to store the chapter seal and key documents. The bishop's throne dates from 1340, and has a panelled, canted front and stone doorway, and a deep nodding cusped ogee canopy above it, with three-stepped statue niches and pinnacles. The throne was restored by Anthony Salvin around 1850. Opposite the throne is a 19th-century octagonal pulpit on a coved base with panelled sides, and steps up from the north aisle. The round font in the south transept is from the former Saxon cathedral and has an arcade of round-headed arches, on a round plinth. The font cover was made in 1635 and is decorated with the heads of putti. The Chapel of St Martin is a memorial to every Somerset man who fell in World War I.

 

The monuments and tombs include Gisa, bishop; † 1088; William of Bitton, bishop; † 1274; William of March, bishop; † 1302; John Droxford; † 1329; John Godelee; † 1333; John Middleton, died †1350; Ralph of Shrewsbury, died †; John Harewell, bishop; † 1386; William Bykonyll; † c. 1448; John Bernard; † 1459; Thomas Beckington; † died 1464; John Gunthorpe; † 1498; John Still; † 1607; Robert Creighton; † 1672; Richard Kidder, bishop; † 1703; George Hooper, bishop; † 1727 and Arthur Harvey, bishop; † 1894.

 

In the north transept is Wells Cathedral clock, an astronomical clock from about 1325 believed to be by Peter Lightfoot, a monk of Glastonbury. Its mechanism, dated between 1386 and 1392, was replaced in the 19th century and the original moved to the Science Museum in London, where it still operates. It is the second oldest surviving clock in England after the Salisbury Cathedral clock.

 

The clock has its original medieval face. Apart from the time on a 24-hour dial, it shows the motion of the Sun and Moon, the phases of the Moon, and the time since the last new Moon. The astronomical dial presents a geocentric or pre-Copernican view, with the Sun and Moon revolving round a central fixed Earth, like that of the clock at Ottery St Mary. The quarters are chimed by a quarter jack: a small automaton known as Jack Blandifers, who hits two bells with hammers and two with his heels. At the striking of the clock, jousting knights appear above the clock face.

 

On the outer wall of the transept, opposite Vicars' Hall, is a second clock face of the same clock, placed there just over seventy years after the interior clock and driven by the same mechanism. The second clock face has two quarter jacks (which strike on the quarter-hour) in the form of knights in armour.

 

In 2010 the official clock-winder retired and was replaced by an electric mechanism.

 

The first record of an organ at this church dates from 1310. A smaller organ, probably for the Lady Chapel, was installed in 1415. In 1620 an organ built by Thomas Dallam was installed at a cost of £398 1s 5d.

 

The 1620 organ was destroyed by parliamentary soldiers in 1643. An organ built in 1662 was enlarged in 1786 and again in 1855. In 1909–1910 an organ was built by Harrison & Harrison of Durham, with the best parts of the old organ retained. It has been serviced by the same company ever since.

 

Since November 1996 the cathedral has also had a portable chamber organ, by the Scottish makers, Lammermuir. It is used regularly to accompany performances of Tudor and baroque music.

 

The first recorded organist of Wells was Walter Bagele (or Vageler) in 1416. The post of organist or assistant organist has been held by more than 60 people since. Peter Stanley Lyons was Master of Choristers at Wells Cathedral, and Director of Music at Wells Cathedral School in 1954–1960. The choral conductor James William Webb-Jones, father of Lyons's wife Bridget (whom he married in the cathedral), was Headmaster of Wells Cathedral School in 1955–1960. Malcolm Archer was the appointed Organist and Master of the Choristers from 1996 to 2004. Matthew Owens was the appointed organist from 2005 to 2019.

 

There has been a choir of boy choristers at Wells since 909. Currently there are 18 boy choristers and a similar number of girl choristers, aged from eight to fourteen. The Vicars Choral was formed in the 12th century and the sung liturgy provided by a traditional cathedral choir of men and boys until the formation of an additional choir of girls in 1994. The boys and girls sing alternately with the Vicars Choral and are educated at Wells Cathedral School.

 

The Vicars Choral currently number twelve men, of whom three are choral scholars. Since 1348 the College of Vicars had its own accommodation in a quadrangle converted in the early 15th century to form Vicar's Close. The Vicars Choral generally perform with the choristers, except on Wednesdays, when they sing alone, allowing them to present a different repertoire, in particular plainsong.

 

In December 2010 Wells Cathedral Choir was rated by Gramophone magazine as "the highest ranking choir with children in the world". It continues to provide music for the liturgy at Sunday and weekday services. The choir has made many recordings and toured frequently, including performances in Beijing and Hong Kong in 2012. Its repertoire ranges from the choral music of the Renaissance to recently commissioned works.

 

The Wells Cathedral Chamber Choir is a mixed adult choir of 25 members, formed in 1986 to sing at the midnight service on Christmas Eve, and invited to sing at several other special services. It now sings for about 30 services a year, when the Cathedral Choir is in recess or on tour, and spends one week a year singing as the "choir in residence" at another cathedral. Although primarily liturgical, the choir's repertoire includes other forms of music, as well as performances at engagements such as weddings and funerals.

 

The cathedral is home to Wells Cathedral Oratorio Society (WCOS), founded in 1896. With around 160 voices, the society gives three concerts a year under the direction of Matthew Owens, Organist and Master of the Choristers at the cathedral. Concerts are normally in early November, December (an annual performance of Handel's Messiah) and late March. It performs with a number of specialist orchestras including: Music for Awhile, Chameleon Arts and La Folia.

 

The bells at Wells Cathedral are the heaviest ring of ten bells in the world, the tenor bell (the 10th and largest), known as Harewell, weighing 56.25 long hundredweight (2,858 kg). They are hung for full-circle ringing in the English style of change ringing. These bells are now hung in the south-west tower, although some were originally hung in the central tower.

 

The library above the eastern cloister was built between 1430 and 1508. Its collection is in three parts: early documents housed in the Muniment Room; the collection predating 1800 housed in the Chained Library; and the post-1800 collection housed in the Reading Room. The chapter's earlier collection was destroyed during the Reformation, so that the present library consists chiefly of early printed books, rather than medieval manuscripts. The earlier books in the Chained Library number 2,800 volumes and give an indication of the variety of interests of the members of the cathedral chapter from the Reformation until 1800. The focus of the collection is predominantly theology, but there are volumes on science, medicine, exploration, and languages. Books of particular interest include Pliny's Natural History printed in 1472, an Atlas of the World by Abraham Ortelius, printed in 1606, and a set of the works by Aristotle that once belonged to Erasmus. The library is open to the public at appointed times in the summer and presents a small exhibition of documents and books.

 

Three early registers of the Dean and Chapter edited by W. H. B. Bird for the Historical Manuscripts Commissioners – Liber Albus I (White Book; R I), Liber Albus II (R III) and Liber Ruber (Red Book; R II, section i) – were published in 1907. They contain with some repetition, a cartulary of possessions of the cathedral, with grants of land back to the 8th century, well before hereditary surnames developed in England, and acts of the Dean and Chapter and surveys of their estates, mostly in Somerset.

 

Adjacent to the cathedral is a large lawned area, Cathedral Green, with three ancient gateways: Brown's Gatehouse, Penniless Porch and Chain Gate. On the green is the 12th-century Old Deanery, largely rebuilt in the late 15th century by Dean Gunthorpe and remodelled by Dean Bathurst in the late 17th century. No longer the dean's residence, it is used as diocesan offices.

 

To the south of the cathedral is the moated Bishop's Palace, begun about 1210 by Jocelin of Wells but dating mostly from the 1230s. In the 15th century Thomas Beckington added a north wing, now the bishop's residence. It was restored and extended by Benjamin Ferrey between 1846 and 1854.

 

To the north of the cathedral and connected to it by the Chain Gate is Vicars' Close, a street planned in the 14th century and claimed to be the oldest purely residential street in Europe, with all but one of its original buildings intact. Buildings in the close include the Vicars Hall and gateway at the south end, and the Vicars Chapel and Library at the north end.

 

The Liberty of St Andrew was the historic liberty and parish that encompassed the cathedral and surrounding lands closely associated with it.

 

The English painter J. M. W. Turner visited Wells in 1795, making sketches of the precinct and a water colour of the west front, now in the Tate gallery. Other artists whose paintings of the cathedral are in national collections are Albert Goodwin, John Syer and Ken Howard.

 

The cathedral served to inspire Ken Follett's 1989 novel The Pillars of the Earth and with a modified central tower, featured as the fictional Kingsbridge Cathedral at the end of the 2010 television adaptation of that novel. The interior of the cathedral was used for a 2007 Doctor Who episode, "The Lazarus Experiment", while the exterior shots were filmed at Southwark Cathedral.

 

An account of the damage to the cathedral during the Monmouth Rebellion is included in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1889 historical novel Micah Clarke.

 

The cathedral provided scenes for the 2019–2020 television series The Spanish Princess.

Shot by my Guru Late KG Maheshwariji..

 

Old memory

 

Before Maheshwariji fell I'll I used to go to his house at Napean Sea road and model for him he was assisted by another Guru late Prof BW Jatkarji.

We three had some great times they pushed me into Salon photography an aspect I did not enjoy as I was not cut for competitive photography.

 

I miss both my Gurus my art my photography was nurtured by them.. Mr Maheshwariji considered me a rare street photographer.

My pictures are hanging at his sons photo gallery at Nashik.

My street photography those days was connected to diverse religion processions and ritualism.

I was part of Bollywood but the only two actors both veterans I documented were late Mr Rajesh Khanna and Mr Danny Denzongpa.

  

www.instagram.com/firozeshakir/

What I have learned is but a handful of earth, what is left unlearned is the Earth itself. -Tamil proverb