The terrible fire that has ravaged Notre Dame this week is a reminder both of the importance of cathedrals – as places of worship, as enduring symbols of national identity – and of their fragility. Standing in Coventry cathedral at the end of his voyage of discovery around Britain’s cathedrals – or “ships of heaven” as he describes them – travel writer Christopher Somerville has an epiphany. As he turns from Graham Sutherland’s tapestry Christ in Glory in the Tetramorph to look back down the nave of Basil Spence’s cathedral, raised in the ruins of the 14th-century building after it was destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940, he sees it ablaze with coloured light from the floor-to-roof windows and he suddenly realises what this remarkable space was designed to say: “You can only understand your life when you’ve come through the gathering dark to Christ at the end, and can turn and look back on it.”
There are apparently more than 100 cathedrals in Britain but Somerville’s evocative book is not intended as an exhaustive guide, rather a selection of his 20 or so personal favourites. He begins with Wells cathedral which he knew and loved as a child: “Wells was my cathedral, its frolics and personalities, its carvings and clock”. Here as in the others he visits, he takes the reader on an illuminating tour of its history while using interviews with people who work in and care for the cathedral to reveal the vital role these ancient buildings still play.
The bishop of Bath and Wells, Peter Hancock, tells him that “in a cathedral people often discover what they have never experienced before, a connection with God”. Nevertheless, as he later discovers in Lincoln, cathedrals are also the stage for very human dramas. In the 1990s, Lincoln became notorious for a very public row between the dean and the sub-dean which involved accusations of fraud: a “sad and grubby saga” that still upsets those who serve there.
Lincoln cathedral has seen it all, including a devastating fire and an earthquake: it is “a much mended, much patched old barque”. Indeed one of the surprising themes of the book is just how unstable and fragile these apparently immutable stone edifices are: “these giant, delicate buildings move. They wobble. They bend and break”. Towers fall and are rebuilt; the wind, rain and pollution eat away at the stonework. The stone masons he meets show him that “it’s a continuous process of rebirth”.
SomervilleThe author has a wonderfully acute eye for details, such as quirky gargoyles and grotesques: carvings of demons and dragons, “Bruegelian characters” like folk musicians playing a shawm or a bumbulum, and the ubiquitous Green Man, “overwhelmed by great curly kale-like leaves sprouting from mouth, eyes and brow”.
Somerville’s travels take him from Canterbury in Kent, where St Augustine began his task of converting the pagan British at the end of the sixth century, to York Minster, “a fortress of a place” built on top of an assembly hall used by the Roman garrison based there two thousand years ago, and to the Anglican and the Roman Catholic cathedrals of Liverpool (“it’s as though the city were trying to express opposing forces – yin and yang, perhaps”). He also visits Armagh’s Protestant and Roman Catholic cathedrals, as well as St Magnus cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney, where once the crews of Scandinavian trading ships hung their large square sails out to dry from the pillars of the nave.
His fascinating stories have much to say about our shared history and culture: from the waves of invaders, such as the Normans, who shaped the architecture of our cathedrals, to the memorials commemorating dimly remembered heroes, and the ancient and modern artworks celebrating the sacred in life. “Art is absolutely fundamental to a cathedral,” a priest tells him in Salisbury: “It’s what this place is about: moments of creative surprise.”
• Ships of Heaven is published by Doubleday (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
