Cathedrals and the bishops

Sorry for the long absence since my last post. It's been a combination of being busy, some days not feeling 100%, and working on some of the photos I've wanted to put up here. So the next installment of my holiday in Somerset ...

After W and I had been to Wookey Hole we took ourselves to Wells, which is only about 2 miles away. It's a lovely little city, with some very old buildings that look a bit drunken, propping each other up along the edge of the street, but just off the main street (at least the main street that we found) and square are two buildings that are far more stately in their presentation. The first is the Bishop's Palace, which has been home to the various bishops of Bath and Wells of the past 800 years.

This is the moated entrance to the grounds of the Bishop's Palace. You can just see some cygnets on the water, and I read in the palace that the swans on the moat/river learnt many, many years ago to ring a bell that's attached to the wall and be fed by the occupants of the palace. The swans have passed the skill down from generation to generation so that apparently they still ring the bell for food even today, though I have to say that we didn't witness this.

And this is the side view of the palace and one small section of it's lovely gardens. You can see it's proximity to the Cathedral by the Cathedral's tower peeking over the top, but I'll come to that in a mo. The gardens of the Bishop's Palace are lovely, and although it was wet we had an amble around and enjoyed the atmosphere. There were a number of sculptures in the gardens that were part of the Somerset Arts Festival, so we took our time looking at some of them, and there was one that I particularly liked of three swans in flight ...

It's not the clearest photo of them, but it gives an impression. There was something very pleasing about the simple lines and the gleaming metal that reflected the grace that these birds have.

Going back from the palace into the market square, and then almost doubling back on yourself through a little arch way in the corner you follow a path for a short distance and come face to face with this ...

The Cathedral. It's quite an awe-inspiring sight, and you need some time outside it just to take in it's size and splendor. However, as you'd expect in a building of such grandeur on the outside, there are some wonderful sights to take in on the inside too.

This is a detail of some lace work that's at least a few hundred years old, so far as I remember. It's in a small cabinet, in a darkened corner of the bottom end of the cathedral, but I stumbled upon it and thought it was beautiful and amazing. Think of the work that's gone into it, and how amazing it is that it's lasted all these hundreds of years.

The other Cathedral we went to was Bath Abbey. Bath is another beautiful city, though it has perhaps a bit more elegance and grandeur in it's whole demeanour than Wells. The Abbey isn't as awe-inspiring from the outside as Wells Cathedral is, but it's still very fine and far from small ...

And here are some photos of the interior ...