Living stone

In a flippant moment I once described Newark as an insignificant town in Nottinghamshire. These days I reflect more on my own insignificance, and I fully repented the comment when I first visited Newark for its literary festival last year. Newark is historic, intricate, and splendid.

I’m going to be passing through the town today, and will give proper salutation.

Again this morning the roads are wet. I like this arrangement of dry days, and overnight rain, and I must remember to specify it for all cycling expeditions.

After a bit of a fight with a canal crossing, I set off at speed along Fosse Way. There’s a nice smooth cycle path beside the thundering Roman road. In another month the cycle path will be impassable, swallowed by a jungle of brambles that’s already encroaching on either side.

It’s a relief to get onto the quiet roads, and stop outside Stapleford under an oak tree that looks like the one at home. A fleeting incursion of home-sickness threatens.

Then a few miles of rampant flowering rhododendron, some of it 25 feet high, before coffee outside a Tardis barge on the river at Newark, a renewed apology to that town, and only a few miles further to Southwell.

There is no agreement, even among the residents, about how this town should be pronounced; so I avoid the dispute, and refer only to “The Minster”. There’s a lovely welcome in the carved porch – a bit like a taxi driver’s placard at an airport. Today I’m definitely expected!

Southwell Minster is overwhelming. It doesn’t feel grand and intimidating when you enter, as so many cathedrals do. But the enormously sturdy Norman pillars, and the squat round arches, give it an earthy gravitas that is missing from the more delicate pointed arches that came a century later. These have been here since about 1180.

There’s an Archbishop’s Palace out the back, where Cardinal Wolesey spent his last days, failing to appease Henry VIII. But that seems incidental to the cathedral itself, which is full of wonders.

There’s a West window, with 300 angels in it. There’s a Chapter House which is world-famous for its 700 year old carvings – not figures of saints, or anything like that, but wild green leaves. Oak, maple, buttercup, hawthorn, vines, hops, ivy, and a dozen others grow in delicate magnificence. And this is not wood – it’s stone.

Everywhere, not just in the Chapter House, the stone carving is almost unbelievable in its delicacy, and clarity, and detail. Some of it is serious, but jokes abound too.

There are a couple of minor leaks in the roof, which is apparently why there is more audience on one side than the other. I’m playing in the Norman nave, looking up at the angel window, feeling honoured, and blessed, in abundance.

Afterwards Andy wants to take me for tea, talk about his membership of an ancient order of knights, and press a further donation on me with a loud and eloquent prayer of blessing. Five minutes after he’s gone, I discover the donation has fallen out of my pocket, and I laugh at the blessing that has now seen the money passed on.

But then I find it’s been handed in at the shop, and I’m reunited with Andy’s blessing.