Today we discovered more of the story of St Cuthbert. We decided to drive down to have a look at Durham. We have not been there before and I really liked it. It is a small manageable city with a University, so fits my criterion as a good place to live. The Cathedral is magnificent and the city itself has been declared a World Heritage site.
The first thing we did was go into the World Heritage site office to get an introduction to the site and were impressed with the Audiovisual about it. It was informative and entertaining. New techniques were used in the construction of the Cathedral which made it more interesting when we came to see them. What impressed me though was the fact that the castle is now part of the University. The disappointing part was that the public are not able to visit the castle, but the audio visual showed the students having a great time in the dining room etc.
As we were going through the exhibitions in the Cathedral, we discovered more of the story about St Cuthbert. He was a monk and considered a very holy man while he was alive. He was sent by St Aidan to Northumbria, and ended up becoming Bishop of Lindisfarne (now also known as Holy Island). When he died his coffin was kept in the altar in the Church. When the Vikings started making incursions into Northumbria, the monks opened his coffin and discovered that his body and even his clothes were still in almost perfect condition. They took the coffin with them. They did this for a long time and finally ended up in Durham.
There are two versions of how this came about. In the Cathedral an exhibition label said that one of the monks who was carrying the coffin experienced a visitation from St Cuthbert who described the site on which the Cathedral was subsequently built. The other, which was in a square near the theatre in Durham next to another sculpture the same as the one we saw in the Church in Holy Island. The label next to the sculpture there says that the coffin got too heavy for the monks to move. Brian's comment on reading that one was that the monks had just got too old to carry it, and that the one who had the vision mentioned in the label in the Cathedral was the first to realise that he was too old to be carrying it.
As I read it the journey started from Holy Island to lay St Cuthbert's coffin to rest in Ripon (Fountains Abbey) but at Durham the coffin had from one account to have become "too heavy to move" and from another to have become "immovable". I was at some difficulty in understanding how a coffin and its occupant can become heavier or immovable. Then came the report that one of the bearers had a vision of St Cuthbert himself declaring his preference to laid to rest at Durham. May I suggest that this vision came at a most appropriate time from the viewpoint of the monks bearing the coffin and all quickly agreed to the request of the posthumous request of St Cuthbert.
We had used the park and ride service to Durham, but of course the bus doesn't go from the same place as it lets you off. We were not sure we were in the right place and started talking to a young woman who was in the same boat. Finally found out that we were at the wrong bus stop but by that time she had told us that she was new to Durham and was on here way home after enrolling in a course to help her set up her own business. She is a photographer and before moving to Durham, she worked for the Defence Department and did the photographs of all the men who had been killed in Afghanistan. It was part of the involvement of Royal Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire.
I do remember seeing a documentary about the way this was handled. It was extremely moving and she said that she had found it so, but also very rewarding.
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