Other in County Durham

Durham Cathedral is widely considered one of the supreme achievements of Romanesque architecture anywhere in the world, a massive Norman church built on a peninsula in the dramatic meander of the River Wear between 1093 and 1133 that stands as arguably the greatest cathedral building in England. The UNESCO World Heritage Site it forms with Durham Castle has been celebrated by visitors and writers across the centuries, and the poet John Betjeman's description of it as the greatest piece of architecture in the British Isles represents a widely shared response to a building of overwhelming quality and presence. The cathedral was built to house the remains of St Cuthbert, the most venerated saint of northern England, whose body had been carried around Northumbria for over a century by monks fleeing Viking raids before being settled at Durham in 995. The shrine of St Cuthbert, together with the head of St Oswald, King of Northumbria, and the remains of the Venerable Bede, who was transferred to Durham in 1022, gave the cathedral a collection of relics that made it one of the most important pilgrimage sites in medieval Britain. The cathedral's architectural significance lies above all in its pioneering use of the pointed ribbed vault, which appears here for the first time in a major building anywhere in the world and represents the technical breakthrough that made Gothic architecture possible. The nave vault of Durham Cathedral, constructed at the beginning of the twelfth century, solved the fundamental problem of how to roof a wide stone building permanently in stone, and the solution developed by the Durham masons was adopted and elaborated across all subsequent Gothic building in Europe over the following four centuries. The Galilee Chapel at the west end contains the tomb of Bede, and the Cathedral's Treasury holds the pectoral cross and portable altar found in Cuthbert's tomb, among the most important early medieval artefacts in Britain.

Wensleydale is the broadest and most pastoral of the Yorkshire Dales, a wide river valley of exceptional agricultural beauty running east from the high fells above Hawes to the Vale of York, its broad floor of traditional meadows and its stone-built villages creating the archetypal image of the Yorkshire Dales that has appeared on countless calendars, postcards and chocolate boxes. The dale takes its name from the village of Wensley rather than from the River Ure that flows through it, and while the dale lacks the dramatic limestone pavements and waterfalls of some of its neighbours, it compensates with a landscape of human-made beauty that reflects centuries of traditional farming practice. The meadow landscape of Wensleydale is of national ecological importance. The traditional hay meadows that have been farmed by the same methods for centuries, cut once annually after the flowers have seeded and fertilised only with farmyard manure, support plant communities of extraordinary diversity including yellow rattle, wood crane's-bill, great burnet and dozens of grass and wildflower species that have been lost from the intensively managed lowland meadows of the rest of England. The Pennine Dales Meadows Special Area of Conservation protects the finest surviving examples, and a walk through an unimproved Wensleydale meadow in June is one of the most quietly beautiful experiences the English countryside offers. The dale is equally famous for its cheese, a crumbly white cow's milk variety with a history stretching back to the Cistercian monks of Jervaulx Abbey who developed the recipe in the twelfth century. The Wensleydale Creamery at Hawes, which narrowly escaped closure in the 1990s and was saved by a management buyout, now welcomes visitors to see traditional cheese-making in action and sells its products direct from the creamery shop. Aysgarth Falls, where the River Ure descends in three broad natural steps through the dale, is the most spectacular natural feature in Wensleydale and one of the most visited sites in the Dales. The nearby castles of Bolton and Middleham add historical depth to a dale that rewards slow exploration.