Historic Places in Worcestershire

Worcester Cathedral stands magnificently on the west bank of the River Severn in the city of Worcester, its honey-coloured sandstone tower reflected in the river below and visible for miles across the Severn Vale and the Malvern Hills beyond. It is one of England's great medieval cathedrals, a building of nearly a thousand years of continuous development that combines Norman solidity with Gothic elegance and contains some of the most important medieval tombs in the country. The cathedral's origins lie in the seventh century when the first Bishop of Worcester established a monastery and church here, but the building that visitors explore today began with the construction of the Norman crypt under Bishop Wulfstan in the 1080s. This crypt, one of the largest Norman crypts in England, survives almost entirely intact beneath the later Gothic nave and gives a powerful sense of the massive, round-arched solidity of early Norman architecture. Above it, the cathedral was progressively rebuilt and extended over the following three centuries in the successive Gothic styles of Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular, creating the harmonious medieval building visible today. The two greatest medieval tombs in the cathedral give it a historical significance matched by very few buildings in England. King John, who died in 1216 and whose reign was marked by the sealing of Magna Carta, is buried before the high altar in a tomb that features one of the earliest royal effigies in England, a Purbeck marble figure of the king in full regalia. Nearby, the chantry chapel of Prince Arthur, the elder brother of Henry VIII who died in 1502 at the age of fifteen before he could succeed to the throne he was born to inherit, is one of the finest pieces of late Gothic decorative carving in the country, its intricate stonework creating a screen of extraordinary delicacy around the prince's tomb. The cloisters on the south side of the cathedral are exceptionally well-preserved and the quiet garden they enclose provides a peaceful retreat from the city outside. The view of the cathedral from the meadows across the Severn, with cricket played on the county ground adjacent to the building during the summer season, is one of the most enduringly English scenes in the country.

Witley Court in Worcestershire is one of the grandest and most poignant ruins in England, the shell of what was once one of the most spectacular country houses in the country, its great Italianate facade and shattered interiors preserved as a maintained ruin by English Heritage and conveying with particular force the fragility of Victorian aristocratic wealth and the devastating consequences of its collapse. The house was originally a Jacobean manor house that was transformed in stages during the nineteenth century for successive owners of increasing wealth and ambition. The final and most dramatic transformation was carried out for the Earl of Dudley in the 1850s and 1860s by the architect Samuel Dawkes and the landscape designer William Nesfield, who together created a palatial Italianate mansion with state rooms of extraordinary luxury and grounds laid out with elaborate formal gardens, parterre plantings and the two enormous fountain basins that survive today as among the finest examples of Victorian landscape design in the country. The Perseus and Andromeda fountain, one of the largest in Britain, was capable of throwing its jet 36 metres into the air and was powered by a sophisticated hydraulic system fed by a purpose-built reservoir. The fountain operated only on special occasions due to the enormous quantities of water required, but on those occasions its spectacle was described by contemporary visitors in the most extravagant terms. The fountain has been restored to working order and operates on selected days throughout the visitor season. The house was gutted by fire in 1937 and subsequently abandoned, the contents sold and the building left to deteriorate over the following decades. The contrast between the still-impressive scale of the surviving facades and the roofless interiors open to the sky creates an atmosphere of melancholy grandeur that deliberately preserved ruins rarely achieve.