Durham Cathedral
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.