St Davids Cathedral
St Davids Cathedral is one of the most important religious sites in Britain, the mother church of the Church in Wales and the traditional shrine of St David, the patron saint of Wales, who founded a monastic community here in the sixth century. The cathedral stands in a hollow in the smallest city in Britain, its massive purple sandstone tower visible above the surrounding walls and rooftops but the full scale of the building revealed only when you descend the Thirty-Nine Steps from the market cross and see it rising before you from the floor of the sheltered valley it has occupied for nearly 1,500 years. The current cathedral was begun in 1181 by Bishop Peter de Leia under the patronage of King Henry II, who made a pilgrimage to St Davids in the same year as penance for his role in the murder of Thomas Becket. The building demonstrates the Romanesque to Gothic transition that characterised ecclesiastical architecture in the late twelfth century, with the solid round arches and massive piers of the nave contrasting with the more delicate Gothic additions made to the presbytery and Lady Chapel in subsequent centuries. The nave arcade leans noticeably outward as a result of subsidence on the soft ground, giving the interior a slightly vertiginous quality that enhances rather than diminishes its character. The nave ceiling is one of the most ornate in Britain, a late fifteenth-century Irish oak roof richly carved with pendant and decorative panels that catches the light filtering through the cathedral's windows to create an effect of extraordinary warmth and complexity. Beneath the high altar stands the shrine of St David himself, restored in the late twentieth century and once again a focus for pilgrimage. In the medieval period two pilgrimages to St Davids were considered equivalent to one to Rome, and three to be equal to visiting Jerusalem, a testament to the importance of this remote location in the religious geography of medieval Christendom. The ruins of Bishop Gower's episcopal palace adjacent to the cathedral are among the finest medieval ecclesiastical ruins in Wales, their arcaded parapets and great hall standing as testament to the wealth and ambition of the medieval bishops of this poor but spiritually rich diocese.