CHAPTER 11: LIVERPOOL, DERBY & LINCOLN AND A FEW WELSH CASTLES

For reasons that defy all logic, A and I, having decided to tie in a cathedral visit with our Christmas Shopping Day 2001, chose Chester as our shopping destination when we'd already been to its cathedral. But we still managed to add to our collection by calling in at Liverpool on the way: this involved a detour of nearly fifty miles. Nevertheless, having set off bright and early, we arrived in Liverpool around mid morning, parked and set off to explore the England's largest cathedral. We eschewed the opportunity to visit it's more charismatic neighbour, the Catholic Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, with its innovative circular design. I do believe we'd both been inside it on previous occasions and drunk in the wonderful light that beams in through a halo of stained glass windows. No, we needed to stay focussed, and our mission certainly didn't involve any cathedrals from the Roman church. We'd deliberately limited ourselves to Anglican cathedrals when we started out because these tended to be the older buildings we'd grown up visiting and marvelling over. When Henry VIII created his own church, existing places of worship were transferred to the Church of England. Therefore, when religious freedoms were finally granted to Catholics, they had to find new churches and cathedrals to meet in. Liverpool wasn't the first place we'd been to that had an Anglican / Catholic pair: others including Bristol, Norwich, Sheffield, Newcastle and Birmingham. Portsmouth also has two whilst the three Anglican cathedrals of Westminster Abbey, St Paul's and Southwark are matched by the Catholic Westminster Cathedral, St George's in Southwark and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Cathedral in Mayfair. The latter is one of only two cathedrals in England that represents Catholics who follow the eastern Latin rite, the other being the Syro-Malabar Cathedral in Preston whose mother church is in India. Altogether there are 20 Roman Catholic cathedrals in England and, had we decided on collecting these, we'd have been finished by now. This figure does not include Gibraltar which also has both Anglican and Catholic cathedrals. We were to visit Gibraltar on a future holiday together but we neglected to visit the cathedral. Just for completeness, I should mention that the Greek Orthodox Church has nine English cathedrals, the Russian Orthodox Church has two, and London boasts four further cathedrals belonging to the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Antiochian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. Meanwhile, North African Coptic  Christians will find their cathedrals in Stevenage and Solihull. That's a grand total of 81 and does not include the Cathedral of Our Lady at Walsingham, a place of pilgrimage in Norfolk that currently isn't a cathedral because it's headed by a married man. If a single man takes over in the future it will become a cathedral again.

Liverpool's two cathedrals are at either end of the aptly named Hope Street and both are 20th century creations. They are very grand and impressive buildings but very different. The Anglican cathedral we stepped inside was vast. There were no degree ceremonies taking place but there was a meeting in the choir and so that part of our cathedral was off limits. It really was a place of superlatives. By floor area, it is the largest Anglican cathedral in the world and one of the biggest overall. It has the country's biggest organ, although as it set in two chambers either side of the choir, we were straining to catch a glimpse of it. It has 10,268 pipes with the organist having 200 stops to use. I bet he or she doesn't have to deliver sideways kicks on the lower F sharp pedal. Then there are the bells. They don't have the heaviest individual  bell in the world: that is the 216 ton Tsar bell in the grounds of the Kremlin; an impressive beast of a bell that we saw on our holiday in Moscow. They do have the heaviest peal of bells in the world though. The twelve Bartlett bells are also hung higher than any other set of bells in the cathedral's central tower. The largest of the twelve bells, Great George, doesn't quite make it to the number one spot in the UK: that honour at the time we visited fell to Great Paul in St Paul's Cathedral although the 2012 Olympic Bell now holds that position. Great George would have been smaller than Big Ben had not the original cracked during testing with a Not Quite So Big Ben being cast as its replacement. I once had a tour of what is now called the Elizabeth Tower in the Palace of Westminster. Our party stood next to the Big Ben as it struck 12 midday and, although it was loud, it certainly wasn't deafening. We were asked to be silent during the time it took to strike the hour as the sound was being sent out live on the BBC's World Service. Apparently, this used to happen on the hour throughout the day until on one occasion when a workman, engaged in some repair work near to the BBC's microphone, struck his finger with a hammer between the ding dong ding dongs and the first bong. In addition to hearing the chimes, listeners around the world heard the workman's colourful language as he nursed his throbbing finger. 

I never took up bell ringing although I did give it a try as a teenager. My grandfather must have been quite decent at it as I remember certificates on the wall of my grandparents' dining room recording his participation in celebrated peals of Bob Majors and Gransire Triples. Bells first arrived in this country with the missionaries who would ring handbells to summon the congregation to worship. By 750 AD, they were sufficiently common for the Archbishop of York to order all priests to ring them. In the minds of superstitious medieval folk, the bells held mystical powers with the ability to keep them safe from attack and disease and to ward off the devil from getting his hands on a recently deceased person's soul. Originally, they were simply hung with a rope descending for the priest to hold when tolling. The reformation saw many bells removed from churches but they were soon being reinstalled, usually mounted on a wheel that gave the person ringing the bell the ability to stop and start it at will. The job of ringing passed to lay people who would often be paid. Those in the tower of St Margaret's Westminster received one shilling for ringing the bells to mark the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots and considerably more a few years later to celebrate Parliament surviving the Gunpowder Plot. In the 17th century, local village ringers began trying to outdo their neighbours and various sequences were created to change the order the bells were rung in. Over the years, they have tolled for the dead, sounded the alarm and rung for moments of national celebration. They are a quintessential British sound and long may they continue to peal. 

Our visit to Liverpool Cathedral could have been very different had the leaders of the new diocese of Liverpool decided to stick with the building they chose as their pro-cathedral in 1880. A pro-cathedral is basically a temporary location for the bishop's cathedra. In Liverpool's case this honour befell the church of St Peters' described by one rector as, "ugly and hideous." Rather than convert this into the cathedral proper as many other diocese have done, an Act of Parliament for a new cathedral building was passed. Plans were drawn up but the original location was found to be unsuitable and the project was abandoned. It was revived again in 1900 with land on St James's Mount being chosen as a more suitable spot. A competition was launched to find the best design with 103 plans submitted for what was to be the first cathedral to be built from scratch since St Paul's after the Great Fire of London. The competition was won by the 22 year old Giles Gilbert Scott. Giles came from an illustrious family of architects. His grandfather, Sir George Gilbert Scott was a name that frequently cropped up as we were looking at Victorian repairs and restorations. In addition to the work he'd done in churches and cathedrals across the land, he was responsible for the magnificently gothic Midland Hotel at St Pancras railway station and the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park. His father, George Jnr., uncle John and brother Adrian were all successful architects as well. Young Giles had two goes at the cathedral, abandoning his first design which featured two towers, for one with a single central tower, causing some consternation in doing so as work had already begun. After the foundation stone was laid in 1904, it took 74 years for the building to be eventually completed. Gilbert went on to design many more buildings including Battersea and Bankside power stations, the latter now housing the Tate Modern art collection. He also designed the iconic red telephone box that could be found across the land in pre mobile phone times.

Our exploration of the cathedral completed, we returned to the car and departed from Liverpool without exploring any of its other treasures. A didn't like Liverpool, like he didn't like Coventry ... and Nottingham ... and the whole of Derbyshire - it was best not to try to find any logic in this so I sat back and let him drive me to Chester. I'd been to Chester a number of times: spending one New Year's Eve in a house overlooking fields that skirted the River Dee; watching the Heisel Stadium tragedy unfold on a tiny little television in our caravan; a family day out to the zoo to celebrate our Ruby Wedding and, of course, our Telegraph Weekend and cathedral visit. A year after visiting the Eleanor Crosses, I made a brief stop in the city on my way to another historical collection, inspired by my shared love of history, collecting and writing little articles for the local magazine. This time, I was heading off to find every castle on the 'iron ring' that Edward I, when not erecting monuments to his deceased wife, was building or converting a string of castles around north and central Wales to cement his power in a region he had taken control of. Altogether I had 17 castles to visit and two days to complete my task: coffee in Chester was only the briefest of stops. 

Flint Castle was my first destination, standing a little forgotten by a housing estate on the shore of the Dee estuary. The castle, like a number of others, was free to explore. I had decided beforehand that I'd locate each castle but not necessarily pay vast amounts of money in entry fees just to have a quick whizz round before the next castle called me. I'd already been round the magnificent castles of Harlech, Caernarfon and Conwy, the most impressive three fortifications, still very much intact centuries after they were built. I did fork out some cash to go around Criccieth despite it being a ruin, because it afforded me panoramic views of the coastline sweeping off the east along the Llyn peninsular, with Harlech just visible to the west. A number of the castles lie fairly close together, so on my first day I had been to all the castles between Flint and Caernarfon although my plans were sent awry by failing to find the remaining keep of Hawarden Castle which lies somewhere inaccessible on the Hawarden estate, once the home of British Prime Minister William Gladstone. I had more success at Holt, guarding a strategic crossing point on the River Dee, although it was so hidden away in a corner of the village that asking a couple of locals where it was drew blank responses: they knew there was a huge sandstone edifice somewhere in the village but they couldn't work out how I might get to it.

Finding Chirk Castle was fairly straightforward and, being a National Trust property, I was able to take a tour for free. Caergwrie Castle was also accessible once I'd climbed up a fairly stiff hill. The commanding view it would have once had was now obstructed by woods that had grown up around it following a fire that left the building in ruins. The next three castles were in fairly close proximity. The delightful Ruthin Castle had to be espied from afar as it is now a hotel, whilst Denbigh had both its castle and its ancient town walls for me to explore. Edward built Rhuddlan Castle so as to have an English presence at the northern end of Offa's Dyke, the 8th century earthworks that marked the border between England and Wales for centuries. In between visiting Conwy and my final castle of the day at Caernarfon, I crossed the Menai Straights onto the Isle of Anglesea to find Beaumaris. It was a bit of a trek and by now it was getting late, I was ready to turn in for the day and it was raining. I must revisit Beaumaris sometime because standing outside, gazing at it in the gloom from under the dripping hood of my waterproof really didn't do it justice. 

After a curry in Caernarfon, a good night's sleep and a wander round the walled town the next morning, I was ready for the next stage of my journey which involved far fewer castles but much longer distances between. I set off into Snowdonia National Park to find Dolwyddelan Castle. The roads were fairly quiet and the castle car park empty. Set some distance from the village of the same name, I had the ruins all to myself. Then it was off to Criccieth and Harlech back on the coast. The coastal road followed in reverse a railway journey that I'd made many years earlier. I was with a group staying in Snowdonia but I'd had to delay joining them to attend an interview. I'd decided to take the train because I love train travel and the route I'd planned would take me all along the Welsh coast from Aberdovey to Porthmadog with, no doubt, stunning scenery to enjoy. I caught a train to Birmingham and then boarded a rattly old diesel to complete my trip. The seats were hard, it was cold and the journey took for ever with the train stopping at every possible place it could just to annoy me. By the time the coast came into view I was mightily fed up. My mood wasn't improved by the addition of about twenty school children commuting home from school, full of noise and irritating behaviour. The beaches, cliffs, streams and rock pools that I'd so looked forward to seeing, left me totally unmoved. It was an awful journey and I also didn't get the job. 

With just three castles to collect, I headed inland again to the enticingly named Castell y Bere. Finding it was quite a challenge and I ended up travelling along single track roads, barely seeing any signs of habitation or other cars for mile after mile, and then suddenly there was a car park and an information sign informing me how this had once been a place of great strategic importance. It was hard to imagine as I trekked up yet another hill and descended into a broad valley with the ruins of the castle a hundred metres ahead. There had once been a small town that serviced the castle but that had long disappeared. Castell y Bere now stood all alone in this empty valley, mountains towering up on all sides. It felt quite mystical and magical, echoes of the past caught on the wind as it whipped between broken fragments of walls and towers. I could have spent much more time there but Aberystwyth and Builth Wells called. By the time I reached Aberystwyth, the enigmatic wind of Castell y Bere had developed into a minor hurricane. I parked on the sea front and was blown up the pathway to the ruins of the castle. I then had the far trickier task of fighting my way into the wind to get back to my car. The last journey was the longest yet with Builth Wells nestling far inland. There was absolutely nothing remaining of the castle although several buildings in the town had used stone from the castle in their construction. Although nothing of the structure is evident, the earthworks on which it was built were still clear to see, the motte on which the keep would have been built and a defensive bank surrounding the lower bailey.