OK, that was weak, even by my standards.
I am, of course, talking about Canterbury Cathedral, which turns out to be tricky to photograph, at least with a smartphone.
I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’d been told the entry price ( still not sure I understand how that works for a functioning cathedral ) was quite high, but I paid it anyway on the basis of “May as well, it’s a famous building I’ve actually heard of”, figuring that I’d spend a bit of time there.
I ended up getting three hours of entertainment out of it, because there’s so much to the place. There’s an enormous amount of history, and reconstructions, and repurposing. I’d assumed that the cathedral was basically one big churching space, but kept finding little sub-chapel areas as I wandered around, both in the upstairs bit & in the vaults below.
There was even one of those grassy area surrounded by vaulted walkway things which I’ve seen in movies & TV, so that was fun to wander around in.
There were some folks doing guided tours, but I wasn’t sure whether they were a join in & tag along or a paying patrons only sort of thing, so I tried to stay out of their way. And after a while, used earphones and a rain noise app to muffle the narration, when it got a smidge distracting.
One interesting overhead bit, if I understood it correctly, is that Thomas Beckett was murdered there, and eventually a shrine was built which was later destroyed by orders of the king, and there’s mention of the shrine, but aside from one part of a stained glass window, nobody ever described what the shrine looked like.
Time and money well spent, I think.
