More Hereford Stories

An hour or so to wander around Hereford this morning. Older, smaller cities have history everywhere in a way that bigger cities - although no younger - do not. This is probably because of the bombing during the Second World War, when Britain's bigger cities were heavily attacked. But even older districts of Liverpool or Manchester or Birmingham or Sheffield are rarely older than Victorian with some Georgian survivors. In smaller cities the heart of the city is medieval, or rather the buildings and not just the groundplan are still medieval. I stood for five minutes next to a dusty overlooked doorway in Hereford this morning that is probably 500 years old; boarded up from the inside it has not been opened in decades, but the hinges and door furniture are still there, the solid wooden door and the Gothic arch it sits in are all intact.

I wanted to see the light in the cathedral this morning, a fitful morning of bright sunlight and wintry showers. The Romanesque pillars are great fat things, massive and tall, and the thin sunlight picked out subtle gradations of colour within the stones, pinks and greys and whites, a soft wash of light across the smooth surface. It brought me up short to realise that they have been there for nearly 900 years. The cathedral has a healthy approach to modern art and is proud of three large tapestries by John Piper, more subtle colours shot through with darker streaks, echoing the old stonework around them. And this morning I found a chapel off the Lady Chapel, a tiny place with three small Gothic window frames which have had new stained glass windows inserted into them. They illustrate the life of Thomas Traherne, a 17th century poet, a local man and priest who wrote about Herefordshire landscapes. He seems a guiding spirit for my kind of work and I should find out more about him.