The friends I stay with in Wales are on a mission to visit every cathedral in England and Wales. They have twice come to stay with me, to tick off St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, a cathedral from 1540 to 1550.
A friend in Norfolk sent me this triumphant round robin message last month.
I thought you might like to know that I have just finished my self imposed task of visiting all the Anglican cathedrals in England and Wales. I think the first I saw was probably Chichester sometime in the 1950s ( I was not keeping a record then ) and the last was Manchester on Wednesday last week, having seen the second to last, Liverpool, the previous day along, of course with Paddy’s Wigwam, a bonus which does not count. Entry into Liverpool Anglican cathedral was substantially delayed by a “graduation” ceremony. I can now relax.
I think there are forty-five Anglican cathedrals in England and Wales. Probably some record-hunting nerd has bicycled to all of them in an incredibly short space of time like the pilgrims who trudge round the eighty-eight temples on Shikoku in Japan. However, there are only seventeen pre-Reformation cathedrals; really sixteen as St Paul’s was entirely rebuilt. There are a clutch of abbey churches and the like that were at one time or another cathedrals but don’t let’s get bogged down in detail. Twelve cathedrals in England are premier cru: in the south, Canterbury Winchester and Salisbury, in the west, Gloucester Wells and Exeter, in the east, Norwich Ely and Peterborough, in the north, Lincoln York and Durham.
It would be a fine thing to visit these remarkable buildings over the course of, say, a year and I am minded to do so. This is an intention not a vow.