Durham Cathedral
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- When monks opened St Cuthbert's coffin in 1104, they found a small Gospel book lying at his head, now regarded as the earliest intact European book.
- That manuscript, the St Cuthbert Gospel, was made around 710–730 and was bought by the British Library in 2012 for £9 million after a public appeal.
- Its tooled red goatskin cover over birch boards is the oldest Western bookbinding to survive intact.
- The foundation stone was laid on 11 August 1093 by Bishop William and Prior Turgot, replacing an earlier Anglo-Saxon church.
- Before settling at Durham, Cuthbert's community spent 113 years at Chester-le-Street, from 882 to 995.
- Henry VIII's commissioners destroyed the saint's shrine in 1538, yet his remains survived and are still buried in the cathedral.
- From end to end the interior measures about 143 metres, and the high vault over the nave dates from around 1250.
- Scenes for the first two Harry Potter films were shot here, and the cathedral also appears in Avengers: Endgame.
- A Lego model of the cathedral finished in 2016 used about 300,000 bricks and stretched nearly four metres long.
Why it is worth it
Durham Cathedral stands on a wooded rock almost enclosed by a loop of the River Wear, sharing the peninsula with the castle of the prince-bishops. It was built largely between 1093 and 1133, and UNESCO, listing cathedral and castle together in 1986, called it the largest and most perfect monument of the Norman style in England. It is also a milestone in building technique: the nave vault is the earliest surviving example of pointed ribs used across a high vault, a solution that pointed the way towards Gothic.
The reason for the church is a saint. Monks fleeing Viking raids on Lindisfarne in 875 carried the body of St Cuthbert with them for over a century before settling on this defensible peninsula in 995; local legend says they were led here by milkmaids searching for a dun cow. Cuthbert's tomb, behind the high altar in the feretory, is marked by a plain slab under a canopy restored in the 20th century, and fragments of his wooden coffin are displayed in the cathedral. At the other end of the building, the Galilee Chapel added in the 1170s holds the tomb of the Venerable Bede, the first historian of the English.
Inside, walk slowly down the nave between the massive round piers carved with chevrons, zigzags and spirals, alternating with clustered columns. Then look for the Neville Screen behind the altar, the tall bishop's throne, Prior Castell's Clock in the south transept, and the dark carved woodwork added by Bishop John Cosin after the Restoration, including a towering canopy over the font. The monastic buildings around the cloister now house Open Treasure, an exhibition opened in 2016 in the monks' dormitory and the Prior's Kitchen. There is a darker chapter too: during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms the cathedral held some 3,000 Scottish prisoners of war, of whom 1,700 died.
Getting there
The cathedral is on the peninsula in the centre of Durham, about 0.4 km from the city centre. From Durham railway station it is a walk of roughly 15 minutes, uphill at the end; the Cathedral Bus also links the station with the cathedral and castle from Monday to Saturday. Newcastle International Airport (NCL) is about 30 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Angel of the North 15.7 km · sculpture
- Gateshead Millennium Bridge 21.9 km · bridge
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Durham Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin and St Cuthbert of Durham, is a Church of England cathedral in the city of Durham, England. The cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of Durham and is the mother church of the diocese of Durham. It also contains the shrines of the Anglo-Saxon saints Cuthbert and Bede. There are daily Church of England services at the cathedral, and it received 393,090 visitors in 2024. It is a grade I listed building and forms part of the Durham Castle and Cathedral World Heritage Site.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
54.77348, -1.57621per Wikidata