All about Cuthbert

Tuesday March 25 - Thursday March 27, Durham, England

Associate producer Lucie Conrad joins the Art of Faith team for our shoot in Durham Cathedral:
The first thing that struck me when travelling up to Durham was how friendly Northerners are -- and how talkative! I spent the entire train journey trying to block out the voice of a fellow traveller recounting her life story to her poor neighbour as well as the packed train carriage. I must say I was relieved when I heard Durham announced on the tannoy. And then there was Durham Cathedral, towering over the city. I was here to join Ian to film the main features of the cathedral as well as to interview a member of its congregation.
When I arrived at the cathedral, having been taken there by another very chatty taxi driver, I was greeted by Ian and John, Head Porter at Durham Cathedral. John is quite obviously an old hand at filming and with his help and expertise our shoot went extremely smoothly.

We went first to the small Cathedral Museum which houses the remains of St Cuthbert’s coffin as well as other extremely valuable artefacts taken from his shrine. Durham Cathedral, you see, is all about St Cuthbert -- as I would find out the following day when we met our interviewee, Lilian Groves, Head Steward and a fountain of knowledge on Durham’s history. Lilian used to lecture at Durham University but retired in the early nineties. Since then, she tells us, she spends every waking hour at the Cathedral. As she begins to talk her eyes fill with tears and I can see that she is clearly deeply connected with this place. And once Lilian begins to speak it’s quite hard to stop her. There is so much information stored inside her that’s bursting to be communicated.
The most important thing she tells us is Durham’s connection with St Cuthbert. The Cathedral simply wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for him. Cuthbert was originally buried in Lindisfarne in 687 CE, and was then declared a saint when his body was dug up eleven years after his death and found to be completely intact. A shrine was set up in Lindisfarne, but soon the Lindisfarne community came under threat from the Vikings and they decided to start a journey to find a new home for Cuthbert’s shrine. Eventually they settled on Dun Holm, the current site of Durham Cathedral.
It is only really when you get inside this glorious Norman building that you realise quite how large the cathedral is. The thing that immediately struck me was the beautiful proportions of this building and its enormous pillars, some of which are engraved in a very unusual manner. Lilian told us how these pillars were carved by highly skilled masons and put together like a jigsaw puzzle. They are hollow inside but full of rubble. Lilian’s theory is that these stones are in fact of the original Saxon church which was built to house Cuthbert’s shrine, as no rubble was ever found at the cathedral site. Lilian also has plenty of other interesting things to tell us, including the fact that Durham’s nave ceiling has the first stone vault in the world.
One tends to think of places of pilgrimage as medieval ideas but we soon discover quite how present this idea is at Durham Cathedral. Lilian stresses more than once that this is a working building, not a museum. And so it is with dozens of busy Stewards in their red and purple gowns taking groups of students or members of the public around their beloved building. On several occasions our filming endeavours were set to clash with such group talks. But not for a moment was there a doubt about who would give way to whom. In Durham the Stewards rule. But with the help of the charming John, the shoot went smoothly, and Ian and I set off happily on our way back to London. (Lucie Conrad)