England #6 - Exeter Cathedral in The England Chronicles - May 2017

And now, finally, Exeter Cathedral! It was founded in 1050, and the present building’s foundation was started in 1133 and finished in 1400. It is absolutely enormous, stunningly Gothic, and, to my great delight, photography was allowed inside.

It was also hard to miss, standing on a green as it is.

It’s so massive that it’s hard to get a really good picture of.

And the inside is just stunning! The ceiling is the longest uninterrupted vaulted ceiling in England.

This is the Minstrel’s Gallery - it dates to around 1360 and shows angels playing medieval instruments.

There are many many people buried at the Cathedral, and there are tombs and stones and effigies all over the place. Like this guy and his wife, in front of the Astronomical Clock, with their little angel friend:

And this …important lady. Cuddling a skull!

OH, and this double-decker, with a man and his wife on top (sadly you can’t quite see her here), and the brother of one of them underneath!

VERY ornate stuff:

The floors were ornate too -

And full of tombstones:

The massive pipe organ:

And the Astronomical clock - the bottom dial (dating from 1484) indicates the time and position of the sun on a 24-hour dial, as well as showing the phase of the moon. The top dial shows the minutes. How cool is that?? There is also a little door below that I totally missed because I read about it later, that a bishop in the early 1600s used to let his cat in and out.

Nearby was this bizarre Steampunk clock, which is actually the early mechanism for the astronomical clock:

And there were priests all over the place too - they didn’t look too thrilled at being tourist attractions, so I only got a picture of one walking away. The Cathedral was definitely a working church - at one point we got to hear the choir singing Evensong, which was really nice.

It was just a fascinating and gorgeous place, and I’d love to tour it again.

It was late in the day when we started back, and we had a breathtaking drive across the edge of Dartmoor and through the middle of the Bodmin Moor. The sun was setting, it was all wild and eerie and stunning… and Kim had her nose in her phone the entire time!!!! I would say, “OOOooOOO, look at that!!!”! and she would say, “Oh, how gorgeous!!!”… without looking up from her phone!!! OMG. I will say in her defense that she was having her usual Relationship Drama and had just found that a guy she’d kind of went on ONE date with ages ago just got married and posted pictures on Facebook and she was all upset despite it being forEVER ago since they’d had one date and he was also a total ass.... but being Kim she’d been holding onto the romantic notion that he’d see the light and they’d get back together because they had a connection which is poor Kim’s mantra and downfall — she thinks she has a connection with EVERYDAMNBODY. So we spend a good deal of that gorgeous drive with me trying to be patient and reminding her that SHE WAS ON VACATION IN AN AMAZING PLACE AND THE DRAMA NEEDS TO BE TOSSED ASIDE and incidentally she better unfriend that asshole right that minute!!! Who I thought she’d already unfriended but of course not. Because if she did, she couldn’t FaceBookStalk him!!

I will also say that this draaaaaama and phone obsession actually did not continue - well, not much, she is kind of addicted to her phone but that was the worst time, and after that she really did come around and toss (most of) the draaaama and focus on the magical trip. It got to the point that it was almost funny, though, and I just sighed to myself and determined to not let it get on MY nerves- if she wanted to miss the moors and wallow in draaama, her loss!!! I would soak it in!!!

We were afraid we’d be too late for dinner in Bodmin and it would be Desert For Dinner again, which was fun once but not so much two nights running. So we stopped off at Jamaica Inn again and had a really nice and surprisingly reasonable dinner at the historic and supposedly quite haunted inn. I had fish and chips and a pint of Beast of Bodmin, a delicious local brown ale.

And a view of the moody Bodmin Moor!