We were invited to spend a couple days with a friend in Kent, in the southeast of England. And so we got a chance to explore Canterbury, one of the most visited cities in the UK and famous for its cathedral. It seems like we’ve been on a mission to see as many of these amazing cathedrals and abbeys as possible this last week, but really it’s been opportunistic that we happened to be “in the neighborhood” and so we’ve taken advantage.
Canterbury Cathedral has similarities to Winchester Cathedral and Bath Abbey, one of which is that they all are impossible to capture in pictures. Their height, scale and majesty are otherworldly in many ways, and I guess that’s what impression they were designed to make! For the people of the time, it must have been such an experience to enter such a structure, with giant brilliant stained glass windows and ceilings ascending towards heaven. The precision of the stone architectural elements, and number and intricacy of the carvings defy my ability to comprehend how workers with primitive tools, no electricity, and wooden scaffolding could create such a grand, visually stunning, cohesive and architecturally sound building. And that’s not even considering how they found and transported all the stone and mortar to the site to built it. It’s beyond what we can conceive in the modern age.
In addition to the cathedral, the town is lovely, crisscrossed by canals, some lined with flowers. There are lots of tourists! The main square also has this crazy tree with a giant trunk, known as a Baobab Plane tree after the African Baobab trees. If you want to know more about these trees, here’s a fascinating article about them: http://elmparadise.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-baobab-planes-of-canterbury.html
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