Pembrokeshire - St.David's City

Sketches at Water & Art

http://artywater.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/sketches-from-north-pembrokeshire.html

St.David's Cathedral

We made two visits to St. David's during our week in north Pembrokeshire. On Sunday 15th September, we looked round the Oriel y Parc visitor centre cum art gallery, shop and café. There, I bought the local geology map (BGS 1:50000, St. David’s Head) and looked round the exhibition of twentieth century artist Graham Sutherland's Beast lithographs. This is now the centre for Graham Sutherland's Pembrokeshire collection of artwork. There was also work at the centre by artists currently working in Pembrokeshire. In the gallery, too, some stuffed animals including grey wolf, otter, gannet, oyster catcher and various birds.In the city centre, we strolled round outside the Cathedral and the Bishop's Palace. We returned to both on Tuesday, looking round the Cathedral during a wet morning. When the weather cleared in the afternoon, we visited the ruins of the Bishop's Palace. We’d highly recommend the Italian ice cream place, on the main road (towards Oriel y Parc and Solva).

The Cathedral

With the sound of the choir emanating from within during the Sunday service, we had look round the outside, where there were stone carvings around the doorways and windows, along with some unusual building stones. The stone was mainly local purple-grey Cambrian sandstone.  Later in the week, we saw an outcrop of this near St. Justinian.  We looked round cloister area where there was a small garden. The cloister wall looked as if it had been restored fairly recently, with stone wall covered with mortar containing small sea shells. From here, we made the first of our two visits to the café in the refectory upstairs. This was on two levels. We sat on the upper one, overlooking the photography in the gallery below. We got there just ahead of the Sunday lunch rush.

On the wet Tuesday morning, we spent quite a bit of time in the cathedral sheltering from the rain which was heaviest during the middle of the day – vague recollections of sheltering here one afternoon with Mum, during another soggy summer camping holiday in the mid-1970s (see later section). Entry was a £3 donation – very reasonable considering some of the (compulsory) admission charges into many of the English Cathedrals (note 1).

Ceiling of bell tower (CAL)

The Chief Chartered Engineer bought a photography permit (£2). I did some quick sketches, though better earlier in the day, before we took a break for a cuppa in the Refectory, when it was less busy.

You didn’t have to be an engineer to notice the Nave was leaning, particularly evident looking along the Nave towards the Quire. Beyond the Quire and around the walls, were tombs of bishops and priests. There were several chapels off the Nave, the Lady Chapel the back. Along the Nave, stone carved arches. There was the Shrine of St.David, built 1275, restored from 2010, dedicated in 2012. On the other side of the Quire, the organ, with big base pipes. I was very taken with the floor tiles and their patterns.  I tried sketching a few, along with the rose window, with stained glass on the west side. Quite a bit of stained glass, including a rose window. Behind the Quire, a ceiling with stone flute carvings and wooden painted ceilings under the bell tower and above the main altar area.

Cathedral tiles (CAL)

In the Treasury, there was a small display of stone carvings, goblets, along with a timeline giving a potted history of St. David’s along the top of the walls. The Cathedral is a Anglican, or strictly speaking, Episcopal. There’s a bishop, hence Bishop’s Palace and the name of the pub up just outside the gateway to the cathedral area from the high street. It all started when St. Davis founded a monastery during the late sixth century AD. The cathedral dates from the late twelfth century. There was also mention of a bishop being killed by Vikings at the turn of the 2nd millennium, 999AD, then key events in English / Welsh history, including William the Conqueror, Edward I conquering Wales in the thirteenth century. Towards the end, Queen Elizabeth II granting St. David’s city status in 1995 news to me, see later section.

Note 1 – cathedral admission charges – tricky one. These old buildings, many still badly in need of costly maintenance don’t pay for themselves.  Some, like St. David’s trust people to make a donation as they go in (but does everyone?). Increasingly, since about the late 1980s, there’s an obligatory admission charge. I heard St. Paul’s in London was £15 (that was about 2 years ago, so probably gone up now). Winchester Cathedral is currently half that, for adults. Nonetheless, multiplied by two and two more child entries, was enough to put off my folk when they were there last month. They argued that their children are miss out on things we had free when we were kids, including something of potential educational value. They were regularly a part of day out, to places like Winchester, Chichester and Salisbury. Dad took us to St. Paul’s, too. Largely because of these admission charges, today was the first time I’d been into a cathedral for more than ten years.

Bishop’s Palace

Rose window, Bishop's Palace

The ruins of the once grand Bishop’s Palace were across the little river Alun (Alin) from the Cathedral.

Cathedral form the Bishop's Palace

Shadows of the Bishop's Palace wall in the late afternoon sun

By the time we got to the Bishop's Palace on the Tuesday afternoon, the sun was out.  We paid to go in (£4.50 each) and had a good look round. Taken by the shapes and textures formed by the building stones, windows and arches, did quite a few sketches. Views from the Bishop's Hall out to the Cathedral.

Building stones

Among the building stones here, some pebbly /gravelly blocks of conglomerate, in the purple-grey of the cathedral and a green.

Around Britain’s Smallest City

City Noticeboard

Downtown St.David's

I say city – it had more the feel of a village with a cathedral attached. The main street had about as many shops as the villages around our way. There were a couple of banks – rural / small-town size branches. City Hall was about the size of a typical village hall. Near the cathedral gate, where we stood sheltering from the rain eating our packed lunches and I sketched the view up the high street, was a small bookshop. Opening times seemingly very laid-back. On the Tuesday it was very busy everywhere, with coach parties (just as there are in London, Winchester, Bath etc), and people like us drawn to as somewhere to go during the wet weather. Nonetheless, we wondered if some of the traffic trundling round was there just to give it the feel of We’re a city, honest.  The lady at the tourist information centre at Oriel y Parc seemed to be overstating it somewhat when she told her caller to “go into the city…”.

What I’ve said here, reflects our personal impressions and is not meant out of criticism.  For its size, it was  certainly well served with galleries. As well as Oriel  Parc, we looked round a glass studio (Steve Robinson) and a smaller gallery near the cathedral gate. Before the last of the rain cleared on Tuesday, we had a cuppa in the Sound Cafe in the main street. Presumably it was named after Ramsey Sound rather than reassurance over structural issues. There was a seemingly unusual childcare policy: a notice just behind me – Unsupervised Children Will be Given a Double Espresso and a Free Kitten.

St. David’s is officially the smallest city in the UK, though this didn’t become official until the mid-1990s. Before then, I thought it vied with Wells, Somerset. Turned out, though, that during my childhood holidays to Pembrokeshire, it was another of those places like Guildford, which many people take to be a city because it has a cathedral but isn’t. Because of St.David being the Patron Saint of Wales and the cathedral being much older than that in Guildford, I’d assumed that, unlike Guildford, it had been given royal charter granting it city status centuries ago. Apparently, until the late nineteenth century, it used to be the case that an Anglican cathedral with bishop was enough, but then they changed the rules. Wells is still the smallest city in England, but when we last looked round there during the mid-2000s it looked a good deal bigger than St. David's. The population is now around 1800. What makes city status official in the UK? Reading the relevant Wikipedia article, it’s more complicated than I thought, though it still involves the monarch granting city status. There are pretenders, among them Guildford (or the football club there, anyway) and Reading. Then there are places which used to have city status but lost it and / or didn’t bother to reapply, most notably Elgin (recall signs to the City Centre while there in May) and Rochester (very recent, 1998). It’s good it needs to be official, rather than simply – We’ve grown encompass the Thames, now sprawl out the M4, with regular traffic jams at J11, or This is nice place to live and shop, with good links to London.

Wikipedia - City status in the UK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_status_in_the_United_Kingdom 
Accessed 30/09/13

Soggy Childhood Camping Memories

The campsite was somewhere near St. David's, near enough to walk there. Not for the first time on these holidays, we were on a cliff top. The warden had a black cat called James. I recall my brother seeing snake – he said it was an adder as it had V’s on it – and being terrified (something passed on down my father’s line, perhaps). We must have had some good weather as there is a photo of my brother and me standing outside the front of the tent, with the sun shining. For much of the rest of the time, though, we were in about the one only part of Britain where it was raining. After about a week, my parents were fed up with hearing on the radio about the Lovely summer we were having – who asked us?

The things I remember (then, age 7) aside from the weather were two cafés in St. David’s (not there now it seemed) – one good – they gave us lollipops, the other (the day we – or rather my parents - packed up the tent early and left) not being much cop – no fish fingers, no ice cream! Then there was the overnight stopover at a B&B on the way back – me sleeping in one end of the single bed, my brother in the other, it didn’t work. My parents (in the double) got no sleep either. The scenery didn’t have much impact – just crossing the Cleddau Toll Bridge (think the sun was shining then, as remember looking down to the Cleddau estuary above Milford Haven; and a couple of castles – Pembroke and Carew - Hurrah for Carew! [my Dad recalling a boyhood chant].