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Wells We took the long train ride from Llandudno Junction to Bristol through eastern Wales, then picked up a car for our explorations of Southwestern England. It was a long travel day, so we chose nearby Tintern, in the scenic Wye Valley in southeastern Wales, for a short overnight stay.

Tintern Abbey -- the view from our B&B	William Wordsworth, that old Lake poet, was impressed with the bucolic Wye valley, writing of it in 1798, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee! the whole poem I, for one, wanted to see what he was on about ... and found the Wye valley to be every bit as beautiful two centuries later as he claimed.
up-Wye at dawn from our bedroom

Well, I'm afraid it was a little TOO sylvan for my travelling companions, and so after a rainy day doing laundry in Monmouth and checking out the Millennium Maze at Whitchurch, we headed back across the Severn and south to the little cathedral city of Wells, where the weather thankfully improved enough for us to walk to dinner.

a hedge Maze along the Wye

from the wall of the Bishop's Palace

The next morning while Chad went to the internet café we went to the Bishop's Palace. The notion of a fortified residence for a churchman didn't make a lot of sense to me until I read the history of this place. Because Wells is named for the artesian sources that bubble up between the palace and the cathedral, the palace is surrounded by a serious moat, complete with fish, ducks, and a family of mute swans that have been trained to ring a bell in the bishop's buttery when they're hungry.

The whole compound hummed with an aura of good management over centuries. The garden feeds the bishop and his household and supplies the buttery that serves lovely organic lunches in the undercroft. Several times now we've seen how a sustained spiritual community has been the focal point for a development of great beauty and persistence.

the bishop's garden

the cathedral from the garden

Over the years, Wells's bishops built a number of large, and even grandiose, buildings, but in the last couple of centuries the grandest of the halls was carefully turned into a mighty garden wall while most of the rest of the buildings have been opened to the public. The drawbridge was last raised in the 14th Century when angry peasants tried unsuccessfully to storm the palace.

The present bishop lives and works in a suite of apartments on the cathedral side of the palace beside the moat. He also has a rose garden and a private passage to the cathedral. We saw him and a buddy out front playing a wicked game of croquet, but I didn't want to take a picture of him. The bishops of Wells have been a distinguished lot, going back beyond a famous fellow named Thomas Ken, who wrote some of the Anglican church's best hymns, and was also a famously honest man. He lived at a time of great men; his mentor was the churchman and fisherman Isaack Walton.

where the present bishop lives

Bishop Ken

His chief claim to fame was the way he shot down his king, Charles II when the king attempted to house his new lady friend Nell Gwynn in the house where Ken was living in London. Ken disapproved of the king's womanizing, and declined. The king tried to force the issue, whereupon Ken, noting that the roof needed repairing, had it taken off. In England, one tries not to live in a roofless house. Charles, surprisingly, was amused. Later, when Charles needed honest advice, he had his men summon "that little fellow who wouldn't give a room to Nell." And when the bishopric at Wells came up, Charles insisted no one but Ken would have it.

Bishop Ken made it a practice to invite a dozen needy people to dinner every Sunday, thereby scandalizing the rest of the bishops, who considered themselves to be in a class above mere commoners, let alone those in need. There have been lots of other Bishops of Wells and Bath -- their portraits hang in the public rooms in the Bishop's Palace -- but it's Thomas whose lasting influence seems to make the whole place glow with consciousness. details from the staircase and chapel above the altar in the bishop's chapel The opulence of the environment is still a little overmuch for a populist like me. I like Ken's once-a-week-gesture, and I probably wouldn't throw in my lot with the rabble trying to storm the Palace gate, the disparity between the common folk and the "quality" makes me cringe. mute swan and her cygnets

Bishop Ken's refectory table gargoyles on the main staircase remains of the great hall

Cathedral chapter house

The cathedral chapter house is usually a fine room where the cathedral community's managers do their business -- the board room. The chapter house at Wells Cathedral is an extraordinarily graceful octagonal room with gorgeous stone carving and lovely windows. It stretches my mind to think of a time when the popular church would be willing and able to lavish such excess on its administrative functions.

The Cathedral is as fine as one might expect given the Palace. The tapestries in the choir, cushions, seat backs, and decorations in the stalls span centuries from Thomas's time to the present. This cathedral is distinguished by the scissor arches, which are rennaissance but look modern. This is a huge and impressive interior space, well suited for worshipful gatherings. The sculptural facade (below) is a who's who of christianity, from the archangels and twelve apostles at the top down through a selection of biblical figures and medieval saints, plus innumerable gryphons, gargoyles, and other fanciful details that aren't really understood anymore. But it's impressive, and easily understandable in modern commercial terms as the theatre in which the religious drama is presented (and donations cheerfully accepted. Alms boxes at the entry let us know thast it costs about £4 -- $6 -- per visitor to maintain the building.) Impressed, as I am, by the lengths to which people will go to create communities and attempt to gain salvation, I was glad to have come here, and felt the power of the space as a human statement. It's easy to imagine the love that went into the carving of every figure, every column, every floret ... and if "the greater glory" is another way of expressing the magnificence of human labor, then count me in.

Wells Cathedral's ornate west facade	detail from the facade's top
	In England, if it has a cathedral, it's a city, and Wells is the smallest city in the U.K. On our second night in Wells, Rochelle and I walked around the cathedral close through a rosy sunset and long northern gloaming, and enjoyed the orderly calm and ancient resonance of this graceful little city. We'd come back here.

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