Chester

Saturday was field trip number three! We went to Chester in England with stops first at Bodelwyddan Church and St. Winefrede's Well. Bodelwyddan looks kind of small on the outside but seems huge on the inside. It is also known as the Marble Church because there are at least 14 different types of marble used on the inside and the Wedding Cake Church because it is the classic structure of a church one sees on a wedding cake. Inside is gorgeous! Everything is carved in detail from the pulpit to the ceiling. It has beautiful, massive marble and stone columns; and the stain glass windows have extremely detailed pictures of biblical scenes. An interesting thing about the church is that there are Canadian troops buried in its churchyard. When I first saw this I was a little surprised to be at a church in Northern Wales and see rows of graves with small Canadian flags standing in front of them. However, during World War I, their camp was based just west of the church; and the Canadians buried at Bodelwyddan were soldiers who died from Spanish flu pandemic.

Our other stop before Chester was St. Winefrede's well. We were allowed to see the outside of the buildings but we could not actually see the well itself because of some work being done on the building protecting it. I was honestly a little disappointed because seeing the well is pretty much the point in going there, but the story of St. Winefrede was still interesting. I felt like I was listening to Greek mythology or something. It is said that Prince Caradoc wanted St. Beuno's niece Winefrede. She refused his advances and attempted to reach a church for sanctuary. Caradoc , however, caught up to her and cut off her head. It rolled down a hill and where it stopped this spring immediately emerged. St. Beuno attached her head back to her body and she miraculously survived. St. Winefrede can always be recognized by the scar around her neck, and the spot has been a place of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics for centuries. Because the well is suppose to have healing abilities, it was not destroyed during the Reformation; now, this site is one of the few medieval shrines still around today.

We spent the rest of the day in Chester. We got to shop around the Row a little bit and then we went on an audio tour of the Chester Cathedral. This was the first time I have had an audio tour, and to be honest I did not like it. No one told me how it was suppose to work so I didn't realize until near the end that there were very small stations in a very large cathedral you had to walk near to get the speech about that section. So I missed a lot of information about the things I was looking at because nothing was coming to my headset. Once a section was done the audio tour also told you where to head next. This was a challenge because it would tell me to go east/north/south/west in a giant building with no clear windows to look through in a town I had only been at for an hour. This further frustrated me because I couldn't tell if passages led to more of the cathedral or to nowhere, and I didn't dare explore because I was afraid of losing what little of the group I could still see. I eventually gave up trying and just admired the architecture while sticking with the people I had found. It was a very impressive building. I don't know the best way to describe it besides massive and extraordinary.

We also had a guided tour of the town. The Romans founded this town, and there is a stone wall surrounding the older part of the city. The tour guide took us up the path on top and we walked the wall for some time. We started out on a shorter end of the wall so it wasn't that impressive at first. But the farther we walked the higher it got until it was about two stories high. Once the tour was over he dropped us off at the Row (pictured above) where we shopped around for a couple hours. The Row is a section of Chester full of little shops. It is really cool because there is an upper and lower level. The ground level has little shops that step down a little lower than the street and the upper level has even more little shops that sit on top of them with sidewalks being the lower shops roof. These shops were packed and sometimes hard to move around in and the streets were full of people. It was an interesting experience different from what we had seen in Wales so far. I loved the old churches and cathedrals and can't wait to see more. Our next trip is to Liverpool, but it isn't for another couple weeks. Classes start tomorrow (Monday) and I don't know what to expect at all. Wish me good luck!