Canterbury Cathedral - Wednesday, 16 December

Gargoyles on the Cathedral: Spent most of the day touring the Cathedral – there were very helpful volunteers circulating the facility with information about the history and background. There was an interesting, very modern sculpture on the wall, so I asked a volunteer about it. He told me it was a memorial to Thomas Becket and that it was full of symbolism about the number of guards who struck the blows, etc. He explained in detail the whole event and showed me where everything took place, including the cloister where they chased him into the cathedral, ending up at the spot in the transept where we were standing, the exact location where Becket was killed. The candle on the floor marks the location of Thomas Becket’s shrine until it was demolished and removed during the Reformation by order of Henry VIII: I also heard a chamber group from the University of Kent rehearsing in the nave for that evening's annual winter concert. I later stopped in the office for the Save Canterbury Cathedral fund, which is in the process of raising 40 million pounds for badly needed preservation and restoration of stained glass and structural elements of the building. They had a couple of sections from one of the huge windows on display: I then went to the Roman Museum, an underground exhibit of the ruins of an ancient Roman house that were found under the city streets during a construction project. The ruins of the Roman town date to around 70 CE, but here is a glass flask that was also on display. It was found during the draining of a nearby lake and dates from the 4th century: