Where the 'Dark Ages' Still Whisper

The oldest room I entered that week wasn’t grand.

Rather than shouting its credentials, it was humble, hidden, difficult to find, almost.

As I walked gingerly through the narrow passageway, deep underground, I was surprised by how cramped it was; I’m not a claustrophobic person, but this was almost suffocatingly small and still.

There’s nothing quite like visiting historical sites to get a sense of the landscape and built environment of our forbears. Though we can glean a lot about their experiences from the written accounts they have left behind, the vast majority of people in the early medieval period did not ever come across the written word; their stories were made in architecture, nature, and the loved ones they lived alongside.

A research trip recently took me to Ripon Cathedral to see one of the finest examples of a surviving stone building from the seventh century, built by one of the heroes of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. I thought I was just going to get a sense of what it might have been like for him and his contemporaries; I wasn’t prepared for the impact that the trip would have on me personally…