It is massive, heavy, incense-scented, a great fortress of a cathedral church and abbey built by conquering Normans in one of the holiest places of the Saxons, high on a rocky wooded peninsula in a loop of the River Wear. Durham has a masterly later Gothic eastern end, but it is the majesty of the original Norman body of the church that stuns you into silence. Built in only 40 years with absolute conviction, it is like a colossal cave, as if carved out of solid rock rather than built upon one. Its walls are incredibly thick, its windows tiny, its pillars muscular and decorated with deeply incised geometric patterns.
Arches are in the powerful semicircular Norman manner, piling up on each other, tier on tier.
The nave and roof are wide, thanks to a technological innovation of the day - ribbed stone vaulting, a structural system that would eventually to lead to Gothic. The proportions are perfect. The nave Clusters of candles flicker in the gloom by the transept, prayers are muttered, clerics flit to and fro though the side door to the former Benedictine cloister, occasionally a face appears from the shadows in a gallery high above. This has always been a pilgrimage church, and a sanctuary church, originally built to house the shrine of the miracle-working Saxon St Cuthbert. His tomb is still to be found at the eastern end, but the true revelation of the cathedral is to be found at the western.