Ripon has never been on my list of places that I want to visit but when we realised that we were just a few miles away from the city, during our recent trip to Yorkshire, we thought we might as well take a look at it. It’s actually a really lovely cathedral, and I don’t much go for big religious structures, but this one has a good atmosphere, almost as friendly as Durham.

As yesterday was Hallowe’en, that makes today All Saints’ Day, so it seems apt to have a cathedral post today. I’m not madly keen on organised religion but I always like to have a look at the local churches.

This is the front door from the inside and as you can see they’ve added some modern glass underneath the medieval stained glass windows. Unfortunately the glass never seems to look half as good in photos as it does in real life. You don’t have to pay to go in to the cathedral but obviously they’re keen on donations as it costs such a lot to keep it standing.

I remember when I was reading someone’s review of Trollope’s Barchester books that they didn’t understand all the church politics, and didn’t know the difference between high and low church. Well, this is high church, often referred to as ‘smells and bells’ because apart from the very ornate decor ‘high’ means the use of bells and incense at particular times during the church service. It’s almost indistinguishable from Roman Catholoic, although this is of course a Church of England cathedral.

I love stained glass, it’s the colours that get me, somehow they always seem so much more vibrant in backlit glass than at any other time. This is quite a modern window and as you can see, the altar cloth is also modern but a beautiful design, quite three dimensional which doesn’t quite show up in the photo.

Ripon Cathedral has definitely been a patron of the arts over the years. The side chapel below has really wonderful textural metal work, as you can see. They were busy setting up an art exhibition at the time we were there, it seems to be quite a hub of the community, which you can’t say of all cathedrals.

Yet another altar, the original I would think, and more stained glass.

This one is a very small window but I think it’s quite unusual to see stained glass in shades of yellow and green and it looked really zingy wth the sun coming through it.