Let me be honest about this. Peterborough is not a tourist town. Yes, the cathedral is one of the finest in the country, but apart from that there is nothing much to attract visitors. As a result, when tourist do turn up, the tour guides welcome them like the prodigal son. We were the only people to turn up for the 11:30 am tour of the cathedral. Our guide confessed that his tour was supposed to last forty-five minutes, but he sometimes ran a bit long. Today, with just us to talk to (until half way through the tour when he picked up four more) he set a new personal best of two hours and nine minutes.

In the afternoon we went on a local heritage walking tour. Once again we were the only people to turn up for it. That one came in just under two hours, so we still had time to see the fine collection of skeletons (human and dinosaur) in the local museum.

OK, first the cathedral.

Built over a 120 year period starting exactly 900 years ago in 1218, the cathedral has been mucked around a bit by every century since then.

The nave is romanesque, that is, it has circular arches and big thick pillars. By the time they had finished building the nave this style was already out of date. Paula prefers the later extension with fan vaulting.

However, the nave has the only surviving medieval painted ceiling in the UK. As well as the usual saints and kings it has a variety of wonderful creatures. Every church needs a dragon or two.

You can’t go wrong with a two faced head, either.

I’m not sure what these are.

Of course, since this is Peterborough and the cathedral is dedicated to Saints Peter, Paul, and Andrew, St Peter has to be featured.

He looks a bit befuddled, doesn’t he? But not quite as confused as the angel on this processional cross.

There’s a less confused St Peter in a modern wood statue.

As you can see he is wearing Marks and Spencer underpants. He got them from St Michael.

The view up the tower is nice, too.

The tower is a lot shorter than it used to be because the church foundations never made it to bedrock, and the tower had to be truncated before it collapsed. Talking of things being truncated Mary Queen of Scots was buried here, in two pieces. However, her son James VI of Scotland eventually became James I of England as well, and he had his mum dug up and moved to Westminster Abbey.

The other Queen who was buried here, and still is so far as we know, is Katherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII.

Her original tomb was destroyed by Cromwell’s Roundheads in the Civil War, along with the stained glass windows, rood screens, records, manuscripts and anything else of beauty they could reach. The whole building might have been torched if they hadn’t been using it as a stable. However, centuries later the Daily Mail newspaper decided Katherine needed a new monument, and crowdfunded the slab and screen in the picture.

Katherine is featured elsewhere in the church.

This is thought to be a carving of the young Katherine with her first husband, Prince Arthur. If Arthur had survived to be king, Henry VIII would never have come to the throne and England might have remained catholic.

What stained glass there is now is almost all Victorian. (Thanks, Cromwell!)

However, some of the shards of the original medieval glass were preserved, and assembled in Victorian times into an abstract mosaic.

The high altar is a Victorian knock off of an Italian original.

THere’s a band of angels on high.

A memorial to Old Scarlett, the Tudor gravedigger who lived to be 98 and was popular enough that he got to be buried in the cathedral himself.

The informative signs around the cathedral have side notes labeled Digging deeper with Old Scarlett.

“I am the vine, ye are the branches”

Or is I like to call it, Fertilizer Jesus.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Andrew, what about the skulls? Does Peterborough cathedral have any skulls? Yes, indeed there are two very fine skulls.

You have to love skulls with missing front teeth.

When our cathedral tour finished we just had time to grab a bite to eat in Starbucks, which is in the old Lloyds Bank building on the site of the chapel of Thomas a Becket where the Bishop of Norwich slaughtered hundreds of peasants in 1381, but I don’t have time for that story. We went on to the museum just in time to be the only people on a walking tour of the other highlights of Peterborough.

There’s a nice reformation guildhall with the arms of Charles II…

… and a Pizza Express with statues of important characters from Peterborough history.

It was originally Boots the Chemists, and doesn’t every chemist’s shop need a statue of Henry VIII strangling a kitten?

Back to the museum to look at the collection there. In the Jurassic period Peterborough was a shallow tropical see full of swimming dinosaurs.

They still have an outdoor swimming pool, but no dinosaurs in it. Maybe if we could clone them?

There’s also a Victorian operating theater.

The museum is in the old infirmary, so they just never remodeled that bit.

As with any old settlement in England, there are Roman remains.

Ooo, look, what’s in that case over there?

Skulls! Real skulls from a stone age burial site. But it gets better.

If you look closely where the plastic arrowhead is pointing you can see the stone arrowhead in the ribs that killed this guy.

If only he’d been able to make it upstairs to the operating theater he might be alive to this day.