Wells Cathedral and the Sea of Steps

In which I visit one of the most glorious cathedrals in England, and try to recreate famous photograph that was taken there.

A little marble angel sits, smiling over the tomb of one of Wells Cathedral’s late bishops. It is as if he knows that fortune itself has smiled on the city of Wells and its beautiful cathedral.

Built between the 12th and 14th centuries, Wells is considered England’s first true Gothic cathedral. Just seven miles from Glastonbury, Wells Cathedral escaped the destruction that Glastonbury Abbey suffered during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. It wasn’t completely untouched - during the transformation from Catholicism to Anglicanism the interior was stripped of its painted decorations, and the ceilings and walls were whitewashed.

The resulting light-filled interior is a sight to behold. Gorgeous ribbed columns and pointed stone arches draw your eye upward to the creamy white vaulted ceiling, elegantly stenciled with red and black ornaments. The famous - and monumental - scissor arches between the nave and the choir are a slightly later addition, built to support the weight of the tower that lies directly above them. In the 14th century the tower was enlarged - reportedly to compete with nearby Salisbury Cathedral - and the extra weight proved too much for the existing cathedral wall. Cracks began to form, and master mason William Joy was called in an attempt to fix the problem. The unique arches that he built - really three sets piled on top of each other - are not only beautiful but structurally ingenious. They’ve been holding the cathedral in place for almost seven hundred years now…

The glorious Chapter House

What I’ve really come to see, though, are the steps to the Chapter House.

In 1903 the British photographer Frederick H. Evans (1853-1943) came to Wells, to photograph the interior of the cathedral. He had been here several times before, but kept returning to the steps to the Chapter House, trying again and again to get the photograph that he wanted.

The photograph that he took in 1903 is one of the great images in the history of photography. Called “A Sea of Steps”, he described the photo later:

…a veritable sea of steps, the passing over them of hundreds of foot­ steps…have worn them into a semblance of broken waves, low-beating on a placid shore…the beautiful curve of the steps on the right as they rise to the height of the Chapter House floor, is for all the world like the surge of a great wave that will presently break and subside into smaller ones like those at the top of the picture.

A Sea of Steps, Wells Cathedral, 1903. Frederick H. Evans

An original gelatin silver print of the beautiful image can sell for over a quarter of a million dollars, and so I do my best to replicate the image…spending an embarassing amount of time getting the angle right.

I get close, but it doesn’t quite work. There’s too much sun at this time of day - plus there’s a placard announcing something-or-other at the top of the steps, which I’m tempted to move, but don’t.

Anyway, I take a photo of the steps from another angle, and it really shows the wear on the left-hand side, the undulations that Frederick H. Evans compares to waves. The steps are beautiful, surprisingly so for such a utilitarian architectural feature, and it is impossible not to think of thousands of feet that have walked up and down the steps over the years, slowly leaving the patterns that remain today.

Religious pilgrims came for centuries to the twin cities of Glastonbury and Wells, just a day’s walk apart on foot.

I find out later that I am just one of many, many people who have come to Wells to stand at the base of these stairs and try to capture the magic of Frederick Evans's photograph. Amateur and professional photographers started flocking here shortly after his photograph was published, in 1903.

It turns out we are all pilgrims of a sort, I suppose.