Wells Cathedral

The town of Wells is a bit short of Glastonbury on the road from Bath.  We wouldn't have paid any attention to it, there being so much to see and so little time, but for a picture in a guide book.  The picture showed the unusual scissor arches in the Cathedral, and we were hooked.

It turns out that the scissor arches were not originally a part of the cathedral.   During its history it was a participant in a cathedral tower-building competition of sorts.  As the tower on the cathedral was modified to reach ever skyward its supporting walls began to buckle.  The scissor arches were added to keep the whole thing from crashing to the ground.  Perhaps an embarrassing episode in the history of architecture, but they're quite beautiful, especially when viewed down the length of the aisle.

The cathedral contains a working three-ring clock dating back to the middle ages.  The outer ring of the clock shows the hour in twenty-four hour format.  The large star at the top of this ring shows that it is just before noon.  The middle ring shows the minutes, and there is a smaller star showing eight or ten minutes before the hour in the photograph.  Finally, the innermost ring shows the phase of the moon.

Above the clock are two knights on horseback which revolve in opposite directions as the hour is struck.  The knights are jousting, and as they pass one knocks the other backwards on his mount with a lance.  We waited and were able to observe this happening, just as it has happened many times a day for some hundreds of years.