Lichfield; Saturday, 26 October, 2024

I was up relatively early, if only because my first destination of the morning required me to be on the 10:03 bus, otherwise I could have happily had a bit more of a lie in before the standard Premier Inn breakfast and then a walk over to the bus station via the ruins of a Franciscan Friary that was torn down shortly after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries.

From the bus station I picked up the number 36, only discovering after I’d let one go that the X3 towards Birmingham would also have stopped at the bus stop I needed. It was a short 10 minute drive south out of the city before hopping off on the main road out of town at the aptly named Wall Turn bus stop.

My destination was the village of Wall, located on the ancient Roman Road of Watling Street and the remains of the Roman settlement of Letocetum. Wall being a small village in the wilds of Staffordshire (less than 2 miles from the centre of Lichfield, but still the wilds as far as bus companies are concerned) it only gets 3 buses from Lichfield and 2 buses toward Lichfield on a Saturday and the first bus out from the city would only leave around 20 minutes to look around the Roman site before the last bus back to Lichfield, so instead I had caught the bus an hour earlier and walked the mile or so down Watling Street into the village.

Not much is left of Letocetum other than the remains of the Bath House and the Mansio, but they are pretty significant structures, and I spent a good hour wandering around the site taking in the information boards and quite a lot of photos. With 15 minutes to spare I wandered down to the bus stop with plenty of time to spare for, at 11:42 on a Saturday morning, the last bus of the weekend back into Lichfield.

Back in the city I headed into the centre to grab a lunch before having a bit of a wander around the city centre and then heading over to the cathedral to have a look around that before my afternoon booked tour at 3pm.

There has been a cathedral on the site since the 700s with the original replaced some time around the Norman Invasion by another cathedral that very little is known about, before that was replaced around the 13th century by the current cathedral. Arguably, the current cathedral is actually a 17th century rebuild and could be considered the fourth incarnation of the building, as virtually the whole of the cathedral was destroyed during the English Civil War – the moat and high walls surrounding the cathedral giving it the appearance of a fortified castle, if not the structural integrity of one.

I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the Cathedral before it was time to meet for the 3pm tour of the Cathedrals towers and roof. The tour started down in the Nave, before climbing up the stairs in the Northwest tower of the front façade to space underneath the spire – looking very much like an upended ice cream cone. From there it was a walk along the edge of the roof of the nave, before entering the main tower of the cathedral and a further climb up to the base of it’s spire to exit out onto the tower ramparts for some stunning views over the city and surrounding countryside.

The tour was scheduled to take 90 minutes, but as it was the last tour of the day, and the guide was so full of information that he wanted to impart it was nearly 2 hours before we descended back down to the floor of the cathedral, just as the choir was practising for the following days mass and with the last of the tourists being ushered out. It also meant as I exited the cathedral, I was greeted with the glorious site of the warm glow of the setting sun reflecting off of the impressive west façade of the building.

I headed back to the hotel to freshen up before heading back out into the city for dinner in a very nice Indian restaurant that my nose had directed me past the previous evening, and I wasn’t disappointed. Consequently, it was a quite a lot slower walk back across the city centre to the hotel for a drink in the bar and then a well-earned early, and because the clocks were about to go back, extended night’s sleep.