Not a lot of People Know That

A trip to Lichfield, somewhere I visited nearly every week until a couple of years ago as my parents moved there in 1986.

Along with an errand, I spent an hour walking around the city and almost inevitably ended up at the cathedral.  I was going to check out the interior as the sun was out and you often get wonderful colour and rays of light in days like this, but a chance chat with one of the volunteers found that they were re-arranging the seating for a concert this evening and things were a 'little messy'.  

So I concentrated on the outside and noticed that the sun was just coming around far enough to graze the western facade of the building.  I'm always taken by how little we actually take in when we look at something. I've been here literally hundreds of times and though I was aware of the statues, I hadn't realised that there were 113 of them on the west front.  I also had no idea what they portrayed, though a close up of this image suggested royalty.  Here we have Henry III, Edward's, I, II and III, and Richard II.  In fact the status across the front include Christ, Moses, the archangels, Mary Magdalene, Adam and Eve, other biblical figures as well as saints, prophets, various bishops of Lichfield, along with Norman and Saxon Kings, plus Queen Victoria, apostles and early disciples.

While the Cathedral pre-dates many of these historic figures it transpires that these statues were replacements, put up in the 19th Century for badly weathered statues from the original construction.