Celebrating St Cuthbert’s Day

Durham Cathedral posted a few pictures of their celebration of St Cuthbert's feast day this year (yesterday) on facebook. I thought I would share this one. This is from the evensong service after the procession at Cuthbert's shrine in the Cathedral. A picture of the shrine below comes from their facebook page. I wish I...

Captivated by the Cross

I've been captivated by this image since I found it earlier this week. It was taken by David W Coigach and posted at deviantART. Taken at Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway  (Southwest Scotland), this imagery seems so right for Heavenfield  with the ravens circling overhead. Ok, so I'll admit heavenfield didn't have a stone cross, which...

Heavenfield Round-up 5: Signs of Power and Piety

The find of the week was the grave of a medieval abbot of Furness Abbey in Cumbria. Past Horizons has the best write up of the discovery at the abbey, which is just southwest of the Lake District. They have also had good features on reinterpreting the mass grave of Vikings found in Oxford, and...

Oswine the Anti-Hero

(A post from the archive on the anniversary of King Oswine's death.) King Oswine of Deira (Yorkshire) 20 August 651 Today is the anniversary of the execution of King Oswine of Deira, considered by some to be a saint. All we know of Oswine is included in Bede's History (Book III:14). Bede writes a curious...

Adomnan, Cuthbert, and King Aldfrith

I was really looking forward to Barbara Yorke's paper "Adomnan at the court of King Aldfrith" from the Adomnan conference published in Adomnan of Iona: Theologian, Lawmaker, Peacemaker. I have a couple of her books and I've learned a lot from her. Unfortunately there are a few things in her chapter that I don't think...

Is this St. Cuthbert? (via Contagions)

A post-mortem of sorts on my other blog Contagions. Let me know what you think! Somehow I envisioned better teeth.   Actually Dr Shelby Plummer, who examined the remains from Durham Cathedral in 1899, believed that the incisors (front teeth) were lost after death. He doesn't elaborate on why he thinks that and the loose teeth...