Inside York Minster

The Minster Tower

But what does the word Minster, of which the city is so proud, mean? What is the difference between a cathedral and a Minster? According to the leaflet which I picked up with my Tower ticket (£3 for students and we get the Minster free, so being a student at York does have its perks…) a cathedral is the mother church of a diocese, where the bishop has his cathedral or ‘seat’. A Minster or ‘mynster’, the Anglo-Saxon name for a missionary church, is a church built as a new centre for Christian worship. York Minster is both.

With 20 minutes before the next tour I pass the time studying the ceiling. In a cathedral the visitor may be excused for failing to look up, with more than enough to admire in statues and stained glass. But in any building, from an airport to your own house, there is something to be said for staring at the ceiling. The great stone buttresses that seem to ascend into heaven make me wonder just how architects and builders achieved such height and grandeur. They certainly believed that the glory of God was something higher than eye level. It will not surprise me later to find out on the Minster website that when work began in 1291 the building as we know it today took about 250 years to build.

In climbing the 275 steps to the top of the 15th century Central Tower (physically unfit, beware) I glance at my feet to place them on the narrow stone steps, but on snatching a look out of one of the windows I am met with the curious sight of a tiny man playing a tiny piano a long way below. Halfway up there is a narrow bridge to cross where stone buttresses spring from the building in arcs and the eye speeds on downwards in a sheer drop to the street below (those with vertigo, beware). Looking up again, the steps spiral onwards and it is odd to consider that people are treading the cold stone directly above.

Emerging blinking in to the breeze and sunlight, I am disappointed to discover that a wire mesh engulfs the top of the tower, so that the impression of height and space is not as it would have been to worshippers in the distant past. However, there are ample gaps in the mesh for the visitor to safely thrust his or her head outwards, and gaze on the spread of civilization below, smothered in the sunlit haze of an autumn afternoon. I am unable to spot the famous Shambles tucked away in a maze of streets, but I can see Stonegate stretching away at a right angle to the Minster, where not long ago I first looked up at the Tower. A sight that particularly appeals is that of the city walls on a thin strip of green, a path leading the eye far back into York’s history.

In the steep descent to the cathedral floor, a modern touch in the form of graffiti back inside the walls brings me back down to the present. Offended at first at the many names and dates engraved in to the ancient stone, I nevertheless pause to consider whether in time these too would become marks of the past, part of the rich history of the York Minster. On completing the Central Tower I feel a sense of deep admiration for the faith and commitment of our ancestors, who refused to remain stuck at eye level. It takes only a moment to look up, and in looking up you will probably find something there that you had not noticed before, something that sometimes will refuse to let go, and make your feet itch to climb up to a new level of existence. So, next time you are in York, don’t keep your eyes down and your feet on the ground but climb the Minster Tower. It’s worth the £3, I promise.

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