Cathedral to Quay

Today, we went on the Cathedral to Quay tour. As the name suggests, it goes from the cathedral, out to the city wall, where it cuts south, joining South Street at the former location of the South Gate, and then continues on to the river and down to the quayside.

We joined the tour a few minutes late (the guide was almost finished with the standard "Potted History of Exeter"), and the first thing he talked about was Richard Hooker's statue. Hooker, as near as I was able to determine from the guide's comments, made the Anglicans more Catholic. After that, we went over to look at the cathedral, which we have now done on several tours. We took an up-close look at a flying buttress, and it was explained to us that during the Exeter Blitz in 1942, a German bomber took out two of the twelve buttresses on the north side of the cathedral. If it had been three, the roof might have collapsed. On hearing this, Amanda proclaimed that the architect (who has been dead for 800 years, as she knew full well) deserved a raise.

After the cathedral, we went over to the Dean and Minister of Music's house, numbers 10 and 11 Cathedral Close. We were able to go into their courtyard, which is reportedly much prettier in the spring (it looked pretty bleak today, I must say). We were, however, not allowed to walk past a certain point in the courtyard, which made looking around a little bit difficult.

After that, we meandered our way through several stories about medieval Exeter (the typical ones about people with royal connections that lived here) and then heard the standard lecture on the city wall. After we had passed the last of the wall, we heard about the prison that was formerly at the South Gate. Thieves were held in the lower level, which doubled as part of the city sewer, and debtors were held in the upper level, where they dangled shoes out the window by their strings to beg for cash, thus giving rise to the phrase "on a shoestring."

Moving on, we saw several Georgian and Victorian-era houses, and then proceeded on to the River Exe. We heard about how Countess Wear (not on the tour) got its name (a greedy countess built a wear across the river to block shipping traffic because she wanted a cut of the profits), and how the canal was established. Apparently, a descendent of the countess about two hundred years after her initial wear extended the wear to cut off all riverine traffic, instead of allowing cargo lighters through. There was nothing that anyone could do about it, until the unlucky guy was found to be plotting against Henry VIII, who promptly locked him in the Tower and had him executed. The people of Exeter, on hearing this, wrote to the King asking for permission to remove the wear, which Henry gladly granted as a dig at his now-deceased former courtier. Sadly for Exeter, the river had accumulated too much sediment behind the wear to allow ships into the port of Exeter. As a result, the city hired a Welshman to build a canal, which he did, although it took him 60 years. The canal opened in 1832, the same day that the cholera epidemic of that year broke out in Exeter. (Coincidence? I think not!) Unfortunately for Exeter's merchants, the wool trade was declining by the mid-19^th century, and the canal was never utilized to its full potential.

Today, the quayside is primarily a tourist attraction, and is home to a great many craft shops, and also the home of Scout Troop 19, which weaseled a new Scout Hut out of developers who were re-developing the quay in the 1980s. The tour ended by plugging the virtues of the Custom House tour, which is not currently available. We were also told the Custom House featured two things, known as the King's Pipe and the King's Drain, where goods that were caught being smuggled were (officially) either burned or poured out, as appropriate. The guide closed by saying "If you believe that, then you'll believe anything."