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Technically the smallest city in the country, WELLS owes its celebrity entirely to its Gothic Cathedral (daily: May, June & Sept 7am-7pm; July & Aug 7am-8.30pm; Oct-April 7am-6pm; suggested donation £4). Hidden from sight until you pass into its spacious close from the central Market Place, the building presents a majestic spectacle, the broad lawn of the former graveyard providing a perfect foreground. The west front, constructed about fifty years after work on the main building was begun in 1180, teems with some three hundred thirteenth-century figures of saints and kings, once brightly painted and gilded, though their present honey tint has a subtle splendour of its own. Close up, the impact is slightly lessened, as most of the statuary is badly eroded and many figures were damaged by Puritans in the seventeenth century. The interior is a supreme example of early English Gothic, the long nave punctuated by a dramatic "scissor arch", one of three that were constructed in 1338 to take the extra weight of the newly built tower. Though some wax enthusiastic about the ingenuity of these so-called "strainer" arches, others argue that they're "grotesque intrusions" from an aesthetic point of view.
Other features worth scrutinizing are the narrative carvings on the capitals and corbels in the transepts - including men with toothache and an old man caught pilfering an orchard. In the north transept, don't miss the 24-hour astronomical clock, dating from 1390, whose jousting knights charge each other every quarter-hour, as announced by a figure known as Jack Blandiver, who kicks a couple of bells from his seat high up on the right - on the hour he strikes the bell in front of him. Opposite the clock, a doorway leads to a graceful, much-worn flight of steps rising to the Chapter House (closes 4.30pm), an octagonal room elaborately ribbed in the Decorated style. There are some gnarled old tombs to be seen in the aisles of the choir , at the end of which is the richly coloured stained glass of the fourteenth-century Lady Chapel .
The row of clerical houses on the north side of the cathedral green are mainly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, though one, the Old Deanery , shows traces of its fifteenth-century origins. The chancellor's house is now a museum (Easter-July, Sept & Oct daily 10am-5.30pm; Aug daily 10am-8pm; Nov-Easter Mon & Wed-Sun 11am-4pm; £2.50), displaying, among other items, some of the cathedral's original statuary, placed here for conservation reasons (and replaced by replicas), as well as a good geological section with fossils from the surrounding area, including Wookey Hole.
A little further along the street, the cobbled medieval Vicars' Close holds more clerical dwellings, linked to the cathedral by the Chain Gate and fronted by small gardens. The cottages were built in the mid-fourteenth century - though only no. 22 has not undergone outward alterations - and have been continuously occupied by members of the cathedral clergy ever since.
On the other side of the cathedral - and accessible through the cathedral shop - are the cloisters, from which you can enter the tranquil grounds of the Bishop's Palace (April-July, Sept & Oct Tues-Fri 10.30am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; Aug daily 10.30am-5pm, though may close on first or second Sat of month for wedding receptions; £3.50), also reachable from Market Place through the Bishop's Eye archway. The residence of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, the palace was walled and moated as a result of a rift with the borough in the fourteenth century, and the imposing gatehouse still displays the grooves of the portcullis and a chute for pouring oil and molten lead on would-be assailants. Its tranquil gardens contain the springs from which the city takes its name and the ruined Great Hall , built at the end of the thirteenth century and despoiled during the Reformation.
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