Patrick Comerford
About 10 or 15 years ago, I was asked to consider moving to a parish in the Diocese of Durham. The invitation and the parish were attractive, but this all came at what was then the wrong time in my life, and I never visited Durham that time round.
Eventually, 10 or 15 years later, I actually visited Durham last weekend while two of us were on a family visit to York. It was like a long gap between that initial invitation and my first visit – almost as long, it seems, as it took to bring Saint Cuthbert’s body to be buried at Durham Cathedral.
The legends surrounding the move of Saint Cuthbert’s body to Durham and the stories of the Dun Cow are depicted in an 18th-century panel on the north façade of Durham Cathedral and recalled in the name of Dun Cow Lane, running along the north side of the cathedral, down to North Bailey, Bow Lane and the River Wear.
The sculpted panel on the side of the cathedral depicts a cow, a milkmaid and a monk and is inspired by a legend about the founding of the cathedral.
The popular local legend says that the location of both the city and the cathedral were selected in the year 995 by a small group of wandering monks with the help of a long-dead saint and a lost cow.
Saint Cuthbert died on the island of Lindisfarne in the year 687. When his tomb was opened 11 years later in 698, it is said, his body had not been corrupted by the passage of time. This seeming miracle led to his tomb becoming a place of popular pilgrimage and Cuthbert was declared a saint.
The Vikings first raided the Monastery at Lindisfarne in 793, and in the decades that followed the threat of further raids was ever present. The monks of Lindisfarne finally decided to leave the island and fled with the relics of Saint Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne gospels.
The homeless monks wandered homeless for seven years until 883, when they arrived in Chester-le-Street, seven miles north of present-day Durham. But continuing threats of further invasions forced the monks to move on with the remains of Saint Cuthbert to Ripon. Eventually, the monks decided to return to Chester-le-Street in 995.
However, as the monks moved back north towards Chester-le-Street, the legend says, Saint Cuthbert’s coffin came to a halt. Despite their best efforts, the monks could not get the coffin to budge.
As they continued in their vain but fruitless efforts, a monk in the community, Eadmer, had a vision of Saint Cuthbert demanding to be taken to a place called ‘Dunholme’. After Eadmer’s vision, Bishop Aldhun and his monks found the coffin could be moved again. However none of them had ever heard of a place called Dunholme was and they were perplexed and puzzled monks stood about how to find it.
As they pondered their dilemma, a cow girl walked by and asked another young woman if she had seen a lost dun cow, a cow with a dull brownish colour. The young woman said she had seen a brown cow heading in the direction of Dunholme – and pointed in its direction.
Taking this as a providential sign, the monks followed two milk maids and arrived at a peninsula formed by a loop in the River Wear. There, Saint Cuthbert’s coffin became immovable, and the monks took this as a sign that the new shrine should be built on that spot. The church they built was the first building in what became Durham, and in turn the church became Durham Cathedral.
Although Dun Cow Lane is a now a pleasant walk leading up to Palace Green and the cathedral close, it once separated the outer and inner baileys. A gate once ran across the lane, but it has since has disappeared, and all remains of the wall has been incorporated into the 18th century Abbey House, home to Durham University's Department of Theology and Religion, at the top of the street.
To this day, the Bishops of Durham sign their names with the signature or designation of Dunelm, from the Latin name for Durham, a Latin form of the Old English Dunholm. But more about Dun Cow Lane, Durham Cathedral, Dunholm and the city that grew up around the shrine of Saint Cuthbert in the days to come, hopefully.
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