Rochester and Diggers

On Saturday I got taken, as a birthday treat, to Diggerland outside Rochester in Kent. It is a kind of theme park owned by a firm that hires out and sells JCB digging equipment. They have several such parks around England. My family had noted my complaint that I had never driven a tractor or any sort of big earthmoving plant. The plan is you pay your entrance fee and then go round the park taking turns on whatever takes your fancy.


You can dig some pretty big holes once you have got the idea of which lever to push in which direction. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it isn't rocket science, so a lot of fun can be had.

The aerial photo was taken from a cherry picker 50 feet up. Rochester Cathedral spire can just be seen slightly right of centre in the distance. In the foreground are many of the Diggerland rides.

Having had our picnic and exhausted the rides (as so often, there's almost as much fun watching other people mess up as in doing it oneself), we went into Rochester itself.


Imposing castle, right next to the cathedral.









The cathedral itself is smallish and Romanesque.

















There's a big light crypt.








The quire has the remains of this fine Wheel of Fortune wall painting.











In a transept is the Baptismal Fresco, claimed to be the first fresco painted in an English cathedral for over 800 years. It was painted over an eighteen month period in 2003-4 by the Russian iconographer Sergei Fyodorov.

Where fresco painting differs from just slapping paint on a wall, is that it is done onto fresh wet plaster. The paint and plaster dry together, thus binding the colour into the material. Only a small portion of plaster can be prepared and painted at a time, since the former dries quite quickly and then can't be used.


When complete the font of the cathedral will be placed in the transept in front of the fresco.

The top, obviously, depicts the baptism of Christ; the bottom left the baptism of King Ethelbert by St Augustine of Canterbury some time round about 600 A.D. On the right newly baptised Saxon Christians emerge from the River Medway and are given communion by Bishop Justus.


The work is quite impressive - one of the best artistic additions to a cathedral in Britain in the last half century.









The baptismal transept from the High Street.






Rochester's High Street is long and pretty. Almost every other building appears to have a plaque on it telling of its appearance in some or other work of Charles Dickens. Some even appear more than once - Eastgate House, an imposing Tudor mansion, is Westgate House in one of his books and The Nun's House in another. All harmless fun and I expect it gets the tourists in.