Having named the cat in honour of a cathedral and a saint the least I can do is elaborate, because I can honestly say I have never had much cause to wonder who St Magnus might be until we tripped over him at every turn on Orkney, so I have been appraising myself of his qualities.
Magnus the Tiny of Devon by the way...who thanks you for all your kind wishes, has gained three ounces and learned how to run / jump / chew wires / stand on three legs and not fall over and generally start being a proper kitten in the space of just four days...
The other Magnus story goes like this...
Earl Magnus inherits the Norse Earldom of Orkney jointly with his cousin, Earl Haakon Paulson. The cousins fight and an attempt to make peace in the year 1116 leads to an arrangement to meet on the island of Egilsay. Now you might guess there is going to be a good guy and a bad guy here... and you might then guess which, given that the cathedral in Kirkwall is not dedicated to St Haakon Paulson. Earl Haakon breaks the agreement to bring just two ships each and arrives with a whopping eight ships full of armed men. Chickening out of the final debacle and rather than killing Magnus himself, Haakon the Yellow (my spin) orders a cook to do the deed, and Magnus is martyred for the sake of peace in Orkney. Stories grow into legend and sanctity is assured, so when the cathedral was founded in 1137 Magnus's remains were interred there and the place was his.
Bookhound and I love a wander around a jolly good cathedral, and the warm red sandstone of St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall looked very inviting on a chilly, blowy day on Orkney. Having warmed up with a bowl of butternut squash and ginger soup ( the most delicious soup I have tasted in a very long while and having sourced a recipe I will be making lashings of it) we headed into the Cathedral for a mooch...
...and past this precarious-looking weather-beaten stone pillar as we walked in the door...
Cathedrals can be rather dark and forbidding places we have found, but on this occasion we were greeted with the sonorous depths of the organ being played at full throttle, a rare occurrence unless services are in progress but we had struck lucky (and my apologies for the blurring, this is the only picture I took but it brings back lovely memories, so on here for posterity)
A visitor had apparently arranged to have a spin on the pipes, and when they stopped playing someone from the staff scuttled out and asked them to carry on as we were all enjoying it so much, so were treated to something completely unexpected, but quite magnificent and truly memorable as we wandered around.
There was something about the sound reaching every corner that made us look upwards and through and along and around every bit of this lovely building which just exuded a very welcoming warmth. Even John Rae, the explorer who discovered the fate of the Franklin expedition looked pretty relaxed and seemed to be enjoying it all...
and the cathedral yielded plenty of inspiring patterns too..
Any more cathedral wanderers out there??
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