I like to look for themes to tag our travels to. Whilst other travellers might interrogate the guide book, decide on their interests then go wandering. I, on the other hand, play the contrarian. Wander first – theme-thread second.

The cities’ trademarks of age: castles, cathedrals and city walls. Churches chime a preemptive toll before calling the hours. The chilled bite of wind in the next deep labyrinthine lane, brackets the sunlit basilica’s crown dome. Turn around and the next city cañon frames a sliver of yet another ecclesiastical roofscape.

Light Beacons. Theme-thread search suggested.

Cathedrals will fit neatly into this conceit. Burgos set the tone; Valladolid, Salamanca’s two, Segovia and now Madrid follow on. All have their archi-ecclesiastical extravaganzas; from the relatively subdued Romanesque of Salamanca’s cathedral Vieja (they started the new second one in 1533), to the uberesque, ultra-gothic of the later seventeenth century builds.

I’m not of a particularly religious persuasion, in fact I’m often left with an ambiguous discomposure as I walk out from these monumental interiors and through the leaves of their vast wooden doors. The acres of gold leaf, the icons of silver bullion, the unimaginable wealth that has been invested at a time when the greater populace was exposed to pox, plague and poverty. Yet to have the imagination, to conceive a project that’s known will take centuries to complete. The skill-sets that had to be mastered, the construction problems requiring solutions often in a time of war and political instability, whilst maintaining an unimpeachable God faith. Concepts that in my secularist’s world feels like an alienating dislocation.

Both Salamanca’s and Segovia’s cathedrals have collections of religious art, in paint as well as fabric; in the latter’s instance curated in a low-ceilinged undercroft. These collections have the feel of obligation, the remainders from rural deconsecrated churches, now of necessity held in perpetuity. “We hold them… now you’re going to see them… all of them… all at once”.

In the main they’re imagery of the Christ crucifixion, which would originally have been placed on high as solitary entities, telling its message for a largely illiterate audience. However, in this restrictive, sterile space and at these concentrations the effect is a dilution, rendered down to inertness and impotency. Of graphic brutality, the morbidity of gore in the dark gloom of illustration, that reduces the Christian message exclusively to one of ‘misery and pain’.

We glance to each other, silently agree a retreat and leave. Stealthily. Guilty.

As what seems to happen on these occasions, I find myself retiring from this macro exposure to hunting the micro-detail. The particulars of a lock’s escutcheon plate or the design of a latch key. The shadow of the rood screen’s railings or the rainbow frieze thrown by the sun lancing through stained glass windows. Questioning the necessity of a padlock on a baptismal font or encountering the revelation of electronic votive candles. That iron hinge on the half foot thick door is seven centuries old and it still works, yet we can’t put a roof on a school gym and expect it to last fifty years.

Cathedrals; places to ask questions and be questioned. Even if I have no answers.

I wander out into a stark winter sun-glare to watch how this city interacts with its cathedral. In Burgos its basilica sat in a seat of aloof reverence, in Valladolid maybe not so. City has marched up unto its Cathedral, a confrontation, as if two pugilistic protagonists are squaring up. More ‘town and frock’ than ‘town and gown’.

Fanciful maybe, but….

PostScript: stand on the transept passage of Lincoln cathedral, high up in the roof space and look along the line of sconces, the apex shields at the convergences of the ceiling’s rib vaulting. The alignment of the early works are out of kilter, then slowly as the perspective recedes and time passes, straightens to true east . It’s a time line of construction, a chronology of learning corrections.

Post-PostScript: Far be it from myself to city-brag my home town Glasgow, but it does have ‘The Dali’. Christ of St. John of the Cross; £8,200-worth of ‘preposterous spending’, to quote The Glasgow Herald. It was 1952; still, long live the Philistines. Today it’s the premier icon in the city’s collections. More important is its setting: the solitary occupant of its own gallery, hung in solitude with diffused low slung lighting, no distraction. Concentrated solution. Try to visit when all others are preoccupied by the gaudy neon pop-art Elvis along the corridor.

In that silent simplicity the impression is mesmeric, it quite simply works. Less is always More.