Up front on Shrewsbury Cathedral

 

Here’s another odd set of loggerheads.  They seem crammed in, rather higgledy-piggledy, in what is admittedly quite a small space for them, a half-shield.

This arrangement is on the front of Shrewsbury Roman Catholic Cathedral, over the main doors.  The most likely explanation for the loggerheads being there is that, at the time the cathedral was being built in 1851, there was a deep suspicion of Catholics, and historians suspect that the cathedral authorities were trying to exhibit their very real loyalty to the town by displaying the loggerheads.

(It might have been better if they’d got the configuration of the loggerheads right though!)

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Imaginary loggerheads

 

Most people in Shrewsbury will know of the Wakeman Trail, a series of collages of ceramic tablets on public sites around the town. They were made by students of the old Wakeman School and are impressions of the town’s buildings.

Mike Griffiths, a former teacher at the school, has made it his task to get them put up.

A friend of ours spotted this loggerheads on one of the works (outside the Catholic Cathedral) and asked Mike (in pic, right) which building the relevant one represented.  

In fact, said Mike, it was no particular ‘real’ building but an amalgamation of a few... which is fair enough!


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