Durham Cathedral is a Norman building constructed between 1093 and 1133 in the Romanesque style. It was founded as a monastic cathedral built to house the shrine of St Cuthbert. He lived as a monk, bishop, and then hermit, on Holy Island, also known as Lindisfarne. He was beatified in 698 and revered as the North of England's best-loved saint.

His community fled Lindisfarne following the Viking invasion in 793 and travelled around the North of England with his body and extraordinary relics for many years, until settling in Durham where they built an Anglo-Saxon church. St Cuthbert was moved into the newly-built Norman Cathedral in 1104, which has been a place of pilgrimage ever since.

The original elaborate shrine was destroyed during the Reformation and replaced by a simple marble slab marked ‘Cuthbertus’ in 1542.