A separate trip, a winter one, and a city that gives you its best-known building before you've left the station. Cologne Cathedral is enormous in a way photographs fail at, so I didn't try for the whole thing. I worked the details instead: the stone lace of the tracery, the figures in their niches, the gargoyles doing their jobs in the cold.

Then I walked west, out through the city, to Melaten. It is one of the great European cemeteries, a nineteenth-century garden of the dead, and I arrived as the snow started. Angels with their heads bowed, veiled mourners, a bronze that has gone green at the shoulders where the weather hits it. The light was going and the flakes were sticking to the lenses, and it was the best hour of the trip.

From soaring spires to silent snowflakes, in one afternoon's walk.

Two very different kinds of stone carving, a few kilometres apart: one built to be looked up at, the other built to be grieved over. Both are below.