St Cuthbert's coffin features in new display at Durham Cathedral

Artefact, made in 698, is regarded as most important wooden object surviving in England from before Norman conquest

As the light picked out every detail of the angels and saints, and the runic and Latin inscriptions carved into the oak coffin of a man who died more than 1,300 years ago, the dean of Durham Cathedral struggled to find an appropriately reverent word. "Wow," Andrew Tremlett finally said. "Wow."

Janina Ramirez, a historian, was also seeing for the first time the cathedral's new display of the coffin of St Cuthbert. She said she had been unable to sleep from excitement the night before. "This is the Tutankhamun's tomb of the north-east," she said, "a window into a time in history which some people call the dark ages."