Although built at different dates, the edifice has a very homogeneous appearance, and might easily be mistaken at first sight for a building of one period. The structure has a gaunt and stern aspect, and greatly wants some salient features to break its rigid outline. Such features existed till about the middle of this century in the shape of two projecting adjuncts at the west end (Fig. 567), the one on the north side being a tower crowned with a pointed roof, and the other, called the consistory house, being a lower building, which finished like a pele tower with a crow-stepped roof and a cape house. These structures have now been removed. [Illustration: FIG. 568.--St. Mungo’s Cathedral. View from South-East.] In the external length of the church, a distance of about 330 feet, the ground falls from west to east about 15 feet. This fall required the walls of the eastern part to be raised so as to bring them up to the level of the western part, and this under-building was made available as a lower church. This lower church forms one of the finest and most characteristic features of the edifice. It extends the whole length from the transept to the east end, and is entirely above ground. It is supposed that the building has been placed on this sloping ground, and not on the higher and leveller site a little to the westwards, in order that the most sacred part, containing the high altar, might be situated immediately over the supposed site of the original tomb of St. Mungo, which would, doubtless, be beneath the east end of the primitive church. The cathedral, as seen from the east end, with the lower church and the choir towering above it, is very lofty and imposing (Fig. 568), and surpasses the view obtained from the west end (Fig. 569) on emerging from the streets of the city.