Stonehenge & Salisbury Cathedral

We almost made a horrible mistake in our planning for visiting Stonehenge.  We had booked everything for the day before the Summer Solstice.  By chance, went to London the day before that and ran into some partiers from the Salisbury area who warned us that tons of people go there on the Summer Solstice and we might want to change our plans.  Boy were they right, on June 20th there were already traffic jams on the country roads so we quickly rebooked for the following Friday.

To get to Stonehenge, we took the train from Reading and grabbed a variation of a hop on hop off bus that does 3 sites:  Stonehenge, Salisbury Castle and old Sarum.  You can add an option for entrance into the sites which we did.  Salisbury is a quaint old English town with a very tall church cathedral.  The bus picks you up outside the station and off you go into the countryside.  When we got to Stonehenge, there is a nice new visitor center with parking for all the tour buses and then there is either a 1.3 mile walk or short bus ride to get to Stonehenge itself.  We first did the visitor exhibition in the visitor center and then walked to Stonehenge and rode the bus back.  Part of the route is through a field that was part of Stonehenge proper/landscape. 

 We got to Stonehenge itself and had to show our timed entry tickets and then started the audio guide on our phones as we walked around the ring of stones.  Now a days most tourists cannot get inside of the stones rather you are kept back a ways on a roped off walkway.  Still it was impressive to see.  Jeff and I were surprised to learn that the horizontal rocks (lintels) did not just sit on the rocks they crossed but that there were joining pieces in the vertical rocks to hold it all together.  Part of our audio tour pointed out that the gentle moundings in the dirt was not natural but had been done as part of the building of Stonehenge.  As we walked to the site we had been near part of the moundings/pathway.  The audio pointed out that there had been some burials around parts of  Stonehenge and that throughout the neighboring fields were mounds that were also burial areas.  None of the mounds are anywhere near the size of the Indian burial mounds you find in Collinsville or St. Louis, but they were distinctive.  Jeff and I enjoyed Stonehenge, but were somehow a little disappointed.  We suspect it is because up in Orkney Scotland we had seen a large ring of stones and another spot with the large stones like this that we were able to go right up to and touch.  I understand the need to protect the area.  I just think we were a little prejudiced after our earlier site visit.

arrow shows where the sun light hits on the 2 solstices

From Stonehenge we went to Salisbury Cathedral in downtown Salisbury.  The cathedral is right in town and was built in the 13th century.  The cathedral is special because it has the tallest church spire in all of England, large cloisters and because it has one of the 4 remaining copies of the Magna Carta.  Since the cathedral is so old, it was originally a Catholic church.  I point this out because the room that the Magna Carta is in was a former room specifically for the monks. In that room there is a stone frieze of some common biblical stories.  Another interesting thing about the church is that it is built in an area that in at least modern times has a very high water level.  Very high as is they have a spot in the floor where they lift up a stone to check the water level with a stick - think checking your car's oil level.  A few years ago the water did rise up and flood the church (I think inch or 2 not bad).  As you wander around the church you find the crypts and stones for prominent townspeople over  the years and some distinct chapels.   Also it is because of the catholic monks that there are a lot of very old books and documents that the church owns such as the Magna Carta.  We wandered around the inside of the church some and then went to the chapter house to see the Magna Carta. 

Baptismal Font

The chapter room has a display about how the document came to be.  Seems the king at the time (King John) had run up some serious bills and was trying to unduly tax the nobles who weren't too happy about it.  They threatened him with a civil war.  The document guaranteed certain civil liberties and all was good except the nobles had to force the king to follow it.  Later kings would use it to their political advantage thus it has been amended some since its original writing.    When it was our turn to see it, we entered a small dimly lit enclosure with a light sort of shining on the document.  Meaning you see it, but you aren't going to read it - not really.  The document was written on sheepskin in very small writing.  Yes I could see start and stop of words, but I couldn't make anything out and it was probably old English that I would not have understood anyway since it was written in 1215.  But hey I can mark that off some bucket list!

After the cathedral, we walked around town some and then headed back to Reading.  We skipped Old Sarum which is a medieval town.  I guess you could say it was the original town of the area before Salisbury.  There is the foundation of a cathedral there that the Salisbury one replaced and other medieval time period buildings (remnants).