Steaking out Salisbury and Stonehenge

Friday was my first trip out of London since I arrived, and it was a combination of a visit to the infamous Stonehenge and the nearby city of Salisbury.

Since I’m not eating red meat here I didn’t bother to check whether or not Salisbury has a steak named after it. Instead, we spent some time in a Cathedral and old church. More architecture, just in case you weren’t bored by all the pictures of buildings from last week’s “Open House London” tour. First, though, was our trip to Stonehenge.

Getting out of the city on our minibus was a fabulously fresh experience. There was already one school trip to Stonehenge and Salisbury, but it was full before I had a chance to sign up. That meant I went on this trip, and it also meant that this trip was not very crowded. Between the open fields on either side of the bus taking the place of five story buildings and the open seats on the bus taking the place of sullen-looking passengers on the tube, it was a great change of pace.

Stonehenge itself was a nice set of rocks that have been standing on a windy hill for thousands of years. The oldest feature, the ditch around it, was dug something like 5,000 years ago. The juvenile stones, by contrast, range between 4,500 and 3,500 years old, if my memory serves.

I’ve heard rumors that Stonehenge is always cloudy and windy, and my visit doesn’t offer any evidence to the contrary. There was a gray curtain of clouds blowing overhead, and the temperature was at least 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) colder than it was in London. The sun didn’t peek through the clouds, it peeked through thinner layers of clouds, offering lighter shades of gray. Someone on the bus said Stonehenge was a lot like the pictured Scotland, and they were right.

After we walked around the rocks, which are most impressive when you consider their historic context, it was time to board the bus and head to Salisbury.

The weather didn’t warm up much, although the wind stopped, and the clouds didn’t break either. Salisbury is notable most for its enormous and old cathedral, which was finished in the mid-1200’s. It’s right next to the river, and there is only a four-foot foundation of stones above the water table. They also added the cathedral’s gargantuan steeple years after the rest of the building was finished, when it was decided the original design was not impressive enough.

So you have a Cathedral sitting on just four feet of gravel and a sky-scraping steeple that was not part of the original architecture. See a chance for disaster? If you stand in the middle of the church and look up the pillars that support the steeple, you can see where they started to bow as the steeple started to tip. Some emergency bracings were put in place, and they managed to stabilize the steeple. They still have to monitor the wind speed though, in case it tries to blow over on them.

The inside of the cathedral is just as massive as the outside. They also did restorations that removed the “compartmentalized” fashion that marks most old cathedrals. That means you can stare down the whole length of the cathedral, and I liked this place a lot more than Westminster Abbey. Somehow, the abbey seemed claustrophobic, but Salisbury Cathedral feels like you could play a baseball game in it and still have space for a church service.

We had a tour guide who showed us a few interesting things such as the oldest working mechanical clock in England (and maybe Europe, though they have to way to prove it) and spots around the cathedral where bored carvers put pagan symbols such as the “Green Men” of fertility in the woodwork.

The end of the cathedral tour was probably the best part, because we got to see an extremely important document. There are only four original copies of the Magna Carta in existence today, and one of them happens to be housed in the Salisbury Cathedral. That one is apparently also the one in the best shape.

Right now you can get quite close to it – the document is essentially taped right under a piece of glass and I’m sure the janitorial staff had to wipe my nose prints from the glass that night. It’s also in pretty good shape for being about 800 years old. In fact, it would be quite legible if not for the fact that it’s written in Latin. Even so, it’s quite a way to top off the tour of that massive building.

Before we went in Salisbury Cathedral, we walked through the town and also toured St. Thomas Church. St. Thomas is almost as old as the Cathedral, and it has a majestic painting of the end of the world, with the Saints rising from their graves and the devil taking the condemned. Apparantly it was whitewashed during restorations, before it was rediscovered during later restorations. That seems to be a theme in English churches, as it’s happened to every place of religious significance I’ve visited so far: Westminster Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral and St. Thomas.

That’s about it. The drive back was uneventful except for the fact that we were reintroduced to London traffic in a 40-minute crawl back to Faraday House. Our bus bumped a cab, whose driver then got out and yelled at our driver. That was interesting, but there was no damage to either vehicle and all it really resulted in was another cab behind us getting angry and laying on his horn for awhile.

I’m not sure what made me enjoy the trip more: the fact that we got out of crowded London and stood in a field for awhile, or the fact that we saw some big historical sights.