Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral

Friday morning, we made our way down to the Dining Room of Wentworth House for a breakfast of eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomato, toast, fruit, yoghurt, and in Bill's and my case, many cups of coffee. I was really dragging, but after four cups of very good coffee felt somewhat better. Does this make me a coffee drinker? Well, not really - as I only seem to drink it when I'm out somewhere..... : )

It was a fairly quick job to pack up our overnight stuff and head out to Stonehenge, using my handy iphone for our GPS. The drive was mainly rural roads - winding and curving, and Abby hung in there for a while, but just short of reaching Stonehenge we had to come to a screeching halt at the side of the road for her to puke. (carsick, not a bug this time)

You can just drive to the area and park in the parking lot and walk along the fenced road to see Stonehenge, but we decided to go ahead and pay to walk around inside the fenced area for at least this first time visiting it. I thought it was worth the money to do once - you get to walk around the entire circle area and get pictures from every angle and the audio tour etc. This time, Bill got to have his arm yanked out of socket by Philip, and Abby and I meandered around taking pictures to our heart's content.

Stonehenge seems to have quite a bit intact, and the information states that the sun rising on the stones at different times of year marks the seasons and so forth. This stone circle is over 5000 years old, and dug all around it is a trench and then earth is mounded behind the trench. It is quite a sight. We found it very amazing and spent about an hour or so there walking around the area.

Then it was back to the car to take a short detour south to Salisbury to see the cathedral there. Since it was lunch time, we stopped for some food first. We managed to find our way through the somewhat winding and not-at-all picturesque streets of Salisbury and finally to the parking area for the Cathedral. This particular cathedral has the tallest spire in all of England and is Gothic in architecture.

In the center of the back area of the cathedral is a baptism pool that is remarkable - the water is moving and flowing through it, but without a single ripple of movement so that is looks like black glass. Stained glass throughout is original to the building - built in the 1200s. The ceilings are painted with different patterns and colors throughout, and of course there are the requisite tombs of all sorts of people. The choir was rehearsing while we were there and they sounded great in that high church way. The garden cloister area was very pretty with the afternoon sun coming through and all the flowering bushes and so forth. Our visit into the Chapter House revealed detailed Medieval friezes carved around the whole room depicting all the stories from Genesis - most of them we were able to identify. We also got a good look at the original Magna Carta document, which is being displayed there under the watchful eye of an elderly lady!

We spent some time outside the West Front of the cathedral, letting the kids run around in the Cathedral Close (a huge lawn park area) and then decided to wind our way up to Avebury - another 5000 year old stone circle. This particular one is not like Stonehenge - it is very large and used to have around 400 stones around it, and the little village of Avebury sits within the circle. High Street runs right through the circle, and parts of the circle are now sheep pasture. This circle is also surrounded by a ditch backed with a very high embankment of chalk - now covered with earth. It was getting towards dusk while we were there, so our visit was fairly quick.

So when I went to do directions home on the iphone - no service!! Big problem with using the phone as a GPS out in the middle of nowhere. So we followed a route northward, hoping it would be a good general direction. As we hopefully wound our way north, I searched the guide book for a decent map, to no avail. The other difficulty with all this was that my iphone by now was getting low on battery power, so I had to be judicious in its use. Fortunately, after just a few miles, we came upon a good sized town and there had some food and got our route home loaded on the phone.

So that concluded our sight-seeing to Wessex county, a place that I think Caleb and I battled over quite a bit in Britannia, with me finally having to give in due to lack of reinforcements. After these trips I am almost always left with the feeling of "if only we had time to do such and such" or "I'd really like to go back and see this" - there is never enough time to really see everything of interest, and we are mainly hitting the big highlights as best as we can. I found Bath to be very beautiful and would love to spend more time there.