Totally X-Treme Cathedral Mega-Weekend, Part One: Stonehenge and Salisbury

Friday, I saw this:

I have 20 or so pictures of it from different angles, but I'm not going to inundate you with all of them. This entry is probably better done as a sort of photo essay, so I'll try to make it mostly pictures and not a lot of me babbling (although I make no guarantees about my ability to do that).

When we got off the bus, I discovered that Huma and Sateary were in our group, so we ended up hanging out for the day. This proved detrimental to them later when we were in Salisbury and a sense of obligation no doubt compelled them to follow my meandering from one unacceptable restaurant to another, but that's as may be.

Stonehenge is, as you can probably tell from the above picture, in the middle of miles of plains and rolling hills, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. A sore, ancient thumb.

Our tickets included an audio tour. Instead of headphones, they give you a "wand" of sorts with a keypad and a small speaker on one end. As you get to different designated stations along the path, you enter that station's number and an enthusiastic man and woman tell you things you didn't know before.

Sometimes those things are of genuine interest, like how many hundreds of tons the stones weigh, or how far away they were quarried (250 miles!). Sometimes those things aren't especially surprising, like being told that the bluestones are blue inside. If you don't go in for that sort of thing, there's also a guided tour given by what appeared to be a car salesman, an estate agent, or a game show host on his lunch hour.

I'd heard a lot of complaints from students who'd gone on the last Stonehenge trip that "You can't get close to it!" and "It's so small!" I have to disagree.

The audio guide confidently debunked the notion that Stonehenge had been used as an observatory and offered up only one feeble piece of evidence that there had ever been any sacrifices performed here, but it fell a little short of speculating on the stone circle's possible uses or methods of construction. It even suggested that it was "as believable as anything else" that aliens were responsible. This gave me an entirely new outlook on everything else I saw afterwards.

Stonehenge is fascinating. I probably could've sat crosslegged staring at it for a lot longer, but the bus driver had a schedule to keep, so it was off to Salisbury.


I know what you're thinking: steak. But there's a lot more to Salisbury than that (in fact, I never even heard anyone mention their steak, nor was there any kind of "Steakland" amusement park; they're a very modest people). Specifically, there's the cathedral, which, at 404 feet, is the tallest pre-1400s spire in the world. You can see it from nearly anywhere in town. Malcolm, one of our RAs and our group leader for the day, led us alongside a stream into the heart of Salisbury. Along the way, most of us were distracted by these swans.


Once we were left to our own devices, Huma, Sateary, and I did some wandering around the shops while I contemplated eating. This is where it didn't pay for them to follow me, because I did more whining about being hungry than actual searching for a place to eat. However, they were good sports. We ended up just going to the cathedral ahead of the others. Like everything else that's hundreds of years old here, it's undergoing near-constant renovation.



We'd had to push back our visiting time there due to a funeral. Salisbury Cathedral isn't just a tourist attraction; it's a working church seven days a week. Eventually, at the appointed time, we all went inside, where we were met by Denis, our tour guide for the day.



Denis was a great guy. Knowledgeable, charming, and funny (plus, you don't have to put any part of him in your ear, which is a bonus). Jill would've loved him. As it happens, his daughter attended both the University of Sussex and UC Davis, so most of us immediately had something in common with him (especially the Davis portion of our party). He told us an amusing anecdote about a Stetson-wearing Texan who'd visited some time ago and was surprised to learn that the cathedral was open on Sundays. Texas: bringing people together all over the world.

Denis had a lot of other interesting things to say, but I think the most interesting, as concerns the cathedral itself, is that the spire was a somewhat later addition to the cathedral about sixty years after its initial construction. This was a bit of a problem, as the building hadn't been designed to support an additional 6,400 tons of stone. Indeed, some of the marble columns inside have actually bent under the strain. It's my understanding that marble doesn't bend easily. They added some flying buttresses and some iron supports elsewhere, and the thing's still standing. At least, it was last time I checked.




Salisbury Cathedral is also home to the best-preserved of the four remaining copies of Magna Carta. Alas, they don't allow photography in that room, so I had to stare at it until I had it memorized.

By the time we left my appetite was pretty insistent, so we got some panini at a cafe and just barely made it back to the bus on time. The driver had a dinner date and had calmly told us several times that he had no qualms about leaving us behind if we weren't there by 4:30. I've never seen a group of students be so organized and punctual.

When I got home, the garbage still hadn't been cleaned up. Awesome! My housemates were disconcertingly unconcerned with it, though. Their plan was to have a porter clean it up. Not now, because it was after 5:00 and the porter had gone home, but sometime. Probably. They weren't sure when, because most of them would be gone all the next day in Canterbury, as would I. I don't know why rotting garbage didn't bother them like it bothered me, but at that point I was convinced that one of them would do something about it on their own. I was wrong, of course, but I think my optimism can be excused.

So a bit of a let-down after a day of incredible sights, but in no way did the end of the day detract from the rest of it. I'd go back to Stonehenge or Salisbury in a heartbeat.