Excursion to Salisbury, Sunday

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Okay, this will most likely be an even longer post than usual since I missed yesterday (with the exception of my Stonehenge photo essay) and I don't really have much to do today. I'll start with the excursion we went on yesterday. Even if it was "touristy", it was amazing. If nothing else, it provided further evidence that one can't walk down the street in this country without bumping into something historically significant and/or cool. We were gone for about 10 hours yesterday, of which a sizable chunk of which was spend on a bus, and we still managed to see at least four sites that are worth traveling to see. The English "interstate" system seems very much like the highways back home, except for the fact that everyone is driving on the left side of the road and the routes are named with a alphanumeric system that is considerably beyond my comprehension. Considering that England has a large population and limited land area, the landscape was very much rural once we got away from the city, interspersed with small villages and hamlets. We saw a huge nuclear power plant looming near the highway, as well as a long convoy of military trucks hauling armored personnel carriers northward. And lots of Bentleys. Eventually we crested a hill and found ourselves looking down on Salisbury.

Salisbury is a fairly small city of 45,000 about one and a half hours southeast of Oxford. The city is beautiful in it's own right, but the main attraction is the medieval cathedral that dominates the city skyline with a spire rising 404 feet into the air. Our first stop was the Church of St. Thomas Becket. While I forget exactly how old it is (I assume it's sometime after this in 1170) I can confidently say that if there was something that old in the states we'd have it roped off as a national monument of some kind. This church, however, was very clearly still in use. One corner was fenced off as a children's play area, with bright plastic chairs and toys. I found this somewhat strange, as there were very clearly dead people buried under every square inch of the floor. In the other corner, long folding tables held tubs of second hand books for sale. And on the other side of the church, there was a 30' tall fresco that is the oldest preserved doomsday painting in the country. It is almost disorienting to look at a centuries old painting then turn to see pensioners buying a used copy of Oliver Twist in the same room. I also found a stained glass window that I really liked dedicated to English war dead (Dr. Trivedi, a medievalist to the core, advised me "oh don't take a picture of that Victorian tat"). The best part was a frame depicting St. George slaying a dragon that bears more than a passing resemblance to Spyro. After checking out the church, we had lunch wandering through a big outdoor market and rendezvoused with the rest of the group outside the cathedral.

The Salisbury Cathedral is the most impressive building that I have ever seen. Even as far as cathedrals go, this one is pretty awesome. They're all very ornate, but I think Salisbury is especially impressive since it was built in only 40 years. I can't really do it justice with words, and my point and shoot camera doesn't quite cut it. One of the reasons I think I liked it so much was the huge windows that let in lots of light (at least in comparison to Notre Dame, the other cathedral I've been to). In addition, the cathedral houses one of the four remaining copies of Magna Carta. While it's not that visually impressive, it's still Magna Carta (those in the know tell me that its correct not to use an article when referring to the document, thus not the Magna Carta). The only bad thing about the entire visit was the gift shop at the end. It was terrible and tacky and commercial and I hated it. But I still bought two postcards.

The next place we visited was Old Sarum, the site of the original settlement of what would become Salisbury after the city moved because of lack of water and squabbling between the clergy and military. Old Sarum was a fortified settlement that William the Conqueror later built a castle at (I'll take a moment to point out that history gives old Willy a great nickname, probably second only to Vlad the Impaler). There's not much left of the castle besides the foundation, but the huge earthen berms constructed around the fort are still there. It's already on top of a hill and the defensive earthworks add some extra height, making it look like something I wouldn't particularly want to run up in chain mail with arrows coming at me, as well as making the view spectacular. Like the rest of England I've seen so far all the grass was vividly green, and the town lacks tall buildings, making the view of the cathedral very impressive. After taking in the scenery for a while, it was time to complete the pilgrimage to what I was sure would be the climax of our trip to England; I am of course referring to Stonehenge.

Stonehenge is a bunch of rocks arranged in a circle. The audio commentary some of us listened to assured us that they are arranged for a very specific reason, although it was coyly ambiguous as to what that reason might be. If you ask me, I think it's most likely that the stone age builders put it up just to confuse future generations of archeologists. The stones are roped off to keep riff-raff like me away from these ancient objects of mystery, and so visitors are compelled to walk the circular path around the site, all the better to contemplate it from every possible angle. Perhaps compelled is too strong a word, since most vistors seemed to approach the side nearest the entrance, snap a few photos, stand and gaze contemplatively at the stones for about 90 seconds, then turn back to the parking lot with a perturbed expression (presumably, they are trying to decide if the experience was worth the admission fee. "6 pounds fiftey? Hey that's like twelve dollars/nine euros/twelve hundred yen/five hundred dinars! Crap!"). Actually, in Stonehenge's defense, it is more impressive than I thought it would be. It actually is pretty big, and clearly required some ingenuity to build without power tools or, oh say...the wheel. The weather was nice that day, which meant the grey stones stood out between against the emerald grass and blue sky with puffy white clouds, looking like nothing so much as a Windows screensaver. But at the same time, the Egyptians were building the pyramids during roughly the same period as the stone part of Stonehenge was finished, and few would argue that Stonehenge is cooler than the pyramids. Except maybe people who claim to be druids.

According to Dr. Trivedi, if you get dressed up in a bed sheet and claim to be a druid, you get to go up to the stones inside the rope barrier and worship them as you wish, presumably as long as "worship" doesn't mean "carve your initials in". This is the one piece of information he gave me throughout the day that I remain skeptical about. Other than that, he seemed to be an authority on just about everything we saw, possibly as a consequence of taking the same excursion several times a year. He even knew quite a bit about when you can eat swans in England. All the swans in the country are technically owned by the Queen. I'm sure the penalty for poaching the Queen's swans involves a gristly, lengthy, very public death in the style of something out of Braveheart. However, some venerable institutions including Dr. Trivedi's college at Cambridge have traditional "swanning rights" to catch and eat them from time to time. As to the merits of swans, according to Trivedi they're like chicken "but gamier. Certainly inferior to goose. But the young ones are more tender...".

After getting our fill of Stonehenge we walked back to the bus (excuse me, "coach") through the crowd of people who were engaged in taking pictures of the rocks from outside the fence, avoiding the admission fee and still getting snapshots. Speaking of the steep fee, the money collected apparently goes to the continued preservation of the site, the plan for which I imagine is something along the lines of "leave them in the ground" (and, as Sarah suggests, "no additional carving or painting"). In reality, the trust that runs Stonehenge has a plan to build a giant underground tunnel through which to run the nearby highway, thus restoring the site to its proper pre-modern aesthetic. Good luck with that. The land around the henge is owned by the Ministry of Defense, but the only visible activity on the surrounding land appeared to be sheep grazing. The sheep were fun to watch. More so than a set of meticulously placed boulders, anyway.

All in all a good day, capped off by watching UGA beat Darth-Visor and the Gamecocks on TV.