Salisbury City and Cathedral

Monday 27 May 1998. Fran and I are on holiday in Wiltshire and have now left the ancient hilltop fort of Old Sarum and are in Salisbury.

As we emerge from the huge car park, our first view of Salisbury, is the river. It cuts under the shopping center in a huge black hole to emerge on the other side of the buildings, hissing and roaring over a wier. Facing the shopping centre and culvert we had to turn round to see this much more attractive view leading towards the old bridge with its arches.

There is an excellent covered market cross with some old half-timbered black and white buildings nearby.

Down one of the streets leading off this crossroads is this arched gateway. Going through it leads into the cathedral square.

Salisbury is one of England's most famous cathedrals. Building commenced in 1220 - late for an English cathedral, but we must remember that Salisbury grew only once the old hillfort city of Old Sarum was abandoned. The Norman cathedral at Old Sarum was built from 1075-1092.

The famous spire is England's tallest at 404 feet or 123 metres and leans around 27 inches from the vertical.

This is the oldest working clock in Europe. It was made in 1386 and originally installed in a bell tower that was demolished in 1798. It is still ticking away and the cathedral website informs us (and I love this!) that it has ticked more than 5 million times since it first started measuring the time! Actually it is probably two and a half million ticks and two and a half million tocks...

Despite never having been an abbey it has cloisters - not sure what it is about walking around a cloister but I always have to do it when visiting somewhere with one! And this is the largest cloister in England.

The great treasure of Salisbury is the best preserved copy of the original Magna Carta, agreed by King John at Runnymede on 15 June 1215 and which laid down the beginnings of English law, since copied around the world. Thirteen copies of the Magna Carta were made, only four of which still exist. Two are in the British Library and one lies at Lincoln within the castle. The one at Salisbury was taken originally to the cathedral at Old Sarum.

At Runnymede King John was urged to sign by his half brother, William Longspeé. A sculpture of this moment can be seen in the cathedral and William was buried there. In another wonderful bit of gossip, the cathedral website informs us that when his tomb was opened after many centuries there was a dead rat with traces of arsenic in it found lying inside his skull. A strange way to die, poisoned by a carrier rat eating its way into your head - you'd have thought someone would have noticed and shooed it away...

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St Marks Square, Venice

Sunday, 3 May 2009. I've already described how we got to Venice, so in this entry we'll have a look at St Marks Square and in particular the exterior of the cathedral itself.

At the waterfront to the west of St Mark's Square are several ranks of Venice's famous gondolas. There are many other places to find a gondola, but from here you have the best chance of being guided underneath the Bridge of Sighs. Hence, the gondolas here may not be the cheapest to ride.

The Doges Palace. Doge is the Italian equivalent of Duke and the Duke of Venice was also the Magistrate, hence the judicial hearings were heard in the palace. It was largely constructed from 1309 to 1424 and following a fire in 1574 was reconstructed in the original style.

St Mark's is the only "square" in Venice. All the other spaces are called a "campi" rather than a "piazza". It had its origins in the 800s but only reached its present shape and size in 1177 when waterways, including a dock that separated it from the Doges Palace, were filled in.

The bell tower is 98.6 meters tall, and separated from the basilica. It has an arched belfry, housing five bells.

The belfry is topped by a cube, with walking lions and the female representation of Venice. It is capped by a pyramid with a golden weathervane of the archangel Gabriel. It reached its present form in 1514 although it is a reconstruction, completed in 1912 after the collapse of 1902.

The first thing that strikes you when you look at any cathedral and stop to think about it is how long it must have taken to build it. In fact that's a source of frustration for many people in Barcelona, where Gaudi's cathedral, La Sagrada Familia has been coming together slowly since 1882 and it is not due to be completed until 2026. Gaudi shrugged this off with the comment "My client is not in a rush..." I quite like the idea that every time I go to Barcelona there is something new to find. And when you think about it, it really makes no difference whether that's because it wasn't actually there to be found the last time, or whether there was just so much to take in that you missed it. With any large cathedral there is always something new to find and see when you visit.

Above the central arch with the fabulous mosaic that we'll look at in a minute, there are four horses cast in bronze in Roman times. The Horses of Saint Mark were part of a Ben-Hur type racing chariot statue. They were looted from Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, around 1204 by Venetian forces in the 4th Crusade.

I've mentioned them before, because in 1797, Napoleon stole the horses for the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, in Paris. They were returned in 1815 after Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. In the 1980s damage from air pollution forced their replacement with exact replicas. The originals are displayed inside - something else I have yet to see...

The mosaics in the arches of St Marks are worth a look with real gold having been used in the making. And let's tear ourselves away from the cathedral for a moment to spare a glance around the rest of St Marks Square. I've been lucky in that I've never been there when it has flooded. The drains of the square apparently lead straight to the Grand Canal and whilst it works perfectly at most times, when the level of the Lagoon rises because of storm surges, the channels of the drains work both ways... St Marks Square is the lowest part of Venice.

I have already mentioned the Doges Palace. So let's look to the other side of the cathedral, where we find the clock tower. The tower is an imposing building with the Venetian winged lion standing out against a blue and white chequerboard design at the top of the façade, on a single storey tower. On top is a bell with two giant blackened bronze figures who strike the bell on the hour.

Right! It's time to plunge into the maze of streets and see where we end up!

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Northleach Museum of Mechanical Music

Saturday 4 June 1994. It was still raining as we returned towards Bourton-On-The-Water and our hotel from Cheltenham and Gloucester, but before we arrived back at the hotel we had noticed another mention of a museum on the map.

At the village of Northleach we found Keith Harding's World of Mechanical Music. If ever you find yourself with a couple of hours to spare, pay it a visit. The small room was packed with people. The guide (who it turned out was Keith Harding himself) welcomed us and then asked an unexpected question.

"Before we start, would you like to see the collection of clocks?" Somewhat bemused we glanced around at each other. Someone nodded and it became infectious. Yes we would like to see the clocks! "Come through, it may be a little squashed!" he apologised, leading us from the museum room into the hallway of his living quarters. A small collection of clocks stood in the hallway - every size of clock you could imagine, from a mantleshelf clock to one that belonged in a clock tower (albeit fitted with a more modest face!)

He proceeded to talk about the clocks, about how, when and where they were made, the type of people who would have had a clock like that and the way in which they were wound. In the middle of his talk a small terrier came down the stairs and launched into a frenzy of friendly leg licking. We patted it dutifully and then with enthusiasm, for as his tale of the clocks went on we became fascinated until he finished with the church clock, demonstrating how the clock in the Tower of Westminster was wound each day.

And then, spellbound we were led back into the museum where he played a piece of music on each of the instruments in the place - polyphons, beautiful music boxes with automated figures and birds, player pianos, wax cylinder phonographs (Come Into The Garden, Maude) and finally the horn gramophone (Teddy Bears' Picnic).

The horn (he explained) was made of papier mache, and all horned gramophones had a horn no bigger than (now how large was it? No matter!). He smiled at us. "Can anyone think why?" he asked gently. There was silence. His smile became broader. "Come now," he chided, "no one with a practical mind?" The answer hit me and I laughed out loud. "So they could get through the door!" I said and his smile became even broader, nodding his delight that he hadn't had to say it himself.

We left the museum, agreeing with the other visitors how pleasant a place it was and what a good time we had had. The guide had worked his magic so well we were all friends by now, even without knowing names! We decided there and then that we would revisit the museum some day.

We headed on up to Bourton-on-the-Water and booked in at a small guest house. Looking through the trees over the River Windrush with its wonderful little bridges, you see the group of buildings where our hotel was.

Apparently on the Friday night someone tried to ram-raid the chemists shop underneath our hotel room in a car. He forgot about the concrete flower pots (trenches more like!) and only succeeded in wrecking the car and had fled, leaving blood in the car. We slept blissfully through it all! Serves the dipstick right, I hope it hurt!

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