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...

Return to Wiltshire, Cotswolds and Avon 1998 Index

Lunchtime in Lincoln

I've been to Lincoln today for an afternoon meeting with some people at the university and having arrived just before lunch, parked in the old part of the city and went to find something to eat there.

There were lots of school trips going on - everywhere were uniformed children with clipboards, looking for things they had on a list to find, drawing the castle or cathedral and somewhat bizarrely in a small group in an alley listening to a man dressed in a toga... Lucius Dressdus...

The castle is imposing and stands squarely facing the equally impressive gateway to the cathedral.

This is pretty much a building in its own right that has a gateway cut through it. It makes entering the Cathedral grounds something of an experience.

The cathedral houses one of the original copies of King John's Magna Carta document and a nearby pub is called the Magna Carta to commemorate the fact. Not that Clive and myself knew or thought to ask why it was called that when we called for a pint a few years ago whilst in the city to deliver a workshop...

There's an incredibly steep and long shopping street that leads from the castle and cathedral's hilltop to the modern city below.

They call it The Health Walk these days, but then every night you can take one of several ghost tours which probably list off all the people down the ages who have had heart attacks and died whilst walking back up...

Nearby is this very ancient Roman archway over the road - one of the original gates into the Roman city. It had a close call with a rather too large lorry in 1964, the damage costing over 1500 pounds to repair. And before anyone thinks that's not a lot, you could buy around 80 Mars Bars for a pound in 1964. A useful measure of worth, the Mars Bar, I always think!

Moreton Corbet - Castle and Mystery

Ah! It's been a bit of an impulse day! I was in Shrewsbury for a meeting and having had that, I was driving merrily back towards the North West, wondering where I would be by the time my stomach signalled it was too long past lunch, when I saw a sign for a castle.

There's so many brown signs on the road these days (you can buy them I think - which explains why you see tourist signs these days pointing to "Lil's Burger Caravan"). Anyway, I wasn't going to stop for a lunchbreak and therefore thought a quick ten minutes look at a castle I'd never even heard of might be fun.

This is Moreton Corbet, which is almost two castles in one. An older castle has a few remains dating from the 1200s and this shell dates from the 16th century. It was originally built, not by a Norman, but by a Saxon who had found favour with the new rulers in our country. A rare castle then - although apparently the Saxon, Bartholomew Toret, fell out with King John and was thrown in jail in 1215. The castle passed into the hands of the Norman Corbet family when Toret's heiress married into the family a couple of dozen years later.

I started off at the 16th century block and then walked through to the remains of the older castle. Part of the keep tower still stands and some of the outer wall, though little remains of any rooms. The most complete part is the gatehouse which had been remodelled in the 1500s.

Walking out via the gatehouse I passed though a fence with two very unusual "gateposts". I was now in the driveway to a church, St Bartholomew's, which had a very fine old building nearby - the old rectory perhaps. I didn't go into the church as I still get twinges of guilt at sightseeing on a working day. How ridiculous that is considering I could have legitimately taken an hour for lunch and in any case had been away from home for two nights... Well, I spent perhaps a quarter of an hour altogether and had driven a massive 4 miles (counting both the journey from the main road and going back) in a diesel hire car that reckoned it was doing 56 miles per gallon.

It was whilst looking at the church that I got an inkling of where the "gateposts" had come from. I wonder where the other two were? I was also amazed at the number of helicopters that were buzzing about my ears. At least ten had flown over during my visit and some of them were very low. Looking up the castle on the Internet just now, I found I was just a short distance from an RAF helicopter training school. So not the castle to go to for peace and quiet then!

There is a ghost story here, of the Puritan who was a guest and who outstayed his welcome, being thrown out of the castle. He cursed the new block so that it would never be completed and it is said that his ghost haunts it still to make sure it won't ever be. It wasn't ever finished in fact and the Roundheads setting it on fire certainly helped the ghost put the kibosh on the Corbet family's building aspirations! The bright sunshine today though, certainly didn't have me thinking of ghosts and hauntings! It's good sometimes to go aside from your route on impulse!

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