First Stop Salisbury

The usual delight of a 25-hour trip landed me safely at Heathrow where I was extremely glad to tbe met by Mary Thoreau. She drove my little jet-lagged self in my rental car to Salisbury, safely negotiating all the M5/M3/Mgazillion motorways necessary. We passed Stonehenge coming in to Salisbury, but for some bizarre reason, it being the Summer Solstice, it was closed off to traffic by several million orange traffic cones. I wold have thought it would have been the exact day that all would-beDruids would have headed there to prance naked at dawn. There were assorted hipp-type characters hitching rides on the road-side, so perhaps their Druid aspirations had been foiled.

Salisbury is an attractive town whcih we wandered through on our way to lunch at the Debenham's Cafe, according to instructions from Kath and Dave who had discovered this little piece of ancient building tucked at the back of a department store, and converted into a cafe. The usual fare of paninis and latte was available, with thankfully no ancient food on display. After lunch was the first dose of tourist-mania, with a visit to Salisbury Cathedral which truly deserves its reputation as one of the most beautiful cathedrals. It is nearly 800 years old, and was built in the "amazingly short time of 38 years", which is of course amazing when one considers the prinitive tools and engineering equipment available for the constructon of the soaring vault. Apparently cathedrals under construction at the time regularly fell down, as they learned along the way how to make them stand up!!!

Crowning the cathedral is a fabulous spire, but it also nearly caused major disaster. The cathedral was not designed for a spire, but some queen commented that it really looked like it should have one, so 7000 tons of stone were duly plonked on top of the roof to make one. Unsurprisingly the beautiful soaring marble pillars inside developed an alarming bend in them over the next hundred years. Sir Christopher Wren was called in about the problem, for which he suggested a solution of a band of steel around the spire. This seems to have solved the problem for the last five hundred years or so, but our little group of tourists all still looked a bit edgy and shifted nervously out of the way, when we gazed up at the gentle curve of said pillars!! The cathedral is not one of the biggest around, but it has truly beautiful proportions and stunning sight lines down the nave. The Chapter house next door also holds one of the four copies of the Magna Carta, written in amazingly tiny script on vellum.

Today will eb Wilton House and off into the English countryside.

More later.