Salisbury and Bath

Arriving back in England from Spain we stayed over in Gatwick for a night and then caught a train (or trains!) to Salisbury. This was to be our youth hostel experience! Like young backpackers we trudged through the town and up the hill to the YHA, dropped our stuff off and headed back into town for a picnic lunch. What to do? The day was fine, if chilly so we decided to catch a bus and do the Stonehenge Tour. What an awesome arrangement of rocks – so carefully and scientifically planned, but nowhere near as big as we had expected. Photographs had always made the area to be larger than it really is but there is certainly a different feeling about the place. So this was where Clive’s grandfather had grown up (Salisbury, West Dene and the Stonehenge area) before emigrating to New Zealand. Two circuits of the roped off site gave a pretty good perspective of how large the earthworks once were and how the site itself was once a part of a walkway which extended down to the River Avon (but which one?? Avon is the old Saxon word for ‘River’). Burial mounds in some ways similar to those of Sutton Hoo were clearly visible on the near horizon. From Stonehenge we bussed back to Salisbury (unable to visit the original site of the Salisbury Cathedral at Old Sarum because there had been a car accident nearby) and visited the Church of Saint Edmund.
The next day dawned cold and blue. Time to visit the Salisbury Cathedral – and what a majestic looking building. So much history involved and inside more of the same. Amongst the tombs and monuments there was one belonging to Bishop Richard Beauchamp (although his body is no longer in the tomb – no-one seems to know where it is now having been moved during a period of restoration in the Cathedral itself) – a distant relative! A guided tour of the church by an old lady who tried her best (but occasionally got things a bit mixed up) gave us a pretty good idea of the role this church has played among the lives of the Salisbury folk.
And the Red Lion Pub – that too has a link to the family of yore!
We declined the opportunity to visit the local pub which still has on display the arm of a former (long dead)inn keeper. But we did stop for a Starbucks. A walk along the banks of the Avon (and again, which one as there are seven – or eight of them, depending on which guide you listen to) enjoying the sun, but not so the cold wind gave a bit of a view of some of the older Salisbury establishments.
In two days we filled our time in Salisbury and it was time to move on to Bath – about an hour away by train.
Bath was freezing and wet! But we did enjoy the Roman Baths and took a guided bus tour of the city which we had intended to be orientation. (The weather was so dismal we didn’t manage to get to some places again so the orientation part in the end became unnecessary but at least we got a pretty good view through the mist of the old city.) We basically self-guided around the place visiting and pausing briefly at a number of sites before heading to the Catholic church where again we attended a Sunday Mass. Bath is the home of Pirate speak and you could almost see Captain Pugwash and Co. amongst the people. The Roman ruins well buried under parts of the inner city are still being explored but there are clear signs of well preserved ruins at the Baths which provided warm and dry relief from the dismal outside conditions. (Seems that all the other tourists in Bath that day thought the same.) While we were kind of sad to leave Bath (the people were very nice and much more relaxed than their more northern counterparts) it was time to move on and we headed back to Gatwick – the cheap fare took five hours of travel; typically Sunday train travel was interrupted by rail works and we ended up catching a link bus which added an extra hour of travel to our time. Just as well we hadn’t planned to be flying out or going somewhere different.