ENGLAND
2003
Day
6 , April 10, 2003 - Thursday
Salisbury
to Stonehenge
We
got up at 8: 00 and had breakfast in the hotel courtyard.
They served a cold breakfast as a buffet and then brought us hot plates.
Afterwards we walked to Salisbury Cathedral and went in the bookstore.
We bought two of Susan Howatch’s books.
We had read several of them at the time (we now have read all of them).
The six books, the Starbridge
Series, is a fictitious family saga about the clergy of the
Diocese of Starbridge which closely resembles Salisbury Cathedral.
Susan Howatch lived across from the cathedral on the Cathedral Close as
she wrote them. The two books we
bought had beautiful covers, not available in the US.
We also bought a Celtic cross and an Irish Bless
ing
tile.After
walking around the cathedral for a while, we attended the morning Eucharist
which was held in the Morning Chapel. The
service was from the 1662 Prayer Book.
We walked over to the Salisbury Museum where the story of Stonehenge and
Salisbury was depicted. We had lunch
in the museum tea room. The
sandwiches were great – prawns, avocado, mayo, and crispy bacon and avocado.
We took the books back to the hotel and went to the bus station to catch
the bus to Stonehenge. Our original
plan was to go to Winchester Cathedral. This
was the only English cathedral that we had written to that would not give us a
private tour plus we felt that we didn’t have enough time to see it like we
wanted to, so we chose Stonehenge instead.
We
got the next to the last bus (2 pm) for the day.
We sat upstairs on the bus. On the way to Stonehenge, we saw Old Sarum.
There was a wonderful view of all of the plains from Stonehenge.
Stonehenge
is most impressive. There are
countless books written on Stonehenge along with many theories about its purpose
and origination. I will leave this
investigation to you. We had an
audio tour which gave us good information about what we were viewing.
It was truly a moving experience to try to imagine how all of these
stones got to the site, much less how those who built Stonehenge were able to
place the huge stones on top of one another.
The weather was bitterly cold and windy with some snowflakes.
It was just too uncomfortable to stay outside and listen to all the
narration. We are glad that we
had the opportunity to see it.
We
found a nice restaurant in town, Harpers. It
has been on the second floor of a building overlooking the Market Square for
more than 20 years. We had cod and smushy peas (as listed on the menu!) with
mint and pork sausage with leeks. For
dessert a lemon treacle tart with cream. It
was an enjoyable meal and the price was right.
