Day trip to Winchester

One of the great things about living in a country so well served by trains is that you can often find a lot of good day trips to do. London is, of course, super well-connected, so if we can't go on a longer holiday, now that restrictions in the country are relaxed, we find somewhere to explore for the day. For today, we decided on the city of Winchester, which is just over an hour by train from where we live. It's an old city from medieval times, and it seemed that there would be much to explore. We had a great visit there!

Not only does Winchester have a lot of historic places to visit, one of the best things about it is that they are all easily accessible from the train station. In fact, it's probably one of the most walkable day trips we've done so far, and we would highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to walk long distances just to find the attractions in a city. It seems like almost everything that Winchester has to offer is accessible within a contained area, from the high street and market, to museums, the old cathedral, and the ruins of the castle built by William the Conqueror's grandson, Henry de Blois, who became the Bishop of Winchester in the 1100s.

High Street, crowded with the market

We started at the Great Hall, where the famed round table of King Arthur is said to be. We learned it's a re-creation of the original, and since King Arthur is not necessarily real, we didn't want to pay to see the re-created table of a mythical person, but at least we saw the area where it's located, and there are ruins from 1000 years ago in the area to see. From there, we walked down the high street and learned there was a Sunday market with all sorts of things to buy, from children's toys to cheese to exotic mushrooms. My treasure was finding creamed honey. It's not easy to find here, and I was pretty excited to find some to bring home. It's not the same as clover honey from Alberta, but it's still a bit of a treat. We kept going until we saw the statue of King Ælfred, a place significant to my husband as his grandfather took him there almost 40 years ago. Once we were done at the statue, we paused for lunch, and then took a walk along the canal.

The canal is just beautiful. There is a small bridge over it that was built between 862 and 868. Yes, you read that right. I didn't forget to add the 1 at the beginning. It's not often that you can still use something that was built 1200 years ago! Along the canal, it was so peaceful with beautiful old homes, some with English gardens, overhanging trees, and a lot of birds singing.

As we continued to walk, we noticed there was an old wall, and we followed it to see what it was, and it turned out that it was the old city wall that protected Wolvesey Castle. We would have found it eventually using our GPS, but it was nice to just come upon it so unexpectedly. Entry is free, and you can explore the ruins and get a sense of how large and imposing it once was. There were some interesting features of the old castle as well. One of them was that the aqueduct system is still in tact in terms of the structure. You could see the two directions it went to dispose of household sewage, and it would get dumped into the moat that used the surround the castle. In addition to the deep water, water with sewage in it would not be good to get into to try to attack. It would be disgusting, but mainly dangerous, I would imagine! The other interesting feature was that one section of the castle was identified as the latrine tower. This is, I think, only the second instance latrine identification I can think of having seen in a place like this. The first was in a castle in Germany where they showed how the royal couple would relieve themselves, which was through a hole in a chair into a chamber pot that one of the servants would have to hold and then dispose of. But here, there was a tower for it. It wasn't clear how it works, but I appreciated the fact that such facilities existed and that we are also told about them. For some reason I'm fascinated by waste management in these old places because usually you never see them, and it's something that everyone has to do, so how did that work in these old places before we had the toilets we do today? Were the Asian style squat toilet facilities? Did people just go out the window or outside? Is there any historical knowledge about this? Well, at least Wolvesey Castle tells us about its past in that regard. 

Latrine tower

Once we were done, we went to Winchester Cathedral. It was built in 1079, using Norman design, but had some rebuilding occur in the 14th Century to add some Gothic features. According to what I read on the city's tourism website, the cathedral was only supposed to be open for reflection and prayer on Sunday afternoons, but we found out it was already back to tours and exhibits. So it was noisier than we hoped, as we had planned on spending some silent time there, but it was not to be. It is a really beautiful church, and we were lucky to be there during choir practice, so we had some nice sounds to drown out the visitors' chatter and noise while we sat. There are several interesting things to see at the church. Aside from the beauty of the architecture, there is Jane Austen's grave, which we were told should have been at her home parish. But as she died unexpectedly in Winchester, where she was living at the time, and had brothers and friends that were all priests, they arranged for her to be buried there instead. There is also an illuminated Bible. We decided not to see it today as it is part of the exhibition you have to pay to see, but I am already planning to go back by myself sometime for that and to see Jane Austen's house. The cathedral also has some very bizarre stone carvings inside, some of which are mythical creatures and others called "green men" that are surrounded by leaves and have, in some cases, leaves even coming out of their mouths.

Once we were done at the cathedral, we rested on the grass near the cathedral and then made our way back to the first statue to get better photos. Earlier in the day, the sun's position prevented us from getting ideal photos, so we thought we'd take advantage of everything being so close and just go back there before heading home. Winchester is a really lovely city that is worth a visit if you have time to go!

Day trip to Salisbury - Stonehenge

I had been to Stonehenge 15 years ago after spending the day in Bath. My cousin had taken me to Bath, and he took me to a lovely tea house in Marlborough for afternoon tea; by the time we got to Stonehenge, it was closed for the day. He explained that you can't actually go up to the stones anyway, which is something I had wanted to do just to get a sense of scale, so I ended up not being too disappointed with not going into the complex where the site is located. I was able to get a decent photo from the road, since there are country roads running through fields in the area, and he showed me Woodhenge and other henge sites where the stones are in worse condition and are just jutting out of farmers' fields in areas and have no fanfare around them. It was good enough for me. If you have been following my travel blog for a while, you'll know that I try as much as I can to take the road less travelled, and being in a vehicle, seeing what tourists don't see, was--and is still--pretty cool. But as I learned today, sometimes the road well-travelled can be pretty good experience.

The train from our place to Salisbury, the nearest major town to Stonehenge, is about 2 hours in total. From Salisbury, there are tour buses offering hop on-hop off service, as they take you not only to Stonehenge but also to a few other sites on the way back to town from Stonehenge. The bus gives you headphones as you enter so that you can listen to information about the town and the sites the bus stops at. We learned that Salisbury was actually a pretty important medieval town, a market town, and that 1 of 4 original copies of the Manga Carta and the best preserved copy, is in the town's cathedral. Unfortunately, the pandemic restrictions have not eased up enough to open up the church yet, so we were unable to see that. But I would go back to Salisbury just for that if I didn't have any other reason to go back. It's a pretty special historical document for this social studies teacher, and I'd love to be able to at least show photos of it to my future students while discussing its significance the rule of law in Western democracies. I'll write more about that another time, when I actually get the see the document next time we go!

Anyway, the bus first stops at Stonehenge, and fortunately, you can buy your ticket on the tour bus along with the bus ticket. So it was nice not to have to wait in line as there were many local people there, although not nearly as many people as usual. A staff member at the gift shop said they would normally get around 6000-7000 visitors on a long weekend like this one, and she said this year, they'd be lucky to get about 10% of that, international tourists making up about 70% of their visitors. From the visitor centre where the entrance is, it's about 1.5km walk across some farm fields to the site itself. We were wondering why we had to walk through some farmer's field, where there had definitely been cattle, based on the dried paddies we saw, but we later learned from one of the info panels that the several acres of land surrounding Stonehenge are also owned by the National Trust, so I guess they do farm it, but it's a public land, technically. It was relaxing walk, although it might have been more relaxing with better weather; it was cold with a high chance of rain and wind warnings. We were grateful not to see any rain while we were out, but wind was wicked. Some of my photos didn't turn out, especially when I used my zoom lens, because the wind was making me so unsteady that my hands couldn't always hold the camera properly still.

What excited me about the site was that, even though you can't go right up to the stones, you can get a few metres away from them, which is still pretty close, if not for scale, but to appreciate them. And the really good thing about the site being cordoned off is that you can get great photos with no people in them. I really never imagined that. Even though there weren't the volumes of tourists they normally get, it's actually possible to get photos with few to no people in them. That is always one of the biggest frustrations as a traveller is getting photos of something interesting without other people in it. I always wonder how they do that for postcard photos, but in the case of Stonehenge, it's pretty easy. 

I think most of you will know what the site is for, so I won't go into detail about that. But I will include the fact that the Stonehenge site is actually part of a large complex that you can see when you go there. You see burial grounds, called burrows, that appear like little hills in the field but are actually burial mounds. You can also see a few other interesting sites, including Woodhenge. We didn't go see everything because it would be a hugely long walk, and I don't know how anyone would have the energy or time to do it, even if you took one of the shuttle buses that ferries people back and forth between the henge and the entrance.

Cloister of the old cathedral

We ended by getting off at Old Sarum, which is a site that has been used by many people for different reasons. It was initially built in the Middle Iron Age, around 400 BC, and was thought to have been built to protect the people living there as well as their livestock. Over the centuries, the Romans inhabited the space, a castle was built by William the Conqueror as well as a great moat, and later a cathedral was added, where you can still make out the foundation of it but has since moved to the medieval cathedral in Salisbury, the one that we couldn't see. The area is also filled with chalky ground, and I picked up a piece to draw with it just to see if it really writes, and it does. Natural chalk. I'll admit I didn't really know that existed and somehow always thought it was just some random ground up rock make into cylinders. Apparently those chalk crayons are made from actual chalk, or at least they were originally.

I'll close by mentioning how neat it is to see and touch artefacts that are 1000 or more years old. I used to say we had nothing like it in Canada--we do: there are many Indigenous sites, but unfortunately, we don't know about them or the government has prevented Indigenous people from accessing them, let alone anyone else. Or they were destroyed by colonisation. So as a result, I need to travel to see ancient spaces and places, from Stonehenge built around 4500 years ago to Old Sarum, beginning around 2500 years ago. Who has walked those lands before me?