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 It's a pretty special historical document for this social studies teacher, and I'd love to be able to at least show photos of it to my future students while discussing its significance the rule of law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.
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| 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?
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