Westminster Evensong, Salisbury, and Stonehenge!

Friday was another productive day in the studio as Sandy and I finished up our work on the personality of place project, but I treated myself to evensong at Westminster Abbey that night. It is surprisingly much better attended than St. Paul’s and has a different feel to it, one of higher tradition. I’m finding that the best way to experience these great cathedrals is to go to a daily evensong – it allows you to hear and feel a building in a way that just standing in the midst of it does not. I took the picture at the right (WOW!) after the service – the sky in this part of the city always seems to have a certain red haze because there are so many important sites. I called it an early night because of our planned excursion for Saturday.

Unfortunately, it was a sleepless night between the Friday night traffic (we have to sleep with our window open now because the heat has no control and makes our room sweltering) and the Friday night swell of rude international travelers in the hostel… which made getting out of bed at 7am Saturday morning not too pleasant. And while we now have (excessive amounts of) heat, we’ve apparently had to sacrifice our hot water in return so showers are now fast, furious, and… well, invigorating.

All eight of us girls took the tube to Waterloo station where we boarded a Brit Rail train for Salisbury. I can’t tell you how great it was to get out of the city. The trains here are smooth, on time, and clean and I felt a sense of relief to see the wide open spaces of the English countryside, dotted with villages and grazing sheep. We arrived around noon and went straight for the cathedral – it is visible from everywhere in the city and is the point from which all things are navigated. Salisbury Cathedral, built between 1220 and 1258, has the tallest spire in all of England at 123 meters, and is noteworthy not only for its breathtaking beauty but because it is wholly a single architectural style: Early English Gothic. It also has an amazing cloister, the largest in England.

While London is an amazing city, I am finding that being there is claustrophobic and I feel like I’m constantly getting out of people’s (and cars’) way. I don’t like that. Salisbury, situated on the River Avon, operates at a slower pace with its 47,000 residents and opens its arms widely to tourists, giving them directions and stopping to let them cross the street. (This is a novel concept in Britain.) The people are dressed more casually and are very friendly. We popped to The King’s Head Inn on Bridge Street, a quaint local pub, where we found wonderful food and surprisingly lower prices. After eating a lot of cold sandwiches in the past week, we welcomed a hot meal on a cold, gray day.

After lunch, we walked back across town to the Wilts & Dorset bus company to board the No. 3 to Stonehenge. It was a double-decker bus and we got seats right up front on the top which allowed us to see Stonehenge coming from a ways away. It’s amazing how close the monument is to a fairly major set of roads but the English Heritage is planning to build a tunnel for the roads so Stonehenge can be viewed without the distraction of modernity. After you pay your entrance fee, they provide you with a free hand-held audio guide that gives you background on the site while walking you around the circle. It was really interesting – did you know that the vertical Sarsen stones actually go under ground several meters? It must be really breathtaking to be at this place on the summer solstice, when the sunset is perfectly framed under one of the lintelled arches. It was a great site, well worth the trouble (and expense) to get there. Hopped back on the train in Salisbury and arrived back in London later that evening, relished a long phone conservation with Chris and hit the sack.