Does it get more iconic than this?
From Devon we took three trains to get to Winchester, where we camped out for three days to do an extra deep dive into English history. Why Winchester? As the first capital of England this town is truly packed with early English history. It also happens to be less than an hour by car from Stonehenge. And it’s even closer to the great cathedral city of Salisbury, and I’m a sucker for a great English cathedral town.
Now first let’s talk about Stonehenge. We sort of felt we couldn’t do a nine-week survey of Great Britain and NOT see Stonehenge. If we didn’t go now, when would we? It almost felt like an obligation more than something I was excited about doing, especially since the public transportation options were sort of messy. I imagined some placed so packed with tourists you could hardly get a decent picture. I proposed not going at all, but Jim insisted we should do it while we were so close. So I arranged to get a driver for the day to take us to Stonehenge in the morning, and then to Salisbury for lunch and a cathedral visit.
This place is truly stunning
Stonehenge is 2 km from the visitor center where you start your visit. You then take a shuttle or a 30-minute walk to get to it. But if you drive into the area from the east, as we had done, you drive surprisingly close to it, giving you a sneak preview which we weren’t expecting at all. All of a sudden, there it was, right in front of our car, one of the most iconic sights on the globe before any tourists had even arrived. We couldn’t believe how cool it was!
This ancient site pre-dates “English” history by a very long time. The first monuments were built here around 5000 BC, and the present stones went up around 2500 BC. These were Neolithic farming people living in the Salisbury plain, who somehow organized a massive communal effort to build this. The largest stones, made of a hard sandstone called sarsen, weigh 25 tons each. They were hauled here from 20 miles away. Smaller stones on the inner circle are called bluestones, and they weigh only 2 to 5 tons each — but they were somehow transported here from western Wales over 150 miles away.
Nobody entirely understands why Stonehenge was built, though it certainly served as a burial site and a place of worship of some sort. It had astronomical and calendar functions. People probably believed the stones had special healing powers. And today it serves as a truly moving connection to our ancient past. We are very happy we went to see it!
This was really a magical visit
Couldn’t stop taking pictures
These sheep seemed pretty oblivious to the fact that they could just look up at Stonehenge anytime they want to
Our day trip to Stonehenge was paired with a lunchtime visit to Salisbury and its incredible Gothic cathedral. As you may have noticed in these pages, every cathedral in the country seems to have some claim of “biggest,” “tallest,” or “longest.” Salisbury’s claim is obvious from the moment you first catch sight of its massive steeple — the tallest in England. The cathedral was mostly built between 1220 and 1258, though the incredible tower took until 1330 to complete.
An entrance to the town of Salisbury
This towering spire of Salisbury Cathedral really grabs your attention. The clouds seemed to be competing for drama.
The nave of Salisbury Cathedral reflected in the baptismal font
Windows in Salisbury Cathedral
The cathedral facade
Only four original copies of Magna Carta from 1215 exist. We saw one earlier in Lincoln, but this one in Salisbury is the best preserved.
Look who I ran into in Salisbury
Now on to Winchester, which plays a huge role in early English history. In the 7th century AD it became the royal and ecclesiastical center of the kingdom of Wessex, one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms competing for power in Great Britain. In the 9th century King Alfred the Great made it the principal royal city of his growing kingdom. And in the 10th and 11th centuries it emerged as the capital of a unified kingdom as King Æthelstan and his successors consolidated power over all of England.
This statue of Alfred the Great, considered the first true king of England, was built in 1901 to commemorate the 1000th anniversary of his death
Winchester remained the capital of England even after the Danes invaded and took control between 1016 and 1035. Only after England fell in 1066 to the Norman invader, William the Conqueror, did the capital functions gradually begin moving to London. By the mid-12th century that process was mostly complete, though Winchester remained symbolically important for centuries.
This history made Winchester Cathedral an especially fascinating place to visit. Many of the kings of Wessex were buried in an earlier cathedral, then moved to this “new” cathedral in the 11th century. They bear legendary names like King Egbert of Wessex, King Æthelwulf of Wessex, King Alfred the Great, and King Canute the Great (the Danish invader). They also included King William II “Rufus,” the unpopular son of William the Conqueror, who died in an “accident” while hunting with nobles. His younger brother conveniently appeared quickly at Winchester to seize the treasury and the throne as Henry I.
In the 1500s the very rich and powerful Bishop of Winchester, Richard Fox, did some reconstruction at the cathedral. In the process he moved the royal bones into lovely painted “mortuary boxes” and put them on display above the choir. These became known as Fox’s Boxes. During the English Civil War in the 1640s, radical parliamentary supporters tore the boxes opened and scattered the bones. They were subsequently recovered and returned to the boxes without any knowledge of who was who. In recent years, scientists have used advanced procedures to begin to reassemble and identify the remains, so that they may one day be returned to their proper places in Fox’s Boxes.
I was fascinated by these stories and by a video in the cathedral about that forensic research. This and so many other stories made Winchester and its cathedral really come alive.
The 11th century Winchester Cathedral, jam-packed with early English history
One of the fascinating mortuary boxes containing the bones of early kings of Wessex and England
Fox’s Boxes line a railing above the choir area of Winchester Cathedral
Winchester Cathedral claims to have the longest Gothic nave in the world — and the oldest intact wooden choir
Writer Jane Austen’s grave in the cathedral
Strolling along Winchester’s lovely River Itchen
Dining at Chesil Rectory, a wonderful restaurant in the oldest house in Winchester, built by a local merchant around 1450. In 1554, Queen Mary I (“Bloody Mary”) married the future King Philip II of Spain in Winchester Cathedral. The lavish ceremony nearly bankrupted the town, so Mary kindly gifted this house to the local convent.