Friday: Old Sarum

  Considering its relatively close proximity to my home, I’ve never been to Old Sarum before. And having made that confession, here’s another: we don’t walk The Great Stones Way to Old Sarum. With a collective age of 179 years, thirty plus miles, several evenings of relaxing red wine behind us and collective exhaustion we drive to the joint. We are so familiar with these smoke-ridden hills and the ubiquitous Alton Barnes white horse that they seem part of our make-up as we head towards the end of this exhilarating trip. Actually, regarding those last two, one dominates the other this morning. Apparently, it’s possible to still see the white horse from Old Sarum but the war games are obviously reaching a climax today as the smoke seems thicker than ever before. In other directions, however, the views are perfect.

 We look down onto the cathedral of nearby Salisbury with some detectable wistfulness on the parts of B and Pathfinder Powell. ‘You don’t want to go down there, do you?’ I ask cautiously. ‘Because I’m not’, I add as an afterthought. And, let’s face it, few venture into Salisbury these days. Sorry Salisbury because you’ve got a wonderful museum … ‘oh you and your conspiracy theories’, the pathfinder admonishes me. Hutton doesn’t have a clue what we’re talking about. He’s a big fan of Salisbury, going so far as to have a Nelly Erichsen illustration of the High Street Gate as the frontispiece in Highways and Byways in Wiltshire. ‘Just concentrate on where we are now’, I suggest.

Hutton brightens up considerably at the prospect: he’s got eleven pages on Old Sarum in you know where. Briefly, there may have been an iron-age hill fort here around 400BCE and subsequent Roman occupation both within and without the ramparts with three Roman roads converging to the east. William the Conqueror turned up and built a motte and bailey and the original cathedral was constructed after 1075 before being moved to its current site a couple of hundred years later. That’s about all you need to know really as the place was abandoned and most of the stonework removed. Naturally, Hutton is appalled by the despoliation and drones on and on about the accomplices of vandalism, ending rather piously with his opinion that ‘their excuse is I suppose that they know not what they do’. Hmmm. I think you’ve stolen that line, Edward.

  We abandon him and pay our £5.20 each to English Heritage to get in. To be fair, most of it – the best bits – are free but we are tourists as well as walkers and we want to have a look at the ruins and the more up to date information. Further, there’s a gift shop. There haven’t been many of those on this holiday and B and the pathfinder immediately stock up on jam, honey and sack-loads of ye olde Saxon fudge. I purchase a wooden ruler with all the kings and queens of England illustrated thereon for my daughter. She’s thirty seven. Further, this photo was taken elsewhere but I like it.

 Some of the high-spots are rather too high for B and I but Pathfinder Powell bravely plots a course along the ramparts and later all around the lower external rings. She has no fear of heights and takes great pleasure in spitting on unsuspecting cows below. Mostly, we have the wide green expanse to ourselves; apart from a few dog walkers, one of whom we accost for the final photograph. It’s not until we sit down for the last picnic, that the place is invaded once more by the French: hordes of loud students with a worrying lack of supervision. It’s of no consequence. We lay back enjoying the sunshine once more. It’s been a truly lovely holiday.