England: Day 7, Four Sites Today

Photograph taken by on Monday, August 12, 2013
Uffington White Horse

Uffington White Horse

Salisbury Cathedral

Salisbury Cathedral

Stonehenge

Stonehenge

Avebury Stone Circle

Avebury Stone Circle

After visiting only one place yesterday, we had a somewhat busier day today. We had four sites to visit today, somewhat spread around the countryside over a round-trip course of a little over a hundred miles.

It was a absolutely lovely day, cool and bright. We started by taking a short drive of about 10 miles to the Uffington White Horse. It is a prehistoric, highly stylized figure of a horse, formed from trenches filled with crushed white chalk. The problem is that as you get closer to it, you don’t see it from the proper angle and it looks less and less like a horse. This is the best picture I could get and you can just make out the horse. I think it needs to be seen from the air to really see it properly. It’s possible that it can be seen well from Dragon Hill, a natural chalk hill with an artificial flat top set below the horse. The hind legs are to the left, forelegs to the right, and the head is not quite visible above them on the far right. There are pictures of it from the air on Wikimedia Commons.

From there we drove south to Salisbury, about 45 miles. We found parking and walked to the cathedral, which is quite lovely (and pretty big). There is a wonderful painting of the cathedral by John Constable from about 1825 and I would have liked to have walked in the Bishop’s Grounds to the south of the cathedral, which is where he painted it from, but we had more to see today and you cannot do everything. The light was a bit tricky today, as it’s been most days, with very bright skies and sometimes shady subjects because of the clouds. This photo is what is known as an high dynamic range (HDR) photograph, made by combining three different exposures of the same image.

Before leaving Salisbury we had a nice lunch in a place called The Boston Tea Party. It is housed in the Old George Inn which apparently dates back to 1314 and in the courtyard of which William Shakespeare is said to have performed one of his plays. In England’s version of “George Washington Slept Here,” Oliver Cromwell slept here on his way to join the army, Samuel Pepys wrote about the Inn in his diary after a stay and both H. G. Wells and Charles Dickens made mentioned of it in their writings.

We drove north to Stonehenge. It hasn’t changed much in the 42 years since I was here last, although the arrangement for seeing it are a bit different. There is a small car park but that is totally inadequate for the number of visitors and a large section of the neighboring field has been turned into an extended parking area. You are not permitted to walk amid the monument itself but are restricted to a circular walk around it. In fact, you get reasonably close on one side and if it were not for the restrictions there is no way you could possibly take a picture like this, with no people showing. This was nine photographs, stitched together to make a single image. They were timed so that I had no people in the background (with a couple exceptions, which were edited out). I think it’s turned out rather well.

Our final historical stop of the day was Avebury Stone Circle, in the small village of Avebury. It was evening by the time we got there and we were not able to spend as much time as I would have liked but I enjoyed it quite a bit. The evening light was lovely. The stones in this photograph are not the largest but they form part of the northwest quadrant of a large circle of stones. We walked around this quadrant and into the northeast. It covers quite a bit more ground than Stonehenge and you can walk right up to the stones.

Rather than eat in the pub at Avebury, which had the wrong vibe for us, we headed towards “home” and stopped at The Barbury Inn in a town called Broad Hinton. We had a very friendly reception there and the food was as good as we had anywhere in the two weeks we were here.

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