Winchester, Stonehenge, and Glastonbury Tor- Friday, July 26, 2013

We had to rush somewhat to eat breakfast (identical to what the same chain was serving us in London, but for half the price now), get dressed and get out of the hotel this morning. The car park that they put us in was several blocks away, and started charging at 8:00 AM, and we didn't have a ticket in our window. (Notice that neither parking nor breakfast were included in the hotel.  Blah.)  That put us at our first stop in Winchester about an hour before things opened at 10.  We passed the time by strolling through the town.  It's a very old, medieval town.  Some of the buildings were old stone ones or half timbered ones.  The central street, High Street, was blocked off to traffic and had a market place set up.  It was a pleasant stroll. One man must have recognized we were tourists as we were waiting at a crosswalk.  He said, "It's hard to believe, but that road is 2,500 years old.  And this one (High Street) is 3,500 years old!"   800 years ago, Winchester was the capital of England.  

We came to Winchester to see King Arthur's Round Table.  Scott remembers a picture of this table in his English lit book in high school, when they were studying the legends of Arthur.  The table now hangs in the Great Hall, the only remaining part of the great castle hat once stood here.  The table was painted with the places marked for Arthur and his 24 knights, Mordred to the king's right and Galahad, and Launcelot to his left, and so on.   Like 221B Baker Street, the Round Table is something that you want to be true from the legendary past of England, but this particular artifact has quite a long part in actual history.  The painting on the table was done in the time of Henry VIII.  The table is far older.  It is older than "Le Morte d'Arthur," the book by Thomas Mallory.  So could the table really have been Arthur's?  Many generations have said so, and we want to believe.  

We continued on to our next stop - Stonehenge.  Julie seems to be more comfortable driving on the left and negotiating the round-abouts.  It helps that the GPS is so informative.  We don't know how we would have done it with Scott just reading a map.  We did get into a traffic jam as we approached Amesbury.  We sat in it for 45 to 50 minutes with traffic hardly moving.   There were several reasons why the traffic was backed up, but the biggest reason seems to have been that people wanted to drive by Stonehenge to see it from the road.  We were a little nervous that ALL of these cars were headed to Stonehenge, but only a small portion of them actually pulled in.  It was busy, to be sure, but it didn't feel overcrowded.  A new visitor's center is under construction, and the roads are being redone too.  We ate a picnic lunch with sandwiches that we bought there and fed some little brown birds our crusts.

Stonehenge's prehistoric circle of stones was already ancient when the Roman's got here.  It's true purpose and many of the details that we would like to know about it are forever lost to the mists of time.  It has a mythic power to it.  True, we couldn't quite get lost in our revery here because of the many people that were sharing the space with us, but like the pyramids of Egypt, it's a monument coming to us from out of the distant past, and we're drawn to it.  Anna jokingly said, "They're just rocks.  That's all they'll ever be."  But she remembered how the keystone lines up during the summer solstice. The audio tour takes you slowly around the rings of stones (visitors aren't allowed in to the ring itself).  Stonehenge is run by English Heritage, the same people who run the Battle of Hastings site, and we were similarly pleased with both.  We purchased a nine-day pass to English Heritage sites when we were at Hastings yesterday, so Stonehenge was free.   After a long slow stroll around the ring of Stonehenge, and taking quite a few pictures, it's time to go.

On the route to our next stop, we saw one more hill drawing in chalk.  This time more of us saw it, and we did get a little video of it, though we don't know what it is.

Our next stop was Glastonbury.  The reason why we came was because of how this town is also tied to the legends of England's past.  It is said that Glastonbury is, in fact, the Isle of Avalon (though it is no longer an island), and that it was here that King Arthur's body was brought at the end of his tale-- the once and future king of England.  It is also believed by some that Joseph of Arimathea came here some time after Christ's death and brought with him the Holy Grail.  Today, the town's legendary past seems to attract all sorts of "interesting" people.  The town seems full of hippies and New Agers and free spirits and what Julie calls "crunchy" people.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

We had a bit of a hard time finding parking, but eventually parked near the Chalice Well Garden.  This is the place where Joseph of Arimathea was supposed to have hidden the Grail, and the waters of the well are supposed to have healing properties.  Certainly, there were people who had come to the gardens here to meditate.  The girls got some bottles to fill at the spring (where the water is supposed to be tested to insure that it is safe to drink).   The three girls also took off their shoes and soaked their feet in the water too.  Anna got down far enough to soak her sore knee in the water, and they eventually talked Scott into putting his feet in too.  The water was REALLY cold so it does make your sore feet feel better, but that's probably just because they go numb.

The real attraction at Glastonbury is the Tor.   "Tor" is a Celtic word for hill, and this one rises sharply to a height of 520 feet above the relatively flat plains around it.  Atop it sits the ruins of a church, which is now merely a tower-- like a chess rook left on a sandpile.  This is the hill that is important enough to England to have been featured as the centerpiece of the Opening Ceremonies at the recent London Olympics.  We came to climb the path to the top.  At one point early one, we asked, "Where's Emma?"  When we looked up at the top, a little black haired head popped up, with a giggle and a wave. She was way ahead of us and having a great time.  Anna and Emma could run swiftly up the slope, but Scott and Julie took their time, with many rest breaks along the way.   We saw black birds, crows perhaps, flying around the hill.  When we stopped to look at one small flock, Julie noticed that there were rabbits all in and amongst the birds.  She counted seven rabbits there.  Then two playful dogs scampered nearby, and it seemed that another dozen rabbits that we hadn't noticed yet suddenly leaped up and scurried down their holes.  We laughed as the rabbits heads peeked back out after the dogs left.

Once we were at the top, the view was great.  We lounged for a while, simply staring off across the plains.  We could clearly see sheep (and maybe alpacas?) grazing on the farms below.  Scott listened to "Jerusalem" on his MP3 player.  There were many other people doing things at the summit, but everyone seemed in a quiet mood.  There were some doing yoga (or a similar kind of prayer).  One guy brought a complicated looking little helicopter toy that he flew up higher than the tower.  

After we went back down, Scott wanted to see the ruins of the Abbey, so we moved our car to the carpark in the centre of town.  We paid for parking at the machine and were just returning to put he ticket in the window of he car when the guy behind us backed out and bumped our car not once, but four or five times as he was trying to get turned around.  Anna got his picture with his license plate, but he didn't stop or apologize or anything.   Two kindly Englishwomen saw it happen and offered their names to us as witnesses. They were shocked at what hey had seen, and said that he shouldn't be driving.  There are a few little scratches on our bumper.

After all the dead people in Westminster Abbey, Emma did NOT want to go to this one, even though the ruins were park like and tranquil.  She and Julie waited outside while Scott and Anna went in.  Scott didn't want to miss it because this was supposed to be the site of KIng Arthur's grave.  In 1191, a monk was supposed to have "found" the bodies of two people in a grave that was marked as Arthur and Guinevere.  They were reinterred in a tomb in the large church in the abbey and their tomb was there for a few hundred years for pilgrims to view.  Today both the tomb and the church are gone, but this was where Arthur's legend is said to have ended.  Appropriately, two white doves few into the abbey ruins as Scott turned around.

We had dinner at a real Italian place in Glastonbury with very Italian waiters.  Then we headed on to our hotel in Bristol.  This day has been one of the best of the trip.