Tour of Western England

Do we look like tourists or what?! We took a tour through a company called Students Tours this weekend to Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral and the city of Bath. It was a great experience to see so much in one day.

Stonehenge is set in beautiful fields just eight miles north of Salisbury. There are many explanations about why it is there and how it was built. This version (it has been built multiple times throughout the centuries) is 5000 years old! Each month the sun shines through a different set of stones, so it's like a big calender. The stones were not as tall as I imagined them to be.




This is Salisbury Cathedral which is 800 years old. If you look at the bottom of the pic you can see our tour guide, he's holding up a red paper to gather the group to him.

Great picture, I know!

The inner courtyard

This cathedral was beautiful. It was constructed in the Gothic art period which our tour guide said we could tell by the pointed archways and the flying buttresses (what are flying buttresses anyway???).

One of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta is housed there. We got to see it, written in Latin on vellum (pig skin...). Great story behind it (check wikipedia for more information if you so desire). The Declaration of Independence was inspired by it.




Here is the town that was built around the cathedral. The story is that a little over 800 years ago there was a division among the people that lived in Salisbury. Apparently the military and the English Church were not getting along. The priest of the church got sick of it and said he was going to shoot an arrow in the air and wherever it landed he was going to build a new cathedral and build a city around it for his followers. The Salisbury Cathedral went up in 30 years. There is always construction going on because it is made of limestone and gets the breeze from the sea nearby.



This is Bath. It looks exactly what I imagined it to look like: water everywhere and antique :).
We walked to along the markets enlivened by the live musicians ( it's so great! They're everywhere here in England serenading our trips...). We walked to the Jane Austin center, who lived in Bath long ago. We didn't go in, but the ancient Roman Baths are there, which they used when they occupied part of England.