A Tale of Old Stones - some you can touch and some you most definitely can't - part two

Salisbury was as far as I had booked anything, or planned anything for the next nearly 2 weeks. I don't know why I wanted to go there, but I did, and it was on the way to Cornwall. 

Salisbury is a lovely old English city. Narrow streets - well I thought they were narrow until I got to Cornwall. A good way to warm up. Wonderful cathedral. ruthless parking wardens!

I booked a room at The Chapter House - a quaint old building that was very near one of the entrances to the Cathedral precinct. It was wonderfully old and comfortable. Uneven floors - especially on the stairs. Great dining room with very expensive aged steaks, which I decided to not use all my money on. Friendly and welcoming. The one draw back was that they car parking was on a no stopping zone for morning peak hour traffic. So I need to be up and about early to put my bag into my wee car and go find a car park - which I eventually did having missed it and then getting hooked into the one way system out of town. One I found tit - around the corner from the Chapter House, I paid for parking, put the voucher in the car, and returned for breakfast and teeth cleaning and such. When I returned I was shocked to see a parking ticket - I had put the voucher upside down. So I then found were to apply to not pay, walking the streets of Salisbury. In the end they were kind and let me off, but posted a letter to my home address in NZ to let me know, and got very snarky when I emailed to ask what was happening a month later before I left the UK. I just thanked them and let it be. My application had asked them not to do that, but hei aha

After dinner on the night I arrived I went for a walk to see the lit up cathedral. Glorious! and then I got down to the big business of the night - what was I going to do the next day and where was I going to end up. I really had no idea about what to do in Cornwall apart from have Cornish pasties (Legally you can only have them in Cornwall now) and lots of Cornish scones - which are different from Devon scones - jam and then clotted cream in Cornwall. So I looked up Lonely Planet and listed their top ten things to do. These included 

• The Eden Project
• Mount St Michael and the causeway out there.
• Lost Gardens of Heligan
• Tintagel 
• Bodmin Moor
• Tate St. Ives

I kind of nutted out a timetable, and then looked for somewhere to stay near the Eden Project. It wasn't a detailed timetable, and I mostly needed to do this each night which was tiring. 

I also booked a Cathedral Tower tour for lunchtime the next day. So after exploring and dealing with the car parking issued - I set off  for the Cathedral. 

What an amazing building. These stones are not as old as Stonehenge, but you can touch them as much as you want. It is so beautiful, from the high altar, the font, the ceiling and the embroidered Magna Carta. I could have spent longer there. The Cathedral also has the oldest working clock in the world - or so they say. Wikipedia says

"The Salisbury Cathedral clock is a large iron-framed tower clock without a dial, in Salisbury Cathedral, England. Thought to date from about 1386, it is a well-preserved example of the earliest type of mechanical clock, called verge and foliot clocks, and is said to be the oldest working clock in the world,^[1] although similar claims are made for other clocks. Previously in a bell-tower which was demolished in 1790, the clock was restored to working condition in 1956"

The Tower tour was a highlight. My 70 something year old guide gave me hope that I would cope with this walk. And what  walk - up into the roof of the cathedral - which was fascinating in itself, and then up and up the stairs and ladders to the top of the tour and its amazing views. T

 You can find some more photos here and here.

And then after all that excitement if was off to Cornwall.