My Visit To Salisbury Cathedral

If you enjoy visiting cathedrals, as I do, and you have not been to Salisbury yet, then you really should try to get there as soon as you can. It is a truly magnificent example of English church-building.

In this article I am not going to give you a guide book version (you can get that in the - er - guide book) but this will be a purely personal view.

When I first saw Salisbury cathedral, it was at night. My girlfriend at the time, whose name was Susan, and myself had made a bit of a mess of our travel arrangements, and also there had been a minor domestic dispute. I won't go into all the details - in fact, I cannot remember exactly what they were, but suffice to say that it involved a lot of drama of the kind that will be all too familiar to anyone who has had any dealings with people of an "artistic temperament."

Anyway the upshot was that we arrived in the charming little city of Salisbury at about 7 pm, and we still had to find a hotel. This took up some time, but at last we were ensconced in a delightful little guest house, at a very reasonable price. (Incidentally, this in my view is the best way to get a hotel. Just arrive and then find one. You may think it is risky, but there is always a hotel to be found, and because it is probably not in the major guide books, it will almost certainly be nice and cosy, and incredibly good value for money.)

But I digress. Once we had secured our accomodation, we went off to explore the city. By the way, I should say that in England, the word city is not an indicator of the size or population of a place. Any town that contains a cathedral is properly designated as a city, so there can be some very small cities, and on the other hand, some quite large towns that are not cities.

Anyway, we arrived at the cathedral about 9 o'clock. It was a dry, clear, dark and bitterly cold evening in February. The cathedral building was bathed in light from floodlights all around it. It looked like it had just landed, like an enormous mother ship, which I suppose in a way is exactly what it is.

The building was closed of course but we were able to stroll around the grounds. This was marvellous though freezing. We also had a bit of a shock. In the grounds is a famous piece of modern art, called I think, the Walking Madonna, which we didn't notice until we were almost on top of it. Quite a fright. It's not exactly beautiful, and the overall impression is rather more ghostly than was perhaps intended.

Anyway, next day we were able to get inside the cathedral and look around. As I said, I won't give you a guide book tour, but if you like church art and architecture, you won't be disappointed, I assure you. I was amazed by the spire which soars high, very very high above the surrounding countryside. This enormous weight of solid stone is made to look wonderfully light and graceful - an incredible achievement. When you stand inside under the spire and you look up, you can see that the main pillars of the transept arch have been twisted into a long snake-like helix shape by the huge mass they are supporting.

Another notable thing about Salisbury is that it is one of the few cathedrals, or indeed churches of any kind, in which the architecture is all in the same style. Anyway if you have some free time, it's well worth seeing.

This article was first published by me on Qassia Sphere: Related Content