We stopped off at Portland Castle on our way back from garden visiting. It is a Tudor castle, or more accurately gun emplacement, built by Henry VIII. We are both suckers for castles, and had seen this one in a TV series about them. Television can be a deceiving medium, and the programme played down the fact that Portland Castle is now surrounded on its landward side by light industrial units and empty buildings. Not so romantic as Dartmouth Castle, that's for sure. Still, it is very well preserved, and you just have to use your imagination to strip out the Victorian breakwater, modern marina, left-over segment of Mulberry Harbour and other post-Tudor accretions, and visualise how it would have looked when it had a commanding line of fire out over the approach to Weymouth, with a flanking gun placement on the opposite shore.
We also stopped at Maiden Castle, the iron age hill fort south of Dorchester. It made a great impression on me when I visited with my parents as a child, though for decades afterwards I believed it was in Wiltshire. Association with Stonehenge, I suppose. Getting to it is slightly confusing because there is no exit from the main road as it sweeps around Dorchester, and you have to head into town then drive out again, passing through a residential suburb and over the A35. Access, the English Heritage site says charmingly and vaguely, is at any reasonable time during daylight hours. According to the interpretation boards at the site, Iron Age people actually lived there full time, which left me wondering how they got their water supply, and why they chose to live somewhere so perishingly windy and cold. The earthworks are very impressive, though, every bit as good as I remember, though neither of us were taken with the view of Poundbury, which looked, as the Systems Administrator observed, like a gigantic Travelodge.
Yesterday we visited Salisbury so as to be able to look at things under cover, as it was forecast to rain heavily for most of the day. We started with the cathedral. I'd visited once before, on a cycling holiday with friends when I was in the sixth form, but since then I've only seen it in paintings by Constable and angry newspaper articles about plans to build on the Salisbury meadows, plus a brief, tantalising view of the spire as we drove past on the way down at the start of the holiday. It is a very fine cathedral, and remarkably all of a piece because it was completed in less than four decades from 1220, while the nineteenth century restoration under Wyatt removed later additions (including some Medieval stained glass which we'd rather he'd kept). It boasts the tallest spire in England and the world's oldest clock, as well as all sorts of obscure but interesting details like a memorial to a family killed in the Sepoy uprising and a young officer who died from wounds sustained in the Charge of the Light Brigade. And it has a copy of the Magna Carta.
Unfortunately, the week we were able to visit coincided with a flower festival. I am not at all a fan of modern floral arranging, and duck past it hastily at Chelsea. Traditional big church arrangements of flowers and foliage are great, especially put somewhere to the side and out of the way, but not swathes of orange fabric with strings of Physalis lanterns hanging down blocking the view of the north window, and a block of white banners with flowers stuck to them hung slap bang in the middle of the nave so that you can't get a clear view along the entire length of the roof. The roof of Salisbury cathedral is one of its glories. I wasn't keen on the floral pillars blocking the nave either, or at the memorials being half hidden behind panels with over-engineered vegetation stuck to them. The organisers were terribly proud of it, and I'm sure it was great fun for the participants, but the answer to the question Does a Medieval cathedral look better with floral gew gaws dotted all over it? is No, it does not.
The Magna Carta was on display in the Chapter House, and my immediate thought was that it wasn't very big. It is only about a foot square, and covered in tiny writing I knew I wouldn't be able to read, which is why I didn't bother going to the British Library Magna Carta exhibition. A one foot square of unreadable vellum wouldn't make much of a display by itself, so the Cathedral authorities have bulked it out with a display on how vellum is made, a translation of the charter, and some thoughts on how modern ideas of civil liberties spring from it. The translation is available on the British Library website, if you want to read it for yourself. Some of the clauses are surprising, as it includes the standardisation of weights and measures, a couple of undertakings concerning forests, and clause 50 specifically bans Gerard de Athee and all his kin from holding offices in England. I didn't think much of clause 54, which says that No one shall be arrested or imprisoned on the appeal of a woman for the death of any person except her husband. So on the whole I'd take the recent fanfare about Magna Carta being the cornerstone of liberal democracy in the free world with a healthy dose of scepticism. It has some good bits in it.
Then we went to Mompesson House, a beautifully preserved Queen Anne house in the cathedral close, a National Trust property whose existence we only discovered the previous day while looking up something else in the handbook. It has a fine collection of Georgian drinking glasses, and was used as a location in the Ang Lee version of Sense and Sensibility. Then to the museum of the Infantry regiments of Berkshire and Wiltshire, which is a typical jumbly regimental museum, lurching backwards and forwards between wars and with a stuffed dog in a case in the hall. It is housed in another fine old building in the cathedral close. Thence to the Salisbury Museum, in yet another historic building in the close, where we saw a temporary exhibtion about Turner's paintings of Wessex, and learned that Salisbury used to have a big textile industry as well as being a market town, and paraded a twelve foot guy around on special occasions as recently as the coronation of Edward VII, but by then our brains were full, and we did not give the neolithic finds the attention they deserved.
Today was the last day of touristing, and we started at Wimborne Minster with a trip to the Minster, which is a delightful, solid, squat, Norman and early English building made out of a lovely muddle of building stones, and has all the atmosphere of dignity and peace that was slightly lacking from Salisbury Cathedral with its flowers. Then I persuaded the SA to follow the signs to the model town, on the grounds that it couldn't be very far away and we didn't need to go in if it looked horrid. It turned out to be just around the corner from the Minster, and to be a one tenth scale model of central Wimborne as it was in the 1950s, built at the time by a local architect and the town surveyor. It is very cleverly done. Visitors can walk in among the buildings and look close up at the shop fronts (including a gas showroom advertising cookery demonstrations, a laundry (as distinct from laundrette) and rival bookshops). The proportions of the buildings were absolutely accurate, the roofs were fully realised with slates and chimney pots, but other details like downpipes were stripped away and it didn't matter. The SA, who is chary of naff models, was impressed.
The National Trust's Kingston Lacy is near Wimborne. It has a fine park in the English landscape style with some really good mature trees, and formal gardens near the house, of which I thought easily the best bit was the fernery, an enclosed garden shaded by trees, with winding paths among raised stone edged beds planted with ferms and small shade loving flowers, and a Victorian cast iron fern patterned pteridomania period bench to sit on while you admired it. The house was built in the late seventeenth century by the Bankes family to replace their family seat of Corfe Castle, which had been sacked by Cromwellian forces, and revamped by later generations of the family. They were avid collectors and decorators, though we got the impression that the Continental art dealers had seen some of them coming on their Grand Tour, as there seemed to be rather a lot of pictures not by the artists they were supposed to have been by. The cream tea wasn't bad but the scone was a touch dry. Eight out of ten to Kingston Lacy, garden and refreshments wise.
Knoll Gardens are just the other side of Wimborne. They have won clutches of Gold Medals at Chelsea and now have them stuck up in rows behind their till. I have long wanted to visit their garden and was not disappointed. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised, since their speciality is grasses and I'd imagined a prairie style garden using a lot of grasses plus tall perennials in the Continental New Perennials style. There is some of that sort of thing but much else besides, plenty of shrubs, some excellent trees including a large and well grown specimen of the unusual Quercus phellos, a spectacular fallen Eucalyptus being allowed to grow on lying across a pond, gravel plantings, and just enough calm expanses of close mown lawn for the whole thing not to feel cluttered. It is a lovely garden, and cleverly laid out to feel bigger than its four acres. Ten out of ten.
Knoll Gardens was virtually the only place we visited that didn't have a tea room. Every garden and museum has at least one nowadays, and every other farm you drive past seems to have a board up advertising teas. I don't see how they can all make a go of it. Even as dedicated cream tea eaters we can't manage more than one a day.
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