Day 7

Bright and early and on the train to Salisbury! When we arrived to the town of Salisbury we first stopped at the Wilton house and had a guided tour from a woman who had a passion for the artwork, architecture, and history of the house. She had been a guide there for eighteen years. The house was originally an Abbey until King HenryVIII ordered to destroy the Catholic abbeys because they wouldn’t recognize his divorce. The land of Wilton, Salisbury, was given to Phillip Herbert, a good friend of King Henry, and was made the Earl of Pembroke. Today, the Wilton house has been passed down through the generations and has just lately been inherited by the Eighteenth Earl of Pembroke, Fifteenth Earl of Montgomery, Lord Herbert. The houses history was so neat. Thomas Chippendale had made almost all the furniture in the house. Indigo Jones did an enormous amount of architecture, and the house hold the largest collection of Van Dyke paintings in Britain. Shakespeare was a visitor there and entertained there twice. A very interesting and beautiful place!

Then we went to the Salisbury Cathedral

We were able to climb the 300+ stairs to the top of the spire! The most interesting parts to this cathedral were that it wasn’t originally designed to have a tower and spire of the top so the pressure of the 600 extra tons is quite apparent in the crossing. Also, the cathedral is built upon four feet of water too keep the structure from collapsing… the cathedral has amazing modern engineering! Our tour guide specialized in Mid-evil gothic construction. He was very informative!

This is the 'Bumping Stone' You can't really tell but the stone has been indented because for hundreds of years this is how they, initiate, I guess would say, the boys into the chior. The head chior boy bumps a new chior boys head on this stone three times to make him a chior boy.