How marvellous to be able to join the coach for the trip right in central London! An early morning mini-cab took us to the pick-up point at Madame Tussaud’s. The first person we said hello to turned out not to live in London at all but Chicago! She’d signed up for the trip because she’d enjoyed a previous tour led by Scott McCracken.
The traffic was light as we headed out of town and soon the grassy flanks of the Wiltshire Downs were rising up round us. Our lunch stop was in Devizes, a town that received the charter permitting it to have a market in 1141. The town retains its focus on the market square, which is where we were heading.
After lunch we walked round to the Wiltshire Museum, opened by the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society in 1853 and subsequently expanded from the Old Grammar School into two adjoining Georgian Houses.
Among the prehistoric collections are items from the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site and a new exhibition of these opened in 2013. The most striking are the finds from Bush Barrow, an early Bronze Age burial mound from about 1950BC. The barrow was excavated in 1808 and produced the richest and most important finds from a Bronze Age grave in the Stonehenge Landscape to date. The gold-hilted bronze daggeris one of the most prized exhibits. Research has shown that the hilt was decorated with 140,000 hair-thin gold wires crafted into studs and hammered into position side by side in a zig-zag pattern. It is suggested that only young teenagers would have eyesight good enough to craft such an item. Only 22 such daggers have been found in the world, 6 of them in the UK. The gold has been identified as coming from Cornwall.
The other stunning find from this grave is a large gold lozenge found on the chest. Made from sheet gold it is only one millimetre thick and with a striking pattern of incised lines. The museum curator suggested the angle created could be mimicking the solstice alignment – I could only see a nice shape though.
Another prized exhibit was the Bronze Age mouthpiece for a musical instrument made from a human femur and dated to about 1600BC – the same age as the Bell Barrow at Normanton Down it had been buried in. The original finger holes had been damaged but had been noted when first excavated.
Much of the rest of the museum was blessedly unmodernised, with some lovely wooden cases and quaint exhibits of local history, just like I remember from museums of the past.
We left the museum when it closed at 4pm. Time to head for our destination – the Red Lion Hotel in Salisbury. This claims to be a 4-star hotel and celebrated its 800th birthday in 2020, making it apparently Europe’s oldest purpose-built hotel. To my mind it was in need of a a great deal of cash and TLC. There was no longer a working lift and the three precipitous flights of stairs to our third-floor room – with an extra steep two-step with no handrail just before you got there – was tough going. But it had a great view of Olde Worlde roofs and the Cathedral spire from the bathroom window. Can you spot the pottery cat on the roof across the way?
As for the rest of Salisbury, the nearly 70 years that have passed since I moved to this smart, prosperous and always sunny market town in 1955 have not been kind. Everywhere you looked there were closed businesses, ramshackle buildings and decrepit window frames visible in the smartest of frontages. But there was a bit of the old magic as we drove into the Market Place. The annual Charter Fair was in full swing, run every year since Henry III issued a charter permitting it on the weekend following the 3 Thursday in October in 1227.
This is of course the same fair where I won The Flying Ducks so lovingly commemorated by The Man on the Battersea Bus.
We unpacked the clothes and the thoughtfully-packed wine. There was just time for a drink before Scott McCracken gave our introductory Evening Lecture: Stonehenge Update.
Scott had the perfect approach to the impossible task of summarising this complex monument. He didn’t get bogged down in the detail but kept his observational helicopter hovering just overhead, telling the story that has gradually emerged of the site’s development over the thousand years from about 3000-2000BC.
