Salisbury

After my rather negative musings on Dudley today, I though I’d had my cumuppance this morning as the weather en route to Salisbury was truly dreadful, with driving rain and – more treacherously – lots of standing water. I had visions of taking a bedraggled and slightly miserable group around Wiltshire’s great cathedral city.

In the event, though, the rains cleared in time for the walk and Salisbury was in fact bathed in a truly delightful golden light. It was everything I had hoped for. Alot of water had come down, though; the Avon was in spectacular form on the site of the old City Mill, while the local branch of J. D. Wetherspoon’s seemed to have been on flood alert earlier!

Funnily enough, Salisbury Cathedral is home to one of the four surviving Exemplar Copies of the Magna Carta. One of the others in in Lincoln, to which I took a group only a couple of weeks ago. I seem to be becoming a bit of a Magna Carta groupie!

The group were a pleasurable lot, too, which helps somewhat. I love it when they can give me a laugh. Upon showing them Mitre House, an old building where new Bishops are traditionally robed before their enthronement and which is now a ladies’ clothes shop, they came up with a lovely image of the Bishops coming out of the ladies’ changing rooms in cope and mitre. I added the inevitable “Does my crozier look big in this?”!

A weekend of contrasts, Dudley and Salisbury. My work is nothing if not varied…….