Another day on our vacation. Sorry for the delay in posting.
Today we took a tour into the west English countryside to see some sights and be “real” tourists 🙂 A tour van picked us up at our hotel and took us to a rendezvous area where we switched for the 5000 Years in a Day (also called Stones and Bones) tour . Old Sarum (Old Salisbury) is a few miles outside of modern day Salisbury, on a hill with a nice view. This was the site of a white castle built by the Normans at the end of the 11th century. Ruins of the castle are still there as you can see in our photos. From this hill you can see the beautiful 800 year old Salisbury Cathedral, which was our next stop. If you are interested in a video of the tour bus, complete with driver audio, JC has kindly recorded some. Here the driver is telling us about the monks at Old Sarum being locked out by the duke (I think).
Salisbury Cathedral is in the picturesque town of Salisbury. 
The town has those charming old buildings and narrow streets that you see in pictures of Europe. Salisbury Cathedral itself is in a “close” or walled off area that is a leftover from the days when it was wise for every building, including churches, to have a wall around it. The cathedral has some beautiful stained glass and a lot of tombs of various important folks. In fact, you can’t even walk into the thing without stepping on dead folks who are buried underneath your feet. The church has the oldest working bell clock in existence. This one dates from the 1300s I think. Amazing. The cathedral has a beautiful atrium area in the center of the church buildings (although I am sure there is another name for it), see the pics (which are not up yet, sorry). Salisbury Cathedral also has one of the 4 known original copies of the Magna Carta of 1215. The freedoms enumerated and discussed in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are both predicated on this ancient document (too bad our government, which is more and more of an oligarchy everyday seems to have forgotten this). Two other original copies are at the British Library and the last is in a cathedral in Lincoln (England, not Nebraska 🙂 ). I tried to read it, but it is in Latin or Middle English or some such and is not “readable” (at least by me). An English translation is here.
After visiting Salisbury, we moved on to the highlight of the tour…Stonehenge! Stonehenge is just kinda in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by sheep farms. 
Since our tour was on June 22nd and the Summer Solstice was on the night of the 20th, there were some
Druids in the circle performing some sort of religious rite. We took lots of pics here. The wind was blowing fairly hard and it was a bit chilly. Felt more like March than June, which was true for most of our visit to England.
After Stonehenge we went to Amesbury for lunch in a pub. I had some roast beef which was pretty good and a beer, which was better, and my first “lukewarm” pub beer to boot. After that we moved on to our final destination, the stones at Avebury. 
On the drive to Avebury we saw a crop circle, although it looked like this one was probably made by people since it bore an uncanny resemblance to a disabled person sign. Avebury, for those who don’t know, has a much larger stone circle than Stonehenge. In some ways it is better than Stonehenge. However, it is less well known. In fact, the circle is so big that it covers a significant portion of the town and the road bisects it. Our guide showed us around, after first warning us that the number of “long hairs” would be significantly higher than average since the solstice just got over. He let us try our hands with some divining rods to see if we could find the source of the “mystic power” of the circle. Not sure if we did or if we weren’t that good at holding the rods. Avebury itself is a picturesque (if very small) place, especially since it has an old Saxon church and a lot of sheep that you can just walk up to. After that, it was an hour and a half ride back into London on the M4. The only great thing about the ride back was that I saw the Fuller’s brewery 🙂
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