It takes amazing knowledge to build a cathedral, let alone build one in about forty years. For even more fun, the Salisbury Cathedral was built on marshland, and yet here it stands eight hundred years later, despite the improvement that nearly destroyed it:  a 6,500-ton steeple was added to a roof that sat on walls on a foundation not designed for the extra weight. The weight has actually warped some of the stone columns holding up the roof, and Christopher Wren (of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London fame) made recommendations to add internal buttresses to shore up the steeple. That is what you get when you have the tallest spire in the UK.

The cathedral was also seriously housecleaned by James Wyatt, an architect, who moved a bunch of things around in the church and got rid of those expensive stained glass windows. It did end up creating a clean-feeling church, even if he did get rid of spare tombs and flip some around so they are now facing away from the altar.

As you may have gathered, Mer wanted to tour the cathedral today, so we spent the morning with a guide wandering around the sanctuary. We also stuck around to see a demonstration of the world’s oldest known working clock, which tells time by ringing a bell (the word “clock” is related to the French and German words for “bell”). It is estimated the clock has “ticked” over five billion times since the late 1300s (although that must mean it doesn’t tick every second, since my back-of-envelope calculations have that at closer to nineteen billion).

After the tours, we ate at the Bell Tower, a tea room located where the old bell tower stood until burned down in the English Civil War. It is a lovely spot at which to eat, especially when I got a scone with clotted cream. Yum. After lunch, we went back into the church to see the best preserved copy of the four known copies of the Magna Carta. Then, Mer had to climb.

The church offers a roof-and-tower-climb tour, but there was only one ticket left, so the obvious not-afraid-of-heights choice was Mer. So, in a rare move, we split up on a vacation for a couple of hours. While Mer was learning about the engineering marvels that hold up the roof, I found and walked along the river through a park, and then along a path through a “flooded meadow,” which is a field with a bunch of irrigation canals. The path led to another pretty river and a pub, but better, I got what I imagined to be a pretty medieval view of the cathedral – it was across the field with no tall buildings in the way. It was impressive.

I went back to the room about 2:30, and Mer met me there about 3:15. We used the short time before 5:00 to explore the nearby Salisbury Museum, an eclectic little museum. It had multiple artifacts from pre-history, a bunch of Roman things (including most of a mosaic floor), several treasure hoards, and other things from the history of the area. They had a special exhibit on the author Thomas Hardy, who set many of his stories in a fictional version of this area. They had a room of paintings of the cathedral and other Salisbury places. A floor dedicated to fashion and dresses. A floor dedicated to ceramics. A giant puppet of the local weavers’ guild. The usual. We saw everything that was open, although we didn’t linger anywhere.

When the museum closed at 5:00, we went back to the cathedral once more in order to attend an evening prayer service in a small chapel, after which, since it was 6:00, we went for supper in the pub that had not been serving food on the first night here; Meredith is persistent. After supper, we went to another pub for dessert, which was really just an excuse to get our butts kicked at a pub quiz. Pub quizzes are trivia quizzes that are very popular in the UK. We like trivia, but had heard that pub quizzes are hard. They are, at least for Americans – many of the questions are British-centric (British brands or celebrities or British TV). We tried our best, but generally were pleased if we got about half the questions right in a given round. We did go out on a high note, though – the last round was a risk-it-all round in which one wrong answer wiped out your score. All other teams except one wiped out, so we came in second with three (out of ten) answers. Yay, team Nerd Royale!

It seems it also takes amazing knowledge to win pub quizzes. It was a fun time. We leave Salisbury in the morning, but it is a fun town. And Mer commented that she had never before had a touring day where she was never more than about a quarter of a mile from her bed and breakfast. Tomorrow we head off to the Dartmoor region.