On our 3rd day in England we visited the city of Winchester. We started out walking towards the cathedral. It was market day, so we stopped and got some food, and went to the open lawn outside the cathedral to eat.
A lot of people had the same idea. It was a beautiful day, and we were all enjoying the sunshine.
The Winchester Cathedral was built in 1079. It has the longest nave and overall greatest length of any Gothic cathedral in Europe.
I fee like that is a terrible picture, and does not do the cathedral justice, but it's what I've got.
The Ancient Pilgrim's Way, travelling to Canterbury, starts at Winchester. Pilgrims would come here to see the shrine/remains of Saint Swithun, because it was supposedly the site of numerous miracles in the middle ages. People would crawl up the stairs and down this walkway (below) on their hands and knees....
...and around the corner to this "holy hole", which they would crawl into to be underneath the shrine. I just re-read that sentence, and it's making me giggle.
The choir is really beautiful, with embroidered seat cushions.
The high altar is pretty impressive too.
The Tournai Baptismal Font -
I'm trying to remember what the story was of the carvings on it. Something about 3 boys being drowned or something, and then maybe being raised from the dead. I don't know, maybe I'm just making that up.
They had this memorial (below) to William Walker. Is the old-timey diving helmet making you scratch your thinker? Let me explain. In 1906 the cathedral was in imminent danger of collapse - the ground water level was too high, and it was slowly sinking into the ground. A bunch of pits were dug along the outer walls, down into the water, and Walker single-handedly went down and shored up the walls by using more than 25,000 bags of concrete. He worked for 6 hrs. a day (from 1906-1911), in complete darkness (because there was so much sediment in the water). Pretty impressive. The guy deserves a memorial.
Most exciting, this is where Jane Austen is buried. I don't know if that's exciting for her, but it was for me. She lived in Winchester for a few years as a child, and then she came here with her sister, right before she died, to be treated for an illness that killed her fairly quickly after she got here.
After the cathedral we headed over to The Great Hall, which is pretty much all that remains of the Winchester Castle, built in 1067.
In the 15th century, Thomas Malory created the image of Camelot that is most familiar today in his work "Le Morte d'Arthur". Malory identified Camelot as Winchester, this very city, for a number of reasons, probably including the fact that it was the capital of Wessex (although many other places in England also claim to be Camelot - phooey). Camelot was said to stand along a river, surrounded by plains and forests, with a magnificent cathedral where Arthur and Guinevere were married, and a mighty castle with a Round Table around which knights see a vision of a Holy Grail and swear to find it. So how does Winchester stack up? Well, we've already see the magnificent cathedral. The River Itchen runs through the city (and powers the city mill, which we'll get to in a bit). Plains and Forests all around. AND the Great Hall of this formerly mighty castle has a BIG ROUND TABLE!
Hellooooo, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?!
Okay, calm down. It turns out that this table dates from 1275....sooooo not contemporary to King Arthur. Definitely a replica. Of course, that doesn't mean that Winchester can't still be Camelot ;) The table was originally unpainted, but King Henry VIII spiffed it up in 1522. The names of the legendary Knights of the Round Table are written around the edge of the table, with King Arthur sitting on his throne at the top.
The stained glass windows all around were beautiful, and showed the coats of arms of important individuals in Hampshire (the county Winchester is in).
There was also a large mural on one wall showing the parliamentary representatives of Hampshire from the reigns of Edward I to Queen Victoria.
All around the castle were these little knights, painted in all different ways. I don't know what they were for, but they were fun to look at.
The kids' favorite part of the castle was the dress-up clothes.
When we'd seen all there was to see in the Great Hall, and exhausted the number of outfits we could make and try on, we headed back across town to hunt for some ice cream. Always with the ice cream, right? We passed a beautiful park that tempted us to stay.
But we were on our way to the City Mill.
The mill is recorded as first milling corn in 1086. In the early 1900's it was used as a youth hostel. In 2004, after a 12 year restoration, the mill once again started to mill flour, powered by water, and you can buy flour there today. To be honest, I was thinking that this probably wouldn't be too interesting, but I was wrong. They've got a great little set-up inside that's quite educational. The kids loved it.
One of my favorite parts was learning that certain phrases I've been familiar with my whole life (especially "fair to middling", which my Grandma always used to say) originate from mills. I mean, who wouldn't get excited about that?
That finished off our lovely day in Winchester. We headed back to Bert and Adreann's where the kids helped set up their tent to sleep in, and we sat around a fire making smores and telling "scary" stories.
