Salisbury

A Hand of Aces and Old Pubs

In a glass case at the Haunch of Venison, on Minster Street, there is a mummified severed hand clutching a set of playing cards. It is a replica now, the original having been stolen in 2004 and again in 2010 and returned both times, but the story stays the same: around 1820 a stranger cheating at whist had aces fall from his cuff, and a local butcher took his hand off at the wrist. The pub is said to be haunted by the man, known as the Demented Whist Player. Records of an inn here go back to 1320, and the building has low oak beams, original stone fireplaces, an open fire, and an upstairs restaurant called the House of Lords. One pub round-up called it "the most atmospheric — a medieval interior with low beams, an open fire and a hand-drawn pint." They pour Wadworth and guest ales, plus beers from Hop Back Brewery a few miles off.

It is not the only old pub in walking distance. The Wig and Quill does English food cooked to order and makes a speciality of Sunday roasts. The New Inn began as three cottages and opened as a coaching inn in 1809. Rai d'Or, whose name means a ray of golden light, sits on the site of a house built in the 1200s to house the men building the cathedral.

Cathedral and the New Town

That cathedral is the reason for all of it. Salisbury was laid out from 1220 as a planned new town on a grid of "chequers," after the bishop gave up on the wind-blown hilltop of Old Sarum and moved down to the Avon. The main body of the cathedral went up in 38 years, unusually quick, which is why it holds together as one design where most cathedrals are a committee of centuries. Pevsner called it "the beau idéal of Early English Gothic design" and the Close "the most beautiful of England's closes." The spire is 404 feet, the tallest in England and the tallest surviving pre-15th-century spire in the world. Inside are the world's oldest working mechanical clock, the best-preserved of the four surviving 1215 Magna Carta copies, and William Pye's Infinity Font, the only cathedral font with its own water supply.

Market Traditions

Tuesdays and Saturdays the Market Square fills with the charter market, trading on the same ground since 1227. Reeve the Baker has been going since 1940, now run by the third-generation Reeve; the Butcher Row shop has a café upstairs looking over the Market Place. Nearby stands the Poultry Cross, a hexagonal covered market cross and the only survivor of four that once stood in the city.

Constable's Water Meadows

For a walk, take the Town Path across the Harnham water meadows — under two miles, flat, pushchair-friendly. This is where Constable stood in 1831 to paint the cathedral rising over the meadows, past the Old Mill and Queen Elizabeth Gardens. The meadows are 17th-century "floated" ones, warmed by chalk-stream water to bring the grass on early.

Five Rivers and Routes Out

Salisbury sits where five rivers meet — the Avon, Nadder, Bourne, Wylye and Ebble. The station runs to Waterloo, Exeter and Bristol, and Stonehenge is nine miles up the road. William Golding taught at Bishop Wordsworth's School here for twenty-one years, marking essays under the tallest spire in the country.