Oct. 25: Salisbury, Amesbury & Stonehenge
I’m standing in the freezing cold on a path that cuts through a sea of open grassland. It’s a dark 7:30 a.m. and I’m alone with the sound of cars rushing by. In the distance stands Stonehenge, anchoring the sky.
~~~
I’m CouchSurfing with Dave, who lives less than a five-minute drive from the circular monument in Amesbury. He drives by Stonehenge every day to work, and I’ve taken him up on his offer to drop me off there on his way to work this morning. Stonehenge opens at 9:30, but the payoff, I thought, would be watching the sun rise behind the stones — even if it meant standing in the desolate cold for two hours.
But the path I’m standing on is on the wrong side, maybe, to watch the sun rise behind the stones. And anyway, if the sun does rise this morning, it does so imperceptibly, hidden behind the mist and clouds and, well, the English sky.
Day creeps up slowly, and stationed behind barbed wire, I watch the unmoving circle, myself shaking, shivering, and breathing into my scarf. I bought the jacket I’m wearing on a September day in Los Angeles thinking its warm would be proportional to its big price tag. But (maybe as Angelenos are wont to do) I’d forgotten how cold cold can be.
~~~
The problem, Dave says, with Stonehenge is the way a road goes right by the monument. It takes away from the awe it’s supposed to inspire in you, the mystery. And then every once in a while, drivers will be surprised by the site appearing suddenly beside them on the road, and they’ll brake and crane their necks to look, causing near-accidents.
~~~
There’s something sort of allegorical about the way something as big as Stonehenge is nestled in a place as small as Amesbury, a town of about 10,000. Many things here and in the rest of Europe seem to work that way — big things and little things, ancient and new, famous and modest — all sharing the same space.
To get back from Stonehenge, Dave instructed me before going to work, “walk down the main road and turn at Sting’s house.” (We had driven by Sting’s house the night before, winding through dark country roads enveloped by trees. The same night, we had a couple pints at the Amesbury hotel where the Beatles stayed while filming “Help.”)
The big names belie the town’s villagey atmosphere. I had coffee with Dave’s mother and grandmother at a new cafe in town after visiting Stonehenge. His grandmother kept looking out the window and remarking, with some surprise, that she didn’t recognize anyone on the street. She apparently spoke too soon — as soon as we stepped out, we ran into someone every ten steps.
“Welcome to the metropolis that’s Amesbury,” Dave said.
“Did you show him the new roundabout?” Gran asked.
It’s big news here.
~~~
Bigger news is in Lacock, an even sleepier village a half-hour’s drive away. There, trapped in some medieval time bubble, TV antennas are banned from rooftops and there isn’t an electric pole in sight. Lacock’s “higgledy-piggledy” and traditional look (in the words of a local news reporter) makes it ideal for period films, so for the next three nights, they’re filming the next Harry Potter here.
Dave takes me there with a couple of his Potter-maniac friends, but I’ll save that story for the next post.
did anyone else catch that shoutout to Northface?
“Many things here and in the rest of Europe seem to work that way — big things and little things, ancient and new, famous and modest — all sharing the same space.”
That’s exactly how I felt and one of the reasons I encouraged my mother to visit Europe at some point. There weren’t many other places in the world that so embraced both the modern and the old and held the two cohesively together.
Nice piece: I live in Amesbury, and it’s nice to see an ‘outsider’s’ take on the place.