Sauntering around Salisbury

My blog posts are all out of order at the moment and erratic in content as well. Only a bad workman blames the tools so no excuses for not doing better on my tablet, but I'm looking forward to getting my laptop back soon. Bear with, as they say.

At my flouncy and flowery B&B (plastic flowers) I start each day with baked beans, greasy mushrooms and a couple of fried eggs with toast and tea.

That set me up for a walk out to Old Sarum, where the original Salisbury Cathedral was built in the thirteenth century. Little is left but it's a lovely site managed by English Heritage. It is like a Maori hill fort, with circles of fortification around the hilltop. There's a good view from Old Sarum to the current cathedral, which boasts the tallest spire in England.

So I wasn't even going to go in to the Cathedral, being slightly underwhelmed by the exterior and slightly wary of the £6.50 'donation' for admission. C'mon, pay up. Drawn in more by the promise of cloisters than by the opportunity to see a version of the original Magna Carta, in I went. And was nabbed at the door by a pair of enthusiastic greeters, keen to set me off in the right direction while giving me a good earful of details about successive building restorations and which bits of stained glass could be said to original, about which they disagreed between themselves for a while. I extracted myself with some difficulty, only to be caught a bit further on by one of them, who then insisted on explaining the shallow foundations. Apparently the water table is measured daily by plunging a simple dip stick down through a special tile in the floor, and if there's any variation beyond 3 to 4 feet, adjustments are made via a system of gates and weirs on the nearby River Avon. As long as the level is stable, the foundations of the Cathedral are protected from disintegration. Very interesting but distracting. For the clean lines and proportions of the structure itself were arresting enough and I was most happy to prowl around alone. 

The Cathedral clock doesn't have a face. It rings a bell on the hour, but that has been turned off except for ringing out at 11.00am on Tuesdays and Thurdays.

Officially my favorite Cathedral (for now)

As well as the army of Greeters, art installations are a thing here. Currently it is Gaia, which really suits the space.

I was told there's a fifteenth century Library downstairs with over 10,000 books. "We have a wonderful librarian" the Greeter told me. "She's really lovely".

You can do a tour that ends with tea and scones, but at £22.00 I'm passing on that, sadly.

I love cloisters, and Salisbury's didn't disappoint.

Posted while taking tea in the gardens outside the Salisbury Museum, sitting under a sun umbrella with views of the cathedral.

About Candes

At the turn of the century, there were around 90 people living in Candes. Each house had a barn, land, and it's own bread oven. Sometimes these ovens are like an extension on the side of the house. The area where Nicholas is establishing a grove of Japanese maple trees was a free-standing bread oven. There's a similar one in the nearby village of Comiac.  Comiac would have had shops, where now there's only the cafe, which sells lunches, a few token supplies and povides postal services. This venture is sensibly subsidised by the state. The main reason is that workers in the area have somewhere for lunch. Lunch being a meal of great importance across France and heaven forbid having to take a sandwich from home to eat on the job! The communual bread oven is fired up by the men once a month. Men's business.

The add-on with the small roof is the bread oven

Nicholas had done a lot of work to make his house, built in 1780, habitable, but he doesn't stay there over winter. One of the other houses has been beautifully modernised by a Dutch couple who live mostly in Spain and come for the summer. Sadly several other houses are already in danger. The house behind Nicholas' has a steep slate roof. Each of the pieces of slate (lors) is attached with a large plug like a bolt that goes through into the roof beams. Every now and again one of the lors falls off so not a good house to walk past on a windy day. 

One of the barns

Nicholas has added the porch to his house. The building behind is Sousou's place.

Tacked onto the back of Nicholas's house is a room that he uses as a woodshed. This used to be the pigsty. Upstairs (next to my bedroom) previous owners had installed an indoor toilet. It's a little cupboard off the main room with a stone bench that has a hole in it - basically an indoor long-drop. The waste would have dropped down into the area that was the pig pen. Quite an efficient system I guess. 

Village well

These weeks Nicholas has been planting vegetables and digging beds for his potato crop, while I have been pulling out mountains of stinging nettles, and weeding around the irises, baby Japanese maple trres, hydrangeas, rose buses and peonies. For a couple of days we sat inside by the fire, rained out of the garden. We also did some walks around the neighbourhood, following tracks through the woods, often marked by mossy stone walls built who knows how long ago. 

Two weeks in paradise

I stayed with Nicholas in Candes, in the locale of Comiac, in the Lot region, close to the Dordogne.

Candes is hard to find on a map. It's a tiny hamlet with one permanent resident, Sousou. Since her husband died she has lived alone in the large house next to Nicholas. Her nephew checks up on her and a district nurse calls in morning and evening. On Fridays the butcher comes by in his van. At the turn of the century, there were around 90 people living in Candes. Each house had a barn, nearby land, a bread oven, maybe a pig pen or a hen run. Comiac, 2 km away,  would have had shops, where now there's only the cafe, which sells lunches, a few token supplies and povides postal services. It is subsidised by the state. The Comiac communual bread oven is fired up by the men once a month and there are community gatherings in the town hall. 

Nicholas had done a lot of work to make his house, built in 1780, habitable, but he doesn't stay there over winter. One of the other houses has been beautifully modernised by a Dutch couple who live mostly in Spain and come for the summer.

These weeks Nicholas has been planting vegetables and digging beds for his potato crop, while I have been pulling out weeds. For a couple of days we sat inside by the fire, rained out of the garden. We also did some walks around the neighbourhood, following tracks through the woods, often marked by mossy stone walls built who knows how long ago. 

Here are some more photos I took around Candes. It is such a pity many these residential and agricultural buildings are not being cared for.

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Return to Candes after 3 years, April 2019

View from 'my' bedroom in Nicholas's
house 

The front of the house. Wisteria, lilac, clematis, roses - with a kiwi berry vine 

I visited Nicholas three years ago and was very happy to have the opportunity to go back again. He's had the roof retiled recently, completed the bathroom- there's even a flush toilet now - and he's done a lot more planting. He has another old barn now, and some of the stone walls have been repaired.

Candes is a tiny hamlet near Comiac in the Lot Region. Comiac has a cafe but for shopping, it's a trip down the hill to Bretenoux or Saint-Céré, 20 minutes via narrow winding roads.

In a borrowed pair of gumboots, a scavanged men's jumper and think gardening gloves I got to work on the nettles, filling barrow after barrow with them, revealing all the irises along the walls just about ready to flower. I pulled weeds from around the peonies, also just coming into bloom.

Nicholas - in the Japanese maple walled garden.
I cleared a mountain of weeds, but
there's  still so much blackberry in there

On sunny days we'd have lunch in the garden, but it was just as nice on wet days being inside with the fire going and a big pot of soup on the hob. 

The broad beans were up but they were being attacked by moles.
Hence the bottles on stakes - they are meant to vibrate in the ground and keep pests away.

Days out by bus - Shaftesbury

Shaftesbury is a small market town in Dorset with a history going back to Saxon times. The town is one of the highest in the county at the breathtaking altitude of 750 feet, and on a reasonable day you are lucky to enjoy views over Thomas Hardy’s Blackmore Vale. It is an hour on the bus from Salisbury, winding through hamlets along the Chalke valley where most of England's watercress is grown. 

Alfred the Great, later King Alfred, established an abbey here for his daughter. In medieval times the Abbey attracted pilgrims who came for blessings at the shrine of St Edward. It's wealth and power grew, but in 1539 it was closed and completely ransacked, one of the last monastries to be destroyed during Henry VIII's time.

 Now there's a walled garden on the site and a small museum run by volunteers.

Calendars and bread adverts have made one street in Shaftesbury famous - Gold Street. 

In 1973 Ridley Scott used Gold Street in an advertisement for Hovis Bread. This ad was voted as Britain's all-time favorite TV ad.