Soaring Over Salisbury: Arts Festival Aerialists
Mary Poppins, you’ve got company: These Salisbury International Arts Fest performers suggest a new way to see southern England. Formerly Sarum, Salisbury is home to the famous 13th-century Gothic cathedral of the name. A nearby grassy knoll (no relation to JFK) marks the site of its Norman predecessor, built 200 years earlier and abandoned for geographic reasons, like bad weather and a lack of nearby water sources:
Cathedral ruins at "Old Sarum," Salisbury's Norman predecessor.
Salisbury’s charming town center still boasts streets named for medieval uses, like Butcher Row and Fisherton and Penny-Farthing Streets. (Not sure what was located on Blue Boar Row…)
Old Salisbury Center
Front-row seats, riverside.
It was from a riverside inn in Salisbury that my family munched on jam-slathered breakfast toast—served in a proper rack, of course—as we watched the hotel’s straightbacked septuagenarian waiter scatter leftover crusts for the resident swans, a mother and her adolescent cygnets.
Elegant they may be, but these birds were no patsies, he solemnly informed us. Shortly after they hatched, a fox had begun menacing the nest, eating a baby or two. Then, a week before our visit, he had watched as the mother swan grabbed and drowned the fox!
Note to fox: "Cave Swanem"
