I've walked here before, but seemed totally out of sorts on the day and really struggled with the ascents. I'm hoping it's a case of getting a bad walk out my system before we tackle the real deal on Saturday 4 September. Still at least I got to tick Fan Y Big and the High Dive off my bucket list. Also looking back at our times, if we perform at a similar level in Yorkshire we'll complete the route in around 9 and a half hours. So perhaps I'm being too hard on myself? The acid test will be our final training walk next weekend, so fingers crossed.
On a gentler note the start of the week involved a trip to Salisbury, to tick Stonehenge and a few other prehistoric monuments off our family bucket list. It was an amazing couple of days exploring the monuments that make up the UNESCO World Heritage Site and Salisbury's famous Cathedral Close. It was a real whistle stop tour that saw us struggling to fit it all in and plenty of sites on the itinerary missed off, leaving us an excuse for another visit.
Stonehenge is course the star of the world heritage site, but the stone circle itself is just a small part of a much wider complex of several hundred burial mounts, Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. One of the most enigmatic mysteries is how the Bluestones, the Preseli Spotted Dolerite, came to be transported 250 miles to Stonehenge. Did glaciers carry these alien rocks to Salisbury Plain in the last Ice age or did humans transport them? Whatever the case a visit to Carn Menyn, their source, is definitely on my walking bucket list.
However Avebury Stone circle is for me an even more amazing site. The largest stone circle in Europe in which sits the small village of Avebury. While a number of stones were removed for practical and religious reasons in Medieval times as the village grew (the Saxons deliberately built their church in the middle of it to counteract what they considered to be the evil influence of the stones) it remains an impressive site. In later times much of the site was restored and markers indicate where missing stones once stood. It's still possible to walk around the outer ring, with the encircling ditch and bank clearly visible, and see the remains of the two smaller stone circles that sit within it.
A mile or so up the road from Avebury you can find the enigmatic Silbury Hill. A 30 meter (98ft) high man-made chalk hill. The tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world. No one knows for sure what its purpose was and several archaeological excavations have failed to resolve the issue or find the hoped for burial horde. Its believed to be around 4,750 years old and would have taken 18 million man-hours or 500 people 15 years to build. No mean feat considering a prehistoric shovel was usually made with a cows shoulder blade.
Finally we rounded off the trip by fast forwarding through time to Cathedral Close to admire Salisbury Cathedral. Before visiting Mompesson House, a grade 1 listed 18th Century House, currently celebrating the 20th anniversary of its staring role in the 1995 film adaptation of the Jane Austen classic Sense and Sensibility, with Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson. We left promising to return to visit Woodhenge, West Kennet Long Barrow, Old Sarum and the various other places we ran out of time to see this time around.
As for this week I'll be celebrating my Birthday and working on a new short story 'The Lighthouse' which will appear on the blog in due course.