Salisbury

For centuries, the city, with its magnificent cathedral and ancient history, has attracted writers and artists, writes Robin Stummer

As Raphael complained, the English still worship the trees, they remember the past. Their masons and carpenters hid Green Men. Salisbury Cathedral reminds you that Stonehenge isn’t far away’…

Sometimes it takes a foreign hand to unravel the gothic finery wrapped around the English soul. On this occasion it was Germany’s biggest-selling author, children’s fiction writer Cornelia Funke, who – helped by her memory of the great Italian Renaissance artist, fuming on an Anglophobic off-day – revealed a truth about the darker, fustier corners of Englishness. That Christianity, its values and the laws upon which it is founded are relative newcomers to the British Isles. The foundations of morality are still to settle. The pagan past is always present.

Nowhere is this thinness more palpable than in, of all places, pretty, and apparently genteel and orderly, Salisbury. No wonder it has attracted writers for centuries.

This year the city will be building on the success of last year’s inaugural literary festival, an especially ripe autumnal bookfest which was crowned by historical novelist Philippa Gregory and dozens more writers of all plumages, as well as walks, talks, workshops and children’s events. Salisbury’s 2018 litfest is set for the weekend of 20th to 21st October, with the Friday and Monday also expected to be called up for literary duties. The line-up is due to be announced by late spring. The seam of history mined by Salisbury’s literature festival is exceptionally rich.

For many, Salisbury’s cathedral is the world’s greatest house of God, a magisterial masterpiece of Early English building, topped by what was for generations the tallest spire in Christendom at 404 feet. Yet the entire building stands on foundations that penetrate a mere four feet into underlying wetlands fed by a lattice of streams and springs. That it stands at all is miraculous, an act of faith.

To the north is Stonehenge and the earthworks and prehistoric standing stones that radiate from it for miles; further on is Avebury, the largest megalithic stone circle in the world, and Silbury Hill, a chalk mound built at the time of the earliest pyramids, the largest man-made hill in Europe. A short walk north from the city itself is the site of the settlement of Old Sarum, a prehistoric hill-top fort and town which would become home to Romans, Saxons, Normans and a short-lived castle and cathedral.

‘Old’ Sarum it is, as the new cathedral and city arose during the 13th and 14th centuries. New Sarum was granted its charter in 1227 – and was the official name of Salisbury until a local government shake-up in 2009.

Old Sarum was not a happy place. It was ‘like Mount Gilboa’, wrote the 13th-century poet Henri d’avranches. ‘A windy, rainswept place without flowers or birds… The castle was subject to the laws of Caesar, the city to those of God.’ For centuries Old Sarum, left as a huge, grassy tumescence of great gouges and ridges in the earth, dotted with a few ruined walls and perpetually windswept, has looked down on its urban nemesis with all the melancholy of abandonment. Dickens visited Salisbury in the 1840s, calling in on the great essayist William Hazlitt’s son, also William, just north of the city, and writing its ancient White Hart inn into Martin Chuzzlewit. In 1848 Dickens rode north to spend a day at Stonehenge. Constable painted Old Sarum on a visit to his friend John Fisher, who lived in Salisbury. Subsequent engravings and reproductions of his watercolour made Constable’s original vision appear more gloomy, darkening skies and sapping the landscape of detail until it became an imminent apocalypse. Yet Salisbury, or, specifically, its cathedral, would be the subject of one of Constable’s best-loved works, ‘Salisbury Cathedral From The Meadows’. Now taken to be a study of despair – his wife Maria had recently died – and hope, the rainbow and the resurrection embodied in the church.