Bucky the Beaver and the 18 Bemidji State University students traveling to the United Kingdom for EuroSpring 2018 visited the Ashmolean Museum, Avebury, Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral during the second week of their five-week adventure.
The Ashmolean is the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, founded in 1683. Their world-famous collections range from Egyptian mummies to contemporary art, telling human stories across cultures and across time. The Ashmolean is the oldest public museum in the world and has five floors of collections from around the globe.
After our stop in Avebury, we traveled 25 miles to Stonehenge.
Stonehenge is perhaps the world’s most famous prehistoric monument. It was built in several stages: the first monument was an early henge monument, built about 5,000 years ago, and the unique stone circle was erected in the late Neolithic period, around 2500 BC. In the early Bronze Age, many burial mounds were built nearby.
Today, along with Avebury, it forms the heart of a World Heritage Site in a unique concentration of prehistoric monuments. The Stonehenge we see today is the end result of several episodes of construction followed by 4,000 years of destruction and decay. Various stones are fallen or missing, making the original plan difficult to understand.
After Stonehenge, we gallivanted over to Salisbury Cathedral.
We started our tour by visiting the oldest working clock in existence, made of hand-wrought iron in or before 1386. Salisbury's clock was originally housed in a detached bell tower north of the cathedral. The tower contained 10 bells in 1531 and eight in 1635. In 1645 the tower was occupied by Parliamentary forces under Colonel Ludlow and attacked by Royalists who set fire to it, forcing surrender. When that tower was pulled down in 1792, the clock moved to the Cathedral tower and worked there until 1884, when a new clock — a gift from the officers and men of Wiltshire Regiment — was installed,
The clock received no attention until it was re-discovered in 1929. In 1931, the non-working clock was moved down to the North Transept, and in 1956 it was completely repaired and restored to its original condition — including restoration of the verge-and-foliot timing mechanism that had been replaced by a pendulum in the late 17th century. The restoration included new weights made in workshops at the cathedral.
Salisbury Cathedral, formally known as the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is an Anglican cathedral in Salisbury, England, and one of the leading examples of Early English architecture. The main body of the cathedral was completed in only 38 years, from 1220 to 1258. Since 1549, the cathedral has had the tallest church spire in the United Kingdom at 404 feet.
