(Winchester, England, U.K.)

While Winchester Cathedral gets most of the attention, there are at least two other significant historic sites in Winchester. The first is called Wolvesey Castle, and is maintained by English Heritage.

Wolvesey Castle was the home of the Bishop of Winchester during the Middle Ages. It was built in the 12th century and hosted all kinds of special events…including those held for the royal family.

Alas, Wolvesey Castle was destroyed by the “Roundheads” in 1646. I will admit that I didn’t know who these oddly-named Roundheads were. But it appears that they wanted a strong Parliament and a constitutional monarchy, rather than an absolute monarchy.

But it isn’t really necessary to have a keen understanding of the English Civil War to appreciate Wolvesey Castle. Some information is posted at various locations around the site, but I enjoyed just wandering around the ruins and being transported back to an earlier time. While the hours are not too extensive, admission is free.

We ended our last visit to Winchester by exploring some of the “upper town”. Our path took us down narrow streets with cozy “cottages” and past atmospheric pubs such as the Wykeham Arms. The academic vibe was similar to our home town of Kingston, Ontario…albeit a few centuries older.

Another major site in Winchester is the Great Hall. It was actually part of a bigger complex called Winchester Castle, which was founded in 1067 by William the Conqueror (as Winchester was a big deal at the time). It was the seat of royal power for quite some time. Alas, that castle has also largely disappeared…but the Great Hall remains. It is still an imposing building and hosts a museum.

The Great Hall also contains the “Round Table.” It is a big wooden tabletop that was later linked to King Arthur and the “Knights of the Round Table”. By the time we arrived, however, the Great Hall was about to close. We decided not to enter (there is an admission fee), leaving us with an important sight to see if we should ever return to Winchester.

While we missed out on the Great Hall, we still managed to cover a lot of territory during our two afternoons in Winchester. This was partly because we didn’t expect to have very much time for sightseeing during the forthcoming two weeks in Wales. We would have an entirely different focus there!

We returned to Shawford for the last time and had a final dinner at “The Bridge.” We loaded up on supplies for our trip to Wales and caught a train out of Southampton early the next morning. Travelling with luggage can sometimes be a burden on British trains, but that feeling was outweighed by the excitement of our impending new experience.

Coming up next: into the Heart of Wales!

(Shawford and Winchester, England, U.K.)

We have some family members living in Shawford, a small community just outside Winchester, England. After arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport, we decided to stay here for a few days before moving on to Wales.

After we had a small lunch at our airline’s arrival lounge, we took a (very full, very delayed) bus to Winchester and were met 90 minutes later at the bus station by our niece. Their house is about a 15-minute walk from the Shawford train station. And right across from the train station is “The Bridge”, the local pub. That’s where we had our first dinner.

Back at our lodgings, we made some rough plans for our sightseeing visit to Winchester. We slept that night for nearly 11 hours, after only about 3 hours of sleep on the plane the night before.

Winchester today has about 50,000 people in the city proper. But, just like my home city of Kingston, it was once much more influential. It was the “capital” of Wessex and even England for many years. It was also the second largest city in England (after London).

We started our visit by lining up a walking tour of the old city for mid-afternoon. We did a little bit of shopping on the “High Street”, and even stumbled upon a record fair at a local hotel. I won’t be doing any music shopping after leaving the U.K., because our future destinations on this around-the-world adventure will be even more expensive for music. And I don’t like the idea of travelling so many thousands of miles with large /fragile vinyl records. As a result, we just picked up a couple of CDs.

Lunch was just some take-out from a street vendor. We’ll be away from home for far too long to constantly have sit-down restaurant meals. We then returned to the tourist information centre and met our walking tour guide. We were now ready to discover the city’s rich and varied history!

One of the nice things about a walking tour is that you end up in places that you wouldn’t have found on your own…and you can also identify places that you’ll go back to later. It’s easy to find them on your own…you just need to retrace your steps from earlier in the day.

I’ll have more details on the walking tour in a later post. We finished our day with dinner at Gurkha’s Inn, a restaurant featuring Nepalese and Indian cuisine. Ever since Darbar closed in Kingston, I have been searching for a comparable dhansak!