Sussex to Stonehenge: Nick Beykirch '00 and Patti McWhirr '00

Our first stop, the Weald and Downland museum, provided a frame of reference for understanding the steady pace of rural development that served as a backdrop for the pageant of English history and politics. This living history museum contains some forty buildings, several of which date back to the 15th century. These buildings were rescued from many regions of England, taken down, moved, and then set up as they would have existed when they were first constructed. The museum showcases agriculture and architecture, as well as domestic life. Costumed craftsmen, farmers, and villagers periodically re-enact events from country life true in every aspect to their eras, and will answer questions posed by visitors as long as no references are made beyond the time frame they represent.

Our first night's stay was in a 12th century water mill in the city of Winchester. Converted to a youth hostel, it proved to be our most primitive accommodation. Low ceilings and shower-rationing aside, sleeping in an 800-year-old building impressed everyone. We also discovered that hostels are fertile ground for meeting other foreign and British travelers. Winchester's cathedral, built in 1079 and the longest in all of Europe, was not its first. The earlier church, established by King Cenwealh in 648, was a much simpler Romanesque building. Either structure, but especially the Gothic cathedral, would have required feats of engineering difficult to envision in light of the limitations of power sources and modeling techniques available.

Many of the cathedrals in England contain a range of architectural styles, mainly because their completion spanned so many decades. Salisbury Cathedral, however, was built in a mere thirty-eight years by three hundred men. Its Chapter House is home to the Magna Carta, and its soaring spire, dating from 1313, is the tallest medieval structure in the world. Nick summarized the experience saying, "These two cathedrals left me with a new respect for the artifacts and techniques of past centuries, many of which were the bases for technologies we use today."

We left Winchester early to visit Salisbury, site of another famous cathedral, and Stonehenge, whose antiquity is nearly beyond the scope of an American imagination.
Glastonbury, Bath, and Ironbridge: Christina Hoey '99 and Ken LeCompte '00

Our second day's travels brought us to the youth hostel outside the village of Street, a suburb of Glastonbury. Glastonbury's abbey ruin is its historical gem, with the well-preserved monastery kitchen providing insight into medieval culinary technology.

We recognized our high point in accommodations for the trip when we approached Banwell Castle. This was the splurge of the trip, though not expensive by American hotel standards. The country home of a local squire, Banwell was built in Gothic revival style during the 19th century, and its peacocks and four-poster beds delighted our crew. It was the launching point for a thorough exploration of nearby Bath, where a famous Roman spa was built on the site of a long-revered natural hot spring. After the fall of Rome, Bath declined until the 18th century, when it was rediscovered by Georgian society, whose architecture of honey-colored stone pervades the city. Today the technology supporting the ancient Roman bath systems is revealed and explained in detail at the Bath museums.

The next morning the group prepared for a transition into a more recent era, and by early afternoon we had reached Ironbridge Gorge. Here, through the exploitation of coal, limestone, iron ore, and clay, the community of Coalbrookdale along the Severn River was thrust into the Industrial Revolution. Coalbrookdale became the birthplace of the world's first iron wheels, rails, and boats, and the cast-iron bridge for which the town is named.

This technological center of the late 1800s was perhaps most vividly portrayed at Blists Hill, a recreated Victorian town whose costumed docents occupied the various stores and workshops and were glad to explain and demonstrate their crafts. Mining and steam train operation were showcased, and the Blists Hill bank allowed us to exchange modern pence for locally minted Victorian shillings. And as Christina noted, "One of the great qualities of a living history museum like Blists Hill is its ability to inform visitors not only of technological developments but also of the people who made these developments happen."