Today was moving-on day again, this time with some finality.  Our brief stay at the Hunters Moon B&B was intriguing and it would have been nice to have the day to explore the environs.  The B&B is within a much larger estate, the Tedworth House Estate, which was owned and used by aristocracy, members of Parliament and other hoi polloi until purchased by the War Office in 1896.  The Hunters Moon complex was originally the house of the estate's gamekeeper and built about 1840.  Our hosts live in the residence, and our little building was originally the kennels for his dogs.  The owners of the residence remodeled it first into a framing studio for the lady of the house, and in 2019 turned it into a unit for overnighting.  Its odd shape is due to its origin as a dog kennel.  Quite charming.  The other B&B unit was originally the larder for the gamekeeper and it has been converted to a second unique overnight venue as well.  The larger estate itself is still quite elegant, with horses and a church and much green space.  Strangely, the estate itself is still owned by the British Ministry of Defense and several garrisons are still nearby.  However, it was time to move on to Salisbury to see something Phyllis was quite excited about.

Salisbury Cathedral is the home of one of the only four remaining (and best preserved) original copies of the Magna Carta, that seminal document that underlies many of the legal principles that we and the Brits still honor today.  Written in 1215 and signed by King John at the insistence of most of his barons, it formed a blueprint for how a ruler should govern and established that a king was not above the law.  Of course, after signing, King John immediately set about trying to renege on most of it, but it was still a very historic step.  Among other things, our modern-day right to a trial by jury of one's peers and right to a speedy trial can be found in language in the Magna Carta.  Phyllis considered it a bit of a lawyer's pilgrimage to see it.  Protected from bright light and photography, it is a little hard to convey the image, but for something this old and significant, that's fair.  Written in Latin, the letters were tiny (scribes wrote small in those days because paper was an expensive and precious resource) and it was said to take 56 hours of writing to complete.  No wonder there were so few copies made. 

Salisbury Cathedral itself was not too shabby.  It was completed in 1258 and has the tallest spire in all of Britain.  Also, it has a row of regimental flags of the local Wiltshire regiments along one wall.  Apparently when a regiment gets a new set of colors (as they are called), the old one is hung in a location important to that regiment, in this case the Salisbury Cathedral,  until it completely disintegrates, when it is gently taken down, burned, and buried.  A set of colors was taken down and disposed of this way just in March, and we saw several very tattered ones that might be next.  A curious tradition.  

After leaving the Cathedral, we headed to our hotel near Gatwick, where we dropped off our luggage and then returned our car to the airport car rental.  We both chatted up the Alamo representative, who was a nice fellow, and while he peered closely with a light all over the car, he did not mention the scars on that one tire rim.  Phyllis was much relieved.  After catching an airport shuttle back to the hotel, we walked to a nearby inn that Craig discovered on the internet.  Once again, a good choice, although the building was so old that Craig had to continually duck due to the low ceiling rafters.  It was just next to an old church with a graveyard full of leaning, drunken-looking tombstones.  Eerie. Then it was back to recombining everything in our luggage to get under our weight limit for the flight from London to Dublin, which has the most stringent weight limits of our entire trip.  Phyllis heartlessly threw away several items, including the blue jeans that she has come to hate on this trip.  We were able to just make it under, according to our scales!  All that Madeira and other assorted alcohols were a challenge.