Building the Impossible

Looking up at Salisbury Cathedral today it seems impossible that the building was started over 800 years ago. With no mechanisation and handmade tools, this extraordinary building took centre stage in a developing new city. It is remarkable to think that as the building progressed more skills would have been learnt. There would have been an emerging skilled workforce and the need for beds, stone, wood, food and clothing. The demands would have been great and constant. The new City would have reverberated with the noise made by wagons carrying huge boulders of stone and the working of that stone. There would be the work done on the wood plus the building works in the city itself. Today the City is somewhat peaceful, but it does have a very loud past.