The Iron Age ring
A ditch and rampart dug in about 400 BC still enclose the entire Norman castle and give the hill its shape.
MARKEDWARDS — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Des Blenkinsopp — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Richard Rogerson — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Anthony Parkes — CC BY-SA 2.0
Salisbury was born here, and here it was abandoned. On a bare hilltop about three kilometres north of the modern city runs an enormous earthen ring dug by Iron Age people in about 400 BC — still formidable enough, well over a thousand years later, for William the Conqueror to plant a castle inside it and for a royal palace of Henry I's day to rise within its inner bailey. An entire town lived within that ditch: castle, cathedral and houses, all on one summit with Salisbury Plain falling away in every direction. Then it ended by administrative decision. In the 1220s the clergy moved down to the plain — the new cathedral was founded in 1220 — and the townspeople followed, until by Tudor times not one inhabited house was left on the hilltop. What remained was an almost voterless constituency, eleven electors by 1831, still returning two MPs to Parliament — the most notorious of the rotten boroughs — until the Reform Act of 1832 swept it away. What survives is the plan of that vanished town written into the ground: castle footings, the outline of the first cathedral marked out in the grass in the north-west quarter of the outer bailey, and the ditch that swallows you as you climb. Be clear about what this is: low ruins, not a standing castle. Anyone arriving expecting towers and great halls will leave faintly disappointed. Anyone who comes for the place itself — the height, the ring of earth, the line drawn through more than two thousand years of occupation — will get a very good hour out of it. The wind is serious here in every season, so bring a layer even in July. For families it is close to ideal after a day of museums: open grass to run on, and you may picnic anywhere on the site. A pushchair, though, will fight the uneven turf and the rabbit holes, and the slopes at the hill's edge are steep enough to keep small children close. Getting here is easy — the Stonehenge Tour bus from Salisbury calls at Old Sarum on its route, which turns the two sites into a single day, or it is roughly ten minutes' drive north, with a car park 200 metres from the entrance, free for members and charged for everyone else.
A ditch and rampart dug in about 400 BC still enclose the entire Norman castle and give the hill its shape.
The footings of Salisbury's first cathedral, marked out in the grass of the outer bailey and empty since the clergy moved downhill.
From the rampart edge you see the whole of Salisbury Plain and the spire of the cathedral that stole the town.
Castle Road, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP1 3SD
If you are on the Stonehenge Tour bus, yes without hesitation: it is a stop on the same route, an hour covers it, and it gives the whole area its historical context. If you are driving, short on time and travelling with tired children, put Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral first — Old Sarum is low ruins and a wide view, not a building you go inside.
Yes, and more than you might expect. The outer bailey — the great earthen ring and the footings of the first cathedral in its north-west quarter — can normally be walked without a ticket, and it carries most of the view over the plain and across to the spire. What you pay for is the inner bailey: the Norman mound, the castle footings and the remains of the royal palace at the heart of the ring.