A day in port: Salisbury and Stonehenge, and back to your ship

Salisbury was laid out from nothing in the thirteenth century, when the bishop moved his cathedral down off the windswept hill at Old Sarum. That is why the centre is a tidy grid of blocks — the chequers — rather than the usual tangle: it is a planned town, and it has kept its shape for eight hundred years.

The cathedral went up in one sustained push between 1220 and 1258, which gives it a consistency most English cathedrals never had. The spire came later, around 1330, and at 123 metres it is still the tallest in the country; the pillars carrying it visibly bend under the weight. The Chapter House holds one of only four surviving original copies of Magna Carta, sealed in 1215, and the cathedral also has a medieval clock of about 1386, widely described as the oldest working clock in the world.

Outside the Close — the largest cathedral close in Britain, ringed by houses of every century since the fourteenth — the city is small enough to cross on foot in ten minutes. A charter market has been held in the square since the thirteenth century and still runs twice a week, and the streets around it keep a good deal of their medieval and Georgian frontage, with pubs, tearooms and independent shops.

Stonehenge is the best known prehistoric monument in Europe. The earthwork enclosure was dug around 3000 BC and the great sarsen stones were raised a few centuries later, so what you are looking at took shape over roughly fifteen hundred years — longer than the span between the Norman conquest and today. It stands in a UNESCO World Heritage Site that also takes in Avebury and the burial mounds spread across the surrounding downland.

You arrive at the visitor centre off the A360, which is where we set you down. The stones themselves are a mile and a half further on: a shuttle bus runs between the two continuously, or you can walk it across the fields in about half an hour and ride back. A marked path takes you around the circle — close enough to pick out the joints cut into the lintels and the stones that have fallen — although visitors do not walk in among the stones during normal opening hours.

The visitor centre holds an exhibition of objects found in the landscape, including human remains and grave goods from the barrows nearby, and a film that puts you in the middle of the circle. Outside it stands a group of Neolithic houses reconstructed from the evidence found at Durrington Walls up the road, usually with volunteers inside demonstrating how the builders lived. There is a café and a shop.