Winchester

It has been a very, very long time since I interacted with the city of Winchester more than glimpsing the Cathedral from the M3. Today's trip took in the Museum, the Cathedral, and a sweep around the city centre. The City Museum is one of a pair: Tudor, Stuart, and 18th-century history is delegated to the Westgate Museum, meaning that the displays at the City Museum jump abruptly from the Middle Ages to the 19th century, and it's a bit sparse: you wonder really whether there's enough to fill two sites. 

The Cathedral's current lighting scheme hits you forcibly when you first enter, but in fact it looks rather good:

The Anglo-Saxon holy wells beneath the cathedral are currently inaccessible in a partly-flooded crypt. When the water rises, the hands of Antony Gormley's sculpture Sound II are filled. Ironically the flooding means it's too far away to see, and, although it's been there since 1986, long before the mobile age, it now looks as though it's checking its phone.

St Swithun-upon-Kingsgate is a rare survival of a small urban chapel still used for worship and very evocative for being so.

I managed to locate the 'holy well' Lady Arlen once sent me a photo of after a visit to Winchester, untold years in the past. She couldn't remember where it was, even at the time; it turned out to be next to the former church of St Thomas west of the city centre. This huge Victorian building replaced a small medieval one a hundred yards away and is now, rather amazingly, converted to apartments. Next to the 'well' you can see an old War Department boundary stone, marked with the broad arrow, delineating the land of what was once Peninsula Barracks. I don't see how this can be a holy well of any description: it is instead (surely) a public drinking-fountain made from medieval fragments relocated from somewhere else. Nice, though - and note the little troughs for dogs at the bottom! 

That was a bonus, as was finding an image of St Catherine in the Cathedral. It's a tiny stained glass window, high up in the north aisle. The sword was my first clue, and then I just about spotted the wheel fragment, confirming what I thought.