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The ruins of Old Sarum (daily: April-June & Sept 10am-6pm; July & Aug 9am-6pm; Oct 10am-5pm; Nov-March 10am-4pm; GBP2; EH) occupy a bleak hilltop site two miles north of the city centre - an easy walk, but there are plenty of buses: #5, #6, #8 and #9 running every fifteen minutes or so (less frequent on Sun). Possibly occupied up to five thousand years ago, then developed as an Iron Age fort whose double protective ditches remain, it was settled by Romans and Saxons before the Norman bishopric of Sherborne was moved here in the 1070s. Within a couple of decades a new cathedral had been consecrated at Old Sarum, and a large religious community was living alongside the soldiers in the central castle. Old Sarum was an uncomfortable place, parched and windswept, and in 1220 the dissatisfied clergy - additionally at loggerheads with the castle's occupants - appealed to the pope for permission to decamp to Salisbury (still known officially as New Sarum). When permission was granted, the stone from the cathedral was commandeered for Salisbury's gateways, and once the church had gone the population waned. By the nineteenth century Old Sarum was deserted, but it continued to exist as a political constituency - William Pitt was one of its representatives. The most notorious of the "rotten boroughs", it returned two MPs at a time to Westminster up until the 1832 Reform Act put a stop to it.
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