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Ivybridge Community College

Ivybridge Community College

Ivybridge Community College

Salisbury Visit - a fitting CREW Closing

Year 13 CREW students took a trip to Salisbury Cathedral - the inspiration for 'Pillars of the Earth' - as a final farewell.

On Wednesday, 3 May, the Year 13 CREW (A Level Creative Writing) cohort visited Salisbury Cathedral.  The visit came after a year-long research project, as part of the Historical Fiction (HF) component of the course; this is where students learnt the importance of accurate research, fine tuning those research skills, writing in a historical world, adapting HF novels into scripts and exploring the differences in the page and screen versions of historical fiction.

Alongside popular HF works such as ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘The Crucible’, students studied ‘The Pillars of the Earth’, for which the cathedral in Salisbury was a source of inspiration for the author Ken Follett.  As well as seeing one of the original copies of the Magna Carta, students not only explored the cathedral itself but also completed a Tower Tour in which they climbed 332 steps, explored the roof spaces to reach the foot of the spire 225 feet above ground level and saw amazing examples of medieval architecture (and 800 years’ worth of graffiti too!).  The climb was well rewarded with outstanding views of Salisbury and the surrounding countryside.

All in all, students claimed it was a valuable and extraordinary experience which worked well to draw the year’s project to a close.