National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

Old Sarum is an ancient mound one and a half miles north of Salisbury. It was an Iron Age hillfort, later occupied by the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans. The Normans built a castle within the perimeter of the mound and a cathedral below it, but disputes between soldiers and priests, plus inadequate water supplies, led to the building of New Sarum (the present city of Salisbury) in 1226. The cathedral was dismantled and a new one built at Salisbury, and the old settlement began to fade away. In Constable’s time Old Sarum was still an impressive feature on the skyline to the north of Salisbury, but to Constable it was a desolate and deserted place. He described it as a ‘once proud and populous city… traced but by vast embankments’ that had become a barren waste, ‘tracked only by sheepwalks’, and that ‘every vestige of human habitation, [had] long since passed away’ (Beckett, Discourses, pp. 24–25). Constable depicted a solitary shepherd in the foreground, in front of an expansive open plain and the mound o