Itinerary first. I always have to start there, because without itinerary the world feels like a messy brief with no headings. So I imagine the day in careful steps: arrive by train into the small, polite station that pretends it is much older than it is; walk, because the map says everything in Wells is walkable if you insist — past the market square where the stalls still smell faintly of apples and yeast; cross the little stream that makes the city feel modestly self-contained; approach the cathedral spires like two earnest questions pointing up. From there, the itinerary draws a neat loop: first Vicar's Close, that long, narrow, crooked lane of stone houses arranged like a statement about continuity; then the Bishop's Palace, with its curtain of walls, its moat, and the swans that turn the water into living punctuation; lunch somewhere that serves honeyed goat cheese (because of course I will imagine what they eat here); spend the late afternoon under the bells, letting the peal make a loose grammar of the heart; then a meandering return across the green, thinking through Augustine again, remembering that semester in 2001 when I first tried to read De Civitate Dei and promptly felt both consoled and scandalized.
The private geography comes first — not the stones and hedges but the interior map I drag behind me. On every civic map there's a cathedral and a palace and a name on a plaque; my map layers those things with memory. Vicar's Close is not just a medieval cul-de-sac; in my head it is a long spine I can trace with my fingertips: rows of houses like vertebrae, narrow windows like small questions, roofs that slope like old books. I picture the Close as a text, each house an annotated margin, each door an index finger. Walking it feels like approaching an argument you half-remember from university — you can see the conclusion in the keystone but the syllogism lives in the mortar.
There is something formally domestic about the Close: you can imagine the inhabitants slipping out to fetch bread in the mornings as they have for five hundred years, habitual gestures that anchor chronology. Yet my private geography insists on a personal timeline overlaying that public age. In one corner I deposit the year 2001, the moment I read Augustine's City of God in a lecture theatre that smelled of coffee and chalk; in another corner I tuck Alcuin, who I file under "Latin teacher who will not suffer mediocrity," because his obsession with texts makes sense of Vicar's Close in a way the guidebook never will. In the space between them I draw Charlemagne on a horse, wearing a curious combination of armor and appetite, because of the capitularies that reach across centuries to tell me that regulation, food, and bees were administrative concerns even then — a reminder that law has always worked through the ordinary details of living.
And then the Bishop's Palace, set slightly apart, its moat a deliberate margin, the water like a rhetorical pause. In my mind the palace sits at the point where earthly city and heavenly city meet awkwardly and brilliantly: Augustine's big argument framed on a small residential island. The swans there — the living heralds of the place — move as if reading from a script written in feathers. The story I tell myself is that the swans learned bell-ringing by osmosis, that the bells and the birds have a shared vocabulary. In reality the cathedral bells ring because people pull ropes; my imagination prefers the idea that the swans translate those peals into ripples, that the water becomes a ledger of sound.
I think of Augustine in 2001 as a rite of passage. I was a law-student-in-waiting then, bristling with legalese, allergic to vague adjectives. Augustine's City of God was strangely sedative and galvanizing at once. I remember the professor saying, almost as an aside, that Augustine wrote in response to the sack of Rome in 410, that he set out to defend the City of God against the accusation that Christianity had brought down the empire. In 2001 that felt like a thesis about blame and responsibility that my law school brains could want to subpoena: who is responsible when an ordered system collapses? What is the thing we call law if the worldly city can be sacked? I underlined pages until my notes formed a second, private City of God in the margins.
Alcuin shows up on my map because he is the sort of person who makes me suspect that the medieval world was not a bottled fog of superstition but a place of disciplined pedagogy. The Northumbrian scholar who went to Charlemagne's court to institutionalize the teaching of Latin — he is the man with the clipboard in my head. He is strict. He is suspicious of sloppy grammar. He probably would not have stood for the way I sigh when I read footnotes. But I am grateful to him; his insistence on texts and transmission is why there is a lineage from Augustine's Latin to the timber and stone in Wells. Every grammar exercise he imagined becomes a small brick in the architecture of memory.
Enter Charlemagne, the equestrian outdoorsman who liked food and knew that governing realities required rules about bees. The capitularies — those bite-sized royal directives — are the hinge between charisma and administration. They read like a ruler trying to be pastoral without losing his grip. Some capitularies were about ecclesiastical discipline and education, but my favorites, secretly, are the agrarian ones: beekeeping rules, estate inventories, lists of foods that should be grown and eaten. It delights me to think that a man who corrected bishops also cared enough about honey to write instructions about it. It places law in the kitchen — in the jar of honey you buy at the market stall across from the cathedral, in the bees that make the sweetness possible. There's a tidy alliance there between governance and appetite: laws regulate souls and orchards alike.
So the itinerary folds the historical into the sensory. Vicar's Close gives me the smell of wet stone and the look of old leaded glass. The Bishop's Palace gives me the hush of a moat and the white bodies of the swans moving like commas on the surface. The cathedral bells give me the vocabulary of time: short phrases of joy, long nascent sighs. And my mind, trained in legal habits, catalogues the sound — a peal is threefold; a muffled toll is something else; the latinate names of the tones might as well be inscribed in the tower, somewhere between arcane and administrative.
As a would-be lawyer I cannot help but notice the legal architecture of place. The palace walls feel like statute; the moat feels like jurisdiction. The bishop, who once had near-royal power, is both religious authority and landed landlord. History becomes a record: charters, deeds, capitularies. If law is the story we tell to secure expectations, then the stones of Wells are its footnotes. Each plaque that lists donors and dates is a clause in a long municipal contract. I wander that contract with the nervous pleasure of someone who appreciates clauses, exceptions, and the way a preposition can tilt an entire case.
Sometimes, when I'm trying to be precise with myself, I translate the scene into legal terms. Vicar's Close is an easement — a right of way through continuity; the Bishop's Palace moat is a defensive covenant; the swans are living emblems given to the palace as a form of perpetual consideration. Augustine's City of God becomes an appellate brief on the human condition: the earthly city has its claims and failures, the heavenly city supplies the moral law. In 2001 I wrote a paper called "Two Cities, Two Orders," and the professor wrote in the margin: "Good structure, more specifics on Augustine's rhetorical strategy required." I still have that paper folded in a desk drawer, a legal relic that smells faintly of printer ink and late nights.
Food seeps into this thatched architecture of thought because food is where law meets daily life. Charlemagne's capitularies that speak of estate management are, to my mind, early statutes of taste. They insist that people grow certain crops, keep bees, and maintain horses. They are trying to standardize living conditions across a wildly heterogeneous realm. For someone who likes to think with her mouth, as I do, that is delicious. Imagine the palace kitchens — vast rooms where regulations and recipes negotiated power. Imagine bishops tasting honey and deciding that this sweetness must be protected, catalogued, and perhaps taxed. I plan, in my head, a lunch at a small restaurant near the Close where I will order something magnanimous and rural-sounding: roasted lamb with thyme, a salad with greens and a scatter of local honey. Eating is a way of understanding history: you sample legislation by taste.
And then the bells. The bells are where the city's soundscape becomes a curriculum. Bell-ringing is choreography and law together: there are rules about when to ring and how, sequences that form a protocol. The change ringing at Wells has a structure that rewards concentration, and there is a parallel in how legal arguments demand order and timing. In the late afternoon, as the peal fills the air, I imagine Augustine hearing similar sequences: syllogisms rung out over theological disputation; Alcuin correcting a student's declension mid-argument; Charlemagne walking with a horse and negotiating a capitulary about orchards. The bells are a timeline, each note a footnote.
Private geography is also about the pockets of solitude you choose. I find one bench, half in sun, half in shadow, and I assign it to myself. It is where I will think about the year 2001 and how reading Augustine then was like learning legalese of the soul. Augustine wrote with a lawyer's precision and a pastor's consolation, and when my head is full of legal forms and Latin fragments Alcuin feels like an ancestral coach. I imagine him, strict and tender, saying: "Practice your case, child; then practice mercy." There is a curiously contemporary comfort in that mixture of rigor and tenderness — it is the kind of pedagogy that a law school should, perhaps, adopt.
Finally, I allow the itinerary to dissolve into wandering. The forecasted route — Close, Palace, bells, lunch — is a scaffold; the real journey is the unplanned thought that arrives when a swan preens or when the bell does a thing I didn't expect. The medieval and the modern collapse into each other in these moments. Augustine's line about the two cities becomes a personal meditation on the civic life I want to inhabit: one city that obeys rules and maintains order, another that aspires to justice and charity. My law student self wants to codify the first; my inner romantic, the part that eats honeyed cheese and names swans, wants to live in the second.
Everything feels teachable here: the stone is an assigned reading; the swan a live case study; the bells a lecture series. Even the air has a syllabus: history 9:00–10:30, theology 11:00–12:00, gastronomy 12:30–13:15, law and memory 14:00–15:30. In 2001 I learned that Augustine could be read as a counselor to law students, and in Wells the cathedral and palace act as a great, slow classroom. Alcuin's ghost sits in the corner, correcting Latin. Charlemagne rides past with his list of capitularies and a request for honey. The swans gossip in the moat about who's been naughty with the bread crumbs. It is absurd and almost too vivid; perhaps that is the point of private geography — it makes history insistently present.
When I finally fold my map back into my handbag and prepare to leave, the itinerary becomes compact and neat again. I have walked Vicar's Close and the Bishop's Palace in both my body and my head; I have tasted the idea of honey, listened to the bells, and read Augustine through the filter of 2001 and legal anxiety. The private geography I create is not a refusal of public history but a negotiation with it: I take what the stones offer and translate it into a hermeneutic that makes sense for a woman with law books in her satchel and a tendency to anthropomorphize swans. The day becomes a case closed: evidence examined, arguments made, verdict undecided but hopeful.
That is the curious finality of itinerary: it promises return. I will come back to Wells, to the Close, to the moat where swans swivel and bells keep time. I will reread Augustine sometimes, and maybe the reading will be kinder. Alcuin will still be strict; Charlemagne will still be hungry; legalese will still be in my blood. But the place will keep me honest. It will remind me that law was always meant to order lives: not to domesticate wonder but to enable it. And if the swans have learned any law at all, it is surely the simplest, most ancient one — that grace, like a bell, is both sound and summons.