If you want to see the most powerful PR image promoting Salisbury’s recovery, proceed first to the Tate Gallery in London.  “Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows” is the artist Constable’s 1831 depiction of the great building. He sees it high and glorious under a stormy sky and a brilliant rainbow, from his easel across the River Avon.

Here was one of the city’s earliest, and most loyal, tourists. Constable often visited friends here. His work fixes Salisbury’s enduring reputation as one of the world’s leading foremost cathedral cities. We overuse the word shamefully, but this really is the city’s icon.

To return to the real living Salisbury of today, its mother lode of pure touristic gold is the Cathedral Close, ringed by a clutch of distinguished old buildings. (It’s the largest such close in Britain. The National Trust offers a helpful online walk.)

Dominating everything is the cathedral itself, set in a vast carpet of green. On our visit it was hosting a touring exhibition of a flock of 2,500 white paper doves, suspended high above the Nave. We’ve been spotting the paper doves in shops and restaurants everywhere. The city had eagerly grasped this obvious symbol of peace as the theme of its recovery.

The cathedral holds the best of the surviving four parchment copies of Magna Carta, and it is on public display.   UNESCO’s citation reads: ”76 lines of text, written in iron gall ink in Latin, in a neat business hand”. This flimsy, insubstantial document outlines nothing less than the mediaeval citizen’s rights, including the right to a fair trial.

I would place Mompesson House, a resplendent film star of a Queen Anne house just across from the cathedral, on that shining string of National Trust properties at which you might want to break your journey on the way from London to the West Country. We were greeted by keen attendants in every room, extolling magnificent plasterwork and period furniture, the graceful oak staircase and a 400 piece collection of 18th-century drinking glasses.

The next address is Arundells. I cannot imagine a more peaceful place to live as this, the former house of Prime Minister Edward Heath. On show here are his collection of paintings, photographs, sailing memorabilia and political cartoons. The Salisbury Museum  completes a magnificent trio is. Most of the important archaeological finds relating to Stonehenge are  on display.

Back in the city centre, about a quarter of a mile away, venerable old Salisbury weaves in and out of 21st-century High Street commerce.

The unassuming St. Thomas’s Church is one of the most precious things here. It is easy to miss this ancient little gem. The story is that craftsmen that working on the cathedral in the 13th century would have come here to pray.

Another venerable survivor from old Salisbury is the nearby Haunch of Venison restaurant, built around 1320. Inside corridors and stairways ramble around like some absent-minded old deacon. Let the building lead you and you could end up in many an eccentric hidden nook or snug, including the one where it is thought Churchill and Eisenhower planned D-Day.

The city’s revival strategists have an ace to play.  It is the gleaming green bus departing regularly from a stop in the Market Place. This is the Stonehenge Tour. A joint ticket covers the fare and entry to Stonehenge (about 10 miles away). The city used to promote  with ultimate touristic understatement in its slogan: “Nice Church – Great Rocks”.

They opened an inconspicuous,  well-designed interpretation centre at Stonehenge in 2013, to replace the untidy huddle of buildings that used to greet visitors. It has restored the dignity of the monument,  and the sense of wonder.  The circle is well out of view. Then, as you climb the hill outside the centre, either on foot or in a land train, those grey, gaunt stones, massive and mysterious, gradually come into view.

Salisbury tempted us to drive there that day with the promise of free park and ride. But there are excellent train services too. With the car – and it’s hard to make this visit without one – we called at Old Sarum, an ancient hill fort, and the original site of “old” Salisbury, two miles  from the city centre. There is a tremendous view back towards the “new” Salisbury.

As we stood there, every bad association of the March 4th attack, the posturing, the power politics, the recriminations, evaporated. In front of us a simple, timeless tableau of meadows with grazing sheep, and, rising above a blur of buildings, a spirit of hope pointing to the deep blue sky. The cathedral.