Symbolic Forest

With travel now allowed within Wales, and places starting to open up, we can now go out and visit castles and suchlike again. Cadw, the Welsh historic monuments service, are starting to open up a number of their sites to carefully-controlled numbers of prebooked visitors at sites where it’s feasible. You can’t see the fantastic Victorian Gothic interiors of Castell Coch, but you can go and visit many of the famous castle ruins of Wales, the most famous being the “Edwardian subjugation” castles of the North. Caernarfon or Conwy are a bit far for a day trip from here, though. Instead, we set out for somewhere a bit more local, and walked through the complex arched gateways of Castell Rhaglan, Raglan Castle.

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Keyword noise: Cymru, Wales, Cadw, castles, castell, Raglan Castle, Castell Rhaglan.

What to do on a Saturday just before Yule? We went for a wander around the Blaise Castle estate, its forests and woods and caves. The museum in the estate’s mansion is not just closed for the winter, but all the windows are securely boarded up; but plenty of people were still climbing up to the folly at the summit of the estate, as ever looking more like a castle than any real castle ever does.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, Blaise Castle, castles, mistletoe, follies.

So, yesterday’s post was originally going to be this blog’s sole Hallowe’en post for this year. As it happened, though, the other thing I did yesterday was take The Children out to visit one of the local castles, which turned out to have at least its fair share of autumnal creepiness and gloom. It was Farleigh Hungerford Castle, just to the south of Bath, originally built in the 14th century by Sir Thomas Hungerford, first Speaker of the Commons. Nowadays it is almost entirely ruined, a couple of jagged towers propped up and stabilised by English Heritage concrete. The only buildings left standing are the chapel and associated priest’s house.

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Keyword noise: Farleigh Hungerford, death, burial, coffins, photography, castles, E Nesbit, English Heritage, ghost stories, Hilary Mantel, history, human remains, effigies, crypts, ruin.

This week, still from my summer holiday uploads: castles and derelict mineshafts.

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Keyword noise: castles, Chapel Porth, Cornwall, Haunters Of The Deep, holiday, mineshaft, photography, Restormel Castle, St Agnes, summer, Towanroath.

This June was originally going to be Photo Month on this site, given the oodles of photos I took on holiday. Unfortunately, I took so many photos on holiday,^* I still haven’t managed to sort through them all yet.

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Keyword noise: arch, archaeology, beach, castles, church, Cornwall, cove, fogou, medieval, photography, ruin, sea, shore, souterrain, Tintagel, tunnel.

(read part one here)

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Keyword noise: archaeology, castles, Iron Age, King Arthur, London, Mabinogion, mythology, raven god, ravens, Tower Of London, Welsh myth.

When I was still a student, as a researcher, I was always a bit rubbish. I’m one of those people who hoovers up random, unconnected pieces of information like anything; but when it comes to use it I can never remember where it came from. Little factoids are no good unless you can judge how true it is likely to be, and you can’t do that if you don’t know their provenance.

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Keyword noise: baking, birthday cake, cake, castles, Celtic, Celtic mythology, cooking, English, history, kitchen, London, mythology, oven, ravens, research, researching, Tower Of London, tradition.