Warwick Castle pt 2

Having read Kylie's post about Warwick Castle, you will now be fully conversant with the wars of the roses and my dislike of high, old buildings. So, take your skun ferret and lower it slowly into the boiling pitch until... sorry, don't know where that came from.

Warwick Castle is really touristy. The building is very impressive, and they've gone to some lengths to try to educate people about some medieval things. But the result is that the whole thing feels a bit cheapened, and they neglect some of their best stuff.

As Kylie has outlined, the castle started as a fairly significant fortification in the history of Norman England. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English were a bit less worried about the hordes of marauding vikings / saxons / poor people / traitors / distant relatives who might try to come and burn your castle down, and a bit less confident about using castles against them if they did come. So the Earls of Warwick turned the castle into a fairly comfortable Victorian gentleman's house, which also happened to have a big wall around it.

The contrast is quite bizarre. Outside: Medieval castle. Inside: Comfortable house, with oak-panneled rooms, fine furniture etc. Odd.

The inside is set up to try to show you what a weekend party at the house might have looked like in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Winston Churchill figures, as he was apparently a regular guest, as were the dukes of Devonshire and Marlborough and the Prince of Wales. On the whole, they were a fairly immoral lot.

Outside, medieval rules. There were quite good displays of falconing, and, of course, the firing of the grand trebuchet. This was a singular disappointment. Here you have a weapon capable of flinging some quite interesting things, like furniture, pianos or small cars, some considerable distance, and what do they do with it? They fling a 15kg rock. Alright, they doused it in pitch and set it on fire first, but it was still a small rock.

Back inside, I was quite disappointed that they didn't make more of their collections. They actually have some quite good artwork, including a number of van Dyke studio portraits, one or two by van Dyke himself, several by Sir Joshua Reynolds and more by his studio, and one quite unique painting of Henrietta Maria which was first painted by van Dyke's studio as a half-height portrait and then extended to its full height by Sir Joshua. They make nothing of them. I only found out about them because I recognized a van Dyke and asked one of the staff about it. He turned out to be extremely knowledgable on the subject, and very helpful and happy to talk for a long time. But if you didn't ask, you would know nothing about it. The one upside is that, because they make nothing of them, you can walk right up to the paintings. You could easily damage or destroy them if you chose to. In other stately homes, the paintings are kept roped off and you can't get near them. At Warwick, you can study them very close up.

They also have a quite extraordinary collection of weaponry, ranging from Norman times through to the 18th century. Again, they make nothing of it. It's like someone found it all in a crate and said, "What'll we do with all this old junk?" "I dunno, just hang some one the walls where it might look nice. Spread it around a bit, you know?" The crowning piece is, of course, the trebuchet, and they make a great deal of that, but on everything else they are silent.

The best thing about Warwick castle was getting in free. We were lined up behind a coach party. The driver came down distributing tickets, and when he got to the end of the line he asked us, "Have you paid?" We said no, and he said, "Well, here, have these tickets, they're spare." Beauty.

Verdict: A good family day out, but could be better.

Oh, and several people have asked what is a Motte and what is a Bailey. A motte is a kind of pile of dirt, useful to be on if you are trying to hurl rocks at someone else's head, or if you want to see a long way, and a bailey is a wall that you put around the motte, to keep people from trying to put a sword in your head (or assorted other disfiguring operations).