June 5th - Alnwick - Alnwick Castle

Recounting June 5th's activities

It seems like we've been gone forever at this point. Today we went to Alnwick Castle, the one Meg keeps calling Dumbledore's
castle because it was the inspiration for Hogwarts in Harry Potter. We started out in the morning by getting Hannah a new 'do. She looks magnificent but I am sworn to secrecy and cannot reveal the details. Or at least I'll let her or her mom tell them. That pretty much consumed the morning.

While Hannah was being coiffed Terry and I headed off for the library and used the internet. We investigated all the possible things to do in Newcastle and surrounding countryside. After wearing out the computers at the library we headed back to pick up Meg and Hannah at the beauty salon and then off for lunch before scaling the castle walls.(This is an invasion after all).

The castle is a big rock thingy with stuff on top and more stuff inside. Terry bought a book Castles explained but so far he says he's not gotten a satisfactory answer out of it.

Really though it is a large sandstone structure that is what you would expect. Rounded crenalated towers arched windows, arched entrances and had the nicest bathrooms we've seen so far. It's a continuing theme. First we went into the state room and library which is the only part of the castle where they check your ticket except for the armament room which we skipped due to time constraints.

The State room really did have some specacular features. There were a pair of Louis the XIV cabinets that had the most elaborate inlay of woodland scenes I've ever seen. The walls were covered in a green silk and floors covered in carpets that were appropriate to the period as well though rather tattered. Shutters that were open beside the tall windows were hand carved
matching pieces that the labels said each took a year to carve and there were about 8 of them.

Over the fireplace was a matched pair of paintings of the duke and dutchess (couldn't tell you which ones - there have been dozens as far as I can tell) and they were assembled in perhaps the most elaborate frame I've ever seen. It was again carved in the Alnwick style and featured oak leaves I think, in a tangle of loose leaves that was clearly a fragile piece. I asked the lady
who was there for questions about it and she said that it comes apart in pieces and they had it down for cleaning last year. Apparently when they went to put it back together they got it all assembled except for a corner and then found that it wouldn't fit. Apparently there were some very tense moments as they took it apart again and tried to reassemble it in the proper sequence. This thing is huge maybe six or eight feet tall and four or five feet across. She said it was very heavy as well. So I took some amusement in the thought of a room full of workers struggling to put it back together under the watchful eye of the current duchess. I'm told she collects stuffed animals (we saw a number of victorian era taxidermied dogs throughout the place) so I can only imagine what the penalty for failure would be. Anyway it really was striking and I'm glad they finally got it all figured out.

The china I wasn't so impressed with. They had a hallway that held a few sets mostly of the hand painted with animals variety. Generally kind of ugly though the tureen lids with the birds of great britain were interesting. Also the notion that you would finish your salad only to find a rhinoceros looking back at you. Those were ok.

The Library had 14,000 volumes in a room that was lined with bookshelfs. The ceiling was elaborately gilded and had apparently only been repainted once. It was one of those ceilings with carved panels and about seventy pieces of moulding for each section. Very castleific. You'll have to take my word for it. The castle is a "copyrighted building" and no photographs flash or otherwise are permitted. We had to turn off cell phones as well as they are known to set off the burglar alarm.

There were many photographs of the current duke, duchess and their family as well as many paintings. Many of the paintings looked very familiar to me but because they weren't labelled it was difficult to recount them here. At one point Terry asked about one that he thought was familiar and the interpreter said it should then went on to tell us that it was a copy of a famous painting though a "Very good copy". After that I'm afraid all the
paintings not of the family were suspect to me. That was my main complaint about the interior of the castle. There were lovely things but I expected to see information about them like what you would see in a museum and it just wasn't there. Perhaps my expectations were a little too high.

We saw the dungeon though you couldn't go in there. It was an oubliette which basically means big hole in the ground. A ladder extended down beneath the locked iron grate. Throughout the exterior features of the castle we did not see animatronic mannequins (which I find kind of creepy anyway) but the dungeon like several other areas contained motion activated recordings. In the dungeon they featured the sounds of someone moaning and coughing which I found kind of gross. Not unlike the drunk on the train but that's another story.

We were able to climb the wall and walk along to see the views of the castle from up there as well as the surrounding countryside which was of course lovely if not completely breathtaking. The rolling green hills divided by stone fences of Northumberland really is pretty. After the stunning beauty of Lewis and Harris it was a tough act to follow.

We came off the wall with a walk through another audio enhanced display of military memorabilia with which we all posed for photographs - copyrights be damned!

Later after dinner - I assume we had dinner I don't really recall, we walked back to the cottage and settled in for a night of single malt and foolishness. Meg Hannah and I had a rousing laugh filled conversation about the propriety of farting in the castle and then discussed things totally unrelated to this vacation. We stayed up past midnight in spite of the fact that the 6th we planned to leave the house for Newcastle by 7:45.