The August bank holiday was a pre-arranged week off for Sarah and I to spend some time together. It was on one such day that we decided to hop over the border into Wales and clamber around on some ancient buildings. Wales is full of such places, and so we planned out a route to visit Tintern Abbey; the inspirational ruins for painters such as Turner and poets such as Tennyson and Wordsworth so I figured that a visit here was bound to get my creative juices flowing.
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| The Tintern Abbey "money shot" |
Situated in the Wye Valley, you couldn't dream of a more idyllic setting; it is a 12th Century Cistercian abbey, which succumbed to Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, and after someone nicked the lead off of the roof (so you see Daily Mail, these things happened even way back before swathes of immigrants flooded the country too!), it subsequently fell into decay.
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| The roofless abbey - that must have been a lot of lead!!! |
It is now looked after by CADW (the Welsh version of English Heritage), who have grasped technology by the horns and dotted around the site a variety of bluetooth hotspots where you can download factoids to your portable electronic device of choice. I am afraid I am still a bit old-school when it comes to things like this, and prefer the feel of a reasonably priced guidebook rather than some text on a screen. I was happy as a sandboy walking around the abbey, but to make me even more appreciative of the scene, a buzzard decided to soar above us - i tried to get an arty picture of it in shot, but the damn thing has eagle eyes, and clearly decided it didn't want to be on camera, so buggered off down the valley (or up the valley, I really don't know).
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| View from the Abbey of the Wye Valley - B-e-a-utiful |
After a swift half in the pub across the road from the abbey (I always love the fact that just across from almost every church there is a pub, so on a Sunday the flock can gather to hear moralising tales about self restraint before piling out of the church and into the local boozer) we moved up towards Raglan Castle, for our second visit of the day. There is a slight linkage here, as the lead that was nicked off of the roof of the abbey was actually used in the later construction of the castle.
Anyway, I have always had a fondness for castles with moats, as I like to imagine them filled with crocodiles and large snakes etc. (OK, a lot of my images of castles come straight out of Hollywood!). On the moat part, Raglan did not disappoint me in the slightest, with a big moat around the great tower and my imagination is good enough to pretend that the piece of wood floating in the moat was in fact a partially submerged croc too.
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| Impressive approach to the castle, even if there were no crocs in the moat |
Raglan castle is actually what I would class a proper castle too, in that it has actually seen a battle fought at it, rather than some posh stately home done out in the style of a castle. Royalists (defending the castle) were eventually defeated by the Parliamentarians here and it was after this that the castle was destroyed.
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| The great courtyard - something they cobbled together..... |
We walked around the site and even managed, despite her fear of heights, to get Sarah to climb up to the top of the great tower to admire the view (which I think she did through her fingers). We were blessed with both the weather and the number of people visiting, the former being warm, and the latter being few, meaning my misanthropy was kept to a minimum.....
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| The great tower at Raglan Castle - it was - erm - great! |
