A Castle full of Stuff
Jul. 30th, 2008 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustNorthumberland is border country, and a fine place for castles, from Lord Armstrong's massive reconstruction at Bamburgh to the most vestigially fortified farm - not to mention the small but perfectly formed castle on Lindisfarne itself. While we were staying on the island, we took the opportunity to visit Chillingham Castle. We could have gone to see the rather more famous Chillingham Wild Herd, but the tides kept us on Lindisfarne until midday, so we had to choose one or the other, the weather was unsettled and the castle won.
How do I start to describe it? It's a genuine medieval castle, built in the twelfth century, used by Edward I as the base from which to attack William Wallace at the end of the thirteenth, with a license to crenellate from Edward III (the license itself is one of the many things on show in the castle). From the drive, the walls rear up sheer as a cliff face, every inch the feudal stronghold - except, isn't that weathervane in the shape of a bat? You pay your admission charge in the gatehouse, which is full to bursting with odds and ends: stuffed animals, a notice denying liability for anything at all ("we can't afford insurance"), a collection of walking sticks, some with handles elaborately carved , others with handles of horn...
Beyond this room are steps down into the courtyard, but if instead you go straight ahead you find yourself in a larger room, in which... Well, straight ahead of you there is a doorway into a dark space. To the left of it is a sofa, above which a pair of snow shoes, crossed, hang on the wall, and above them in turn a sled is suspended from the ceiling. Between the snow shoes and the door, a hand-lettered sign says "DUNGEON" with an arrow pointing down into the darkness. On the left hand wall, a curious harness in black fur and luminous pink straps is decorated with a badge commemorating the visit to Alaska of Pope John Paul II in 1981 (a notice beneath explains that this is not Miss Frou-Frou's favourite kinky kit but the harness of a Siberian husky dog actually driven by his Holiness when he arrived in Alaska in a sledge much like the one above). Photographs and documents describing the part played by Arthur Wakefield (great-uncle of Sir Humphry Wakefield, the present owner of the castle), provides some sort of thematic link between these items, and anyone might have a carved oak dresser and some antique pottery...
This is collecting on a grand scale; I was going to compare it to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, which houses Electra Havemeyer Webb's collection of Impressionist paintings, folk art, quilts and textiles - but also of cigar store Indians, weathervanes, houses, barns, a meeting house, a one-room schoolhouse, a covered bridge, and the 220-foot steamboat Ticonderoga. Sir Humphrey Wakefield's collection demonstrates what can be amassed by a collector with the same eclectic acquisitiveness, all of whose actual money is being poured into the restoration and maintenance of a medieval castle.
So, in the courtyard, a dragon lurks under a window; in the Great Hall (where Sir Humphrey declined the offer of a grant to restore the Victorian plasterwork) rough masonry walls frame an oval table set for a banquet with fine glass and china, watched from the dais by an armoured figure on horseback. At a turn in the stairs, a pile of fleeces waits by a spinning wheel. In another state room, suddenly the tone is all delicate workmanship, fine cabinets display porcelain, and inlaid mandolins, upstaged by an impossible elaborate polychrome plaster ceiling. And as if all this were not sufficiently miscellaneous, one large room is actually called the Museum, and here mechanisms and magazines and locks and interesting odds and ends are stacked from floor to ceiling. And of course there's a chapel, and a minstrel's gallery (from which you can admire the antlers of the biggest giant Elk in the world, presiding over the tea rooms.
Not to mention the gardens, formal and informal, where we could have lingered for longer than we did, had it not started to rain in earnest.
How do I start to describe it? It's a genuine medieval castle, built in the twelfth century, used by Edward I as the base from which to attack William Wallace at the end of the thirteenth, with a license to crenellate from Edward III (the license itself is one of the many things on show in the castle). From the drive, the walls rear up sheer as a cliff face, every inch the feudal stronghold - except, isn't that weathervane in the shape of a bat? You pay your admission charge in the gatehouse, which is full to bursting with odds and ends: stuffed animals, a notice denying liability for anything at all ("we can't afford insurance"), a collection of walking sticks, some with handles elaborately carved , others with handles of horn...
Beyond this room are steps down into the courtyard, but if instead you go straight ahead you find yourself in a larger room, in which... Well, straight ahead of you there is a doorway into a dark space. To the left of it is a sofa, above which a pair of snow shoes, crossed, hang on the wall, and above them in turn a sled is suspended from the ceiling. Between the snow shoes and the door, a hand-lettered sign says "DUNGEON" with an arrow pointing down into the darkness. On the left hand wall, a curious harness in black fur and luminous pink straps is decorated with a badge commemorating the visit to Alaska of Pope John Paul II in 1981 (a notice beneath explains that this is not Miss Frou-Frou's favourite kinky kit but the harness of a Siberian husky dog actually driven by his Holiness when he arrived in Alaska in a sledge much like the one above). Photographs and documents describing the part played by Arthur Wakefield (great-uncle of Sir Humphry Wakefield, the present owner of the castle), provides some sort of thematic link between these items, and anyone might have a carved oak dresser and some antique pottery...This is collecting on a grand scale; I was going to compare it to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, which houses Electra Havemeyer Webb's collection of Impressionist paintings, folk art, quilts and textiles - but also of cigar store Indians, weathervanes, houses, barns, a meeting house, a one-room schoolhouse, a covered bridge, and the 220-foot steamboat Ticonderoga. Sir Humphrey Wakefield's collection demonstrates what can be amassed by a collector with the same eclectic acquisitiveness, all of whose actual money is being poured into the restoration and maintenance of a medieval castle.
So, in the courtyard, a dragon lurks under a window; in the Great Hall (where Sir Humphrey declined the offer of a grant to restore the Victorian plasterwork) rough masonry walls frame an oval table set for a banquet with fine glass and china, watched from the dais by an armoured figure on horseback. At a turn in the stairs, a pile of fleeces waits by a spinning wheel. In another state room, suddenly the tone is all delicate workmanship, fine cabinets display porcelain, and inlaid mandolins, upstaged by an impossible elaborate polychrome plaster ceiling. And as if all this were not sufficiently miscellaneous, one large room is actually called the Museum, and here mechanisms and magazines and locks and interesting odds and ends are stacked from floor to ceiling. And of course there's a chapel, and a minstrel's gallery (from which you can admire the antlers of the biggest giant Elk in the world, presiding over the tea rooms.
Not to mention the gardens, formal and informal, where we could have lingered for longer than we did, had it not started to rain in earnest.
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Date: 2008-08-07 12:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-07 09:30 am (UTC)