Warwick Castle

On Tuesday we took a train from London to Warwick, a tiny Tudor town in Shropshire, in order to see Warwick Castle, one of the best, most famous castles in England.

I did not want to get up that morning because our room in London was so incredibly cold. The heat didn’t work, and the blanket was extremely thin and short. There was no water pressure, and the shower was just a trickle–alternately scalding and freezing. I didn’t want to take a shower that morning, but I did it anyway, relying on sheer force of will to see me through. It was so cold with the cold water trickling down my back. I was shivering and shaking and moaning.

When I came out of the bathroom, I said to Rob, “Could you hear me crying in there?”

“No,” Rob said, “but I could hear you saying, ‘Oh, why? Why?'” He did a very skillful impression of me being melodramatic.

Luckily, the train ride to Warwick was quite warm and relaxing. The train was so quiet, nearly empty, and we made our way quietly into the countryside, through brilliant green pastures dotted with sheep and bordered by hedgerows and little sparkling creeks.

When the conductor came to punch my ticket, I couldn’t find it–because I’m a stupid American who’s basically never ridden a train before. (More seasoned travelers would have kept their tickets handy.) Finally, after a flustered search, I did find it, and I apologized for the delay. “That’s all right,” the young conductor said merrily. “No worries. Cheers!” And he went on his way.

We arrived in Warwick at about 10:00 and walked to Warwick Castle. It was so cold we were pretty much the only people there. We had the run of the place. We really got our money’s worth, too, because we spent the entire day exploring the drafty castle and its lovely, frigid grounds.

I don’t know how to describe it. It was a castle, a real castle. This wasn’t Disney World. Everything was real and incredibly old. The original motte-and-bailey castle (a motte is an earthen mound and a bailey is a walled courtyard) was built in 1068 by William the Conquerer. About 100 years later, the motte-and-bailey was replaced with a stone castle. In 1604 the castle was converted into a country house, and various earls of Warwick and other rich people lived there for the next 350 years.

I’ll try to give you a little taste of what we saw: stone towers, an empty moat, a dungeon containing antique torture devices, drawbridges, parapets, dark cedars full of ravens, rhododendron thickets, a falconer doing bird shows, the Avon River (very small and gentle), gliding swans, a thatch-roofed boathouse, grand old oaks with ruffled golden leaves. Peacocks strolled the grounds. Jousting demonstrations were held. We admired a formal rose garden that was sound asleep and almost entirely gray except for its pure green pond.

We toured the Great Hall, which was full of suits of armor and which contained the biggest fireplace I’ve ever seen. We read that in the beginning, in medieval times, the floor of the Great Hall would have been just soil and hay, and there would have been animal skins strewn about with lots of people sleeping on them.

It was so nice to be inside the slightly warm castle, away from the cutting wind, but I must confess I was hesitant to go inside at all because of my shy person’s fear of costumed interpreters/reenactors. You see, interpreters were everywhere, playacting among the various posed waxed figures (Warwick Castle is now run by the Madame Tussauds people). So most of the day I was nervous and kind of hiding, afraid I’d be swept up into some sort of theatrical nonsense and I wouldn’t know what to do or say. Oh, you should have witnessed my consternation when one of the interpreters, dressed as a Victorian lady, asked Rob and me to introduce ourselves to a wax gentleman standing by the fireplace. We had already been forced to tell the maid who we were and where we were from, and she had announced our arrival to the lady of the house. I was hiding behind Rob, giggling nervously and looking for a fire exit.

Anyway, this explains why most of the day we were outside, roaming the gardens in the whipping wind or standing at the top of a tower in the whipping wind. I was so cold. My nose kept dripping . . . right onto the ground.