Things really start to open for the season here after Easter, and lucky for us Easter was very early this year. As a result, we rented a car over two weekends and spent several days visiting nearby historic sites within an hour's drive (give or take) from B'ham. Our first visit was to Tamworth Castle in (yep, you guessed it) Tamworth.. I'm sure something important has happened here, and if Mark was here--he could tell you what it is..but you're stuck with me so all I have are pictures:
There's the castle, kind of in the middle of the town. Tamworth is a nice little town and the kids had a great time playing in their town playground after visiting the castle. The castle had one of the better interpretive exhibits we had seen so far. It was very much geared for children and one of the nicer hands-on exhibits they provided was a dress-up room. Here are Matt and Mallory in their medieval outfits:
Next stop was Kenilworth Castle. This has a neat history. It started out as a Norman Keep, eventually transformed into one of the grandest palace/castle around central England during the Elizabethan period. Sadly it was destroyed during their civil war, so is in ruins today. The scale of the place is amazing. While we here there, they were putting on a medieval minstrel show and a falconry display with a peregrine falcon (there's a picture of him below) and a really BIG owl--they called him an eagle owl, but he looked like a great horned owl.
Here's a great picture of the castle:
And here's the falcon:
In the midst of these weekends tooling around the area, we found a fantastic country pub called "The Plough" (isn't that just perfect??). It was located in the countryside outside of Lichfield, along the Birmingham and Coventry Canal. Anyway we ended up eating there three times and country pubs rank right up there with one of the things we will miss the most. The atmosphere is like nothing in the States and the food is to die for. Unfortunately, I don't have any digital images of it.
Mark and I visited Ragley Hall by ourselves on a Friday while the kids were in school. This is a 17th century manor house that has been owned by the same family (Marchioness of Hertford). The house is west of Stratford-on-Avon and about 90 minutes from B'ham. The house doesn't have much in the way of historical significance or history, but the furnishings, rooms, and gardens were delightful. They had the most delightful 2-story mural on the south staircase hall that was painted by an American painter. It took him 15 years to finish it, but it is spectacular.
Mark and I had a really nice lunch there, too, on the patio overlooking the rose garden.
Next stop was Sudley Castle in the Cotswolds. This is a privately-owned castle by Lord and Lady Ashcombe (no English Heritage discount here). The castle was started in the tenth century and was the home and burial place, in St. Mary's chapel, of Queen Katherine Parr who was Henry VIII's last wife. Lucky her, she outlived him. The castle was destroyed during the civil war. Part of the castle was rebuilt and a manor house was added in the early nineteenth century. So, some of it is in ruins, most is rebuilt, but the best thing are the award-winning gardens.
Here are a few pics of the castle and chapel:
Here are some pictures of the gardens. One was a Tithe Barn (in ruins) and a "secret garden" the kids loved:
Berkeley Castle and Butterfly farm--Berkeley castle has been in the Berkeley family for 850 years. These are the same "Berkeley" that University of California at Berkeley is named after. Berkeley's most dramatic story was the imprisonment and eventual murder of King Edward II (and how many of us remember who this is??). Mark wants to tell you how he died: He was murdered "with a hoote brooche put thro the secrete place posteriale". We'll leave the rest to your imagination!!! Frankly, Faith was pretty bored of castles by this time, although there were a lot of interesting relics and antiques from Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth (the first one, although QEII is getting to be an antique in her own right). Here are some pictures:
We bought the kids some wooden swords at the gift shop (do you think they will go through security on the flight back to the States??). Anyway, after one quick lesson from their mother, they were dueling like pros:
Adjacent to the castle was the Berkeley Tropical Butterfly House. This place was amazing. It was basically a huge greenhouse with tropical plants, a pond with fountain and tons of butterflies in their natural habitat. The humidity was unbelievable, but I think we managed to take a picture of just about every variety that was flying around. Here a couple of our best ones. The one on the left is a swallowtail and the one on the right is a tailed jay:
The last thing is, frankly, our favorite lucky find--the Cotswold Falconry Centre. This place was amazing. This guy started this center about 15 years ago. He maintains this huge aviary of predatory-type birds like eagles, owls, buzzards (we call them hawks), falcons and kites. He puts on an hour "show" about every 90 minutes where he brings out different species and shows us what they do. During our show, he first brought out a hawk (similar to our redtails) and had her flying around and come to a lure. The best was the two little scop owls (Zippy and Bongo). We have this show on video tape, and it is hilarious. Anyway, here are some images of the birds in the center:
These were two of our favorites:
We hope you enjoyed this. It will be our last webpage before we get home. Sorry it was sooo big. Thanks for all your comments while we've been here. See you all very soon.