Shropshire 24 - Whittington Castle ./behind the facade/take a different route /get outside and notice beautiful things

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Whereever we move to we try to get out and find out about our immediate neighbourhood . That does not always take too long . Then we draw circles around the house . The first to cover around five miles from home . A short trip to see what is local . The circle gets bigger . Half an hour travel from home . When that is exhausted the circle widens to around one hour from home home . Once that has been covered we have the urge to move house and start again . After a year in our current home we still have places to visit on the doorstep. Places a touch further away and those just at the outer limit of daily travel . But we are getting bored . We try our best to get outside often . We do our best to notice beautiful things .

We were not a million miles from Whittington Castle . I remembered it from earlier visits . A facade that looked exactly like a castle should look but a disappointment behind with its house and cafe . Whittington Castle is around 15 minutes from Ellesmere on the road to Oswestry . We knew that there was parking on site for £2 . The money went directly to maintaining and improving the castle experience . There was also a cafe but it was doubtful we wanted another breakfast or even a lunch . The area still reminds us of its welshness . We passed through Welsh Frankton and wondered if the people living there thought themselves Welsh or English. They had a better NHS in England and better bus passes .

Arriving it was clear that there was activity going on with some building work being undertaken on one corner of the car park . There were a few cars parked up and I searched out the cafe to pay our fee . The cafe was relatively full too . I thought that the castle would have been helped if the owners the Trust had offered motorhome parking overnight . There was plenty of space both hard standing and grass . It was out of the way of the houses and would benefit the local pub and the castle too.

The first stop was outside the castle gates with its moat and ducks . The view across from the castle to the red brick church was lovely. I thought what a nice village this was to live in . Sions friend Woolly Mammoth had passed by this way some while back and visited the castle with Jo. Shame he said that we were not there on the same day .

The site is around 12 acres with much of it in the process of being rewilded . The moat once circled the castle . Now it only half circled the building . There were apparently swans Lady Beatrice and Sir Tom and their offspring Vera and Lynn but they were not to be seen. Perhaps they no longer lived on the moat . The castle was built on a prehistoric site. The home of prehistoric man and his round houses . The castle when it was erected by the Earl of Chester was one of chain of castles built on the English side of Offas Dyke . The Earl of Chester being one on the most powerful earls under Edward I.

A motte and bailey castle had been built with wooden pallisades and was destroyed being replaced by the stone gatehouse and barbican in or around 1223. The facade was lovely but behind it was very little remaining . A farmhouse had been built into its walls around 1808 and a cafe and giftshop tagged on. I wondered if something more in keeping built of stone might have looked better . Or perhaps something more modern and futuristic . The castle had been in a ruinous state since around 1750 but a walk further into the complex and over the wooden bridge took us to more towers and the footprint of what was the medieval castle . It felt quite small and perhaps was rather cosy.

Legends surround the castle of the Marian Chalice . Purported to be the Holy Grail brought to the castle .

We stood on the walls overlooking the village . I wouldnt mind the view from my front window of they gateway and the walls . In the distance an old churchyard which we never got to and the red brick church . It was time to head home .

It had been a grey old day which we did enjoy. A bit of fresh air . A touch of freedom. Time to forget about Covid . Time to start to scratch that itch of travel by working out where we can go and when we can leave this grey island for some much needed sunshine .

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