Following up from yesterday's posts about the teeny tiny amphitheatre in the Castle moat and the comments they got:
This is the view from the main doors of City Hall, over the War Memorial and Market and up the hill to Castle Blancheflower, which has dominated the city for nigh on a thousand years. The teeny tiny amphitheatre is at the bottom of the moat on the opposite side.
Built in 1068 and never conquered, this view looking up the bailey from the moat gives some impression of its impregnability.
Of course the main reason it was never conquered is that all of our major rebellions and revolutions started here in East Anglia and went off and attacked other places, smashing their castles instead. We're still a bolshie bunch of buggers … blame Boudicca.
For trivia freaks, the battlements are the very same that Monty Python used to fling its suicide bagpipers from (a lot of Python was shot in and around the city; Elm Hill deputised for mediæval London and Sartres' Paris, John Cleese's desk for the "And now for something completely different" in all but the first series was positioned just under the Castle at the top of the slope in this picture … you can see the old Bell Hotel behind him in the shows; the Hermanas holiday camp down the road at Winterton became everything from jungles to deserts to African villages … the list goes on. I suppose we were cheaper than filming in London).
This is my favourite shot of the castle. Spring sees the bailey a solid mass of yellow daffodils and they're followed by this scruffier, daisy-bespattered look that somehow seems in keeping with the long history of the place. Plus of course, the white flowers go well with the Castle's name.
And this is the view from the stage of the teeny tiny amphitheatre in the moat. The beautiful stone that gave the Castle its name of Blancheflower was shipped over from Caen in Normandy by William the Conqueror and both the Castle and Cathedral are built from it. As you can see, it scrubs up a treat (the Castle's nice and easy to clean but the Cathedral was recently wreathed in scaffolding for four years for restoration and buffing up).
Here's the Norman front door (it's not the front door any more and is usually out of bounds to the public, hence its unrestored state).
The Castle now houses the Tate In The East art gallery as well as a superb series of galleries showcasing the Norwich School of Painters and one of the finest collections of English painting anywhere, as well as a huge and fabulous museum (and a pretty decent café).
The main Castle Keep itself is left open for exhibitions. It's an awesome space; the stones around the archery slits are scratched with 900 year old graffiti.
The Keep used to house the Ancient Egypt section of the museum, but the mummies have now been given a cosier home and this Burne-Jones tapestry is just about the only permanent exhibit in there now. They change everything else round every time I visit.
Forgive the hurried Photoshop stitching; I just wanted to give some kind of impression of the interior space. Some of the soot-blackened walls have been left uncleaned to give a more authentic feel.
I love the Castle. You can go up on the battlements and down into the dungeons (with the inevitable mediæval torture museum … yay). It's a great place to spend rainy days.
Anyhoo … enough blathering faff from me; come on over and see it for yourselves.
18 comments:
Ah I remember those top views very well, standing there with you! :) Those daisies are gorgeous, a particular favourite of mine I discovered that the seeds I planted a long while ago have finally grown and I at last have some in the front garden! Pleasure!
You have made the Castle look great, what a good advert for coming to Norwich...so much better nowadays than when you and Phil were little, more stuffed animals and dead things then, now the children can interact with the many educational aspects, and the well tha can now me viewed without one falling in!, glad it has a good solid piece of glass over it...
Hi Lynn....
Oh fiddle I have made spelling errors, ah well something for you to laugh at...
Lynn, it was such a shame we didn't have a rainy day in Norwich while you were here so that we could explore the inside as well as the outside of the Castle. Maybe next time.
Most gardeners curse daisies in their lawns but I rather like them.
Mum, it's a really first class jewel in the city's crown these days, though you can still find fusty Victorian cabinets full of archæology if you know where to look and who to ask. I love that stuff.
I love this castle, too, and I've never seen it—apart from your photos. I'm afraid in the US, we would have torn this down because it's too expensive to maintain, and we must have shiny and new things!!
I'm just glad they've not allowed a McD in it like they did in the Louvre.
And yes, I can see that in the US this would have been flattened to make a parking lot or a mall. You guys certainly have a tradition of maintaining your cultural history with a wrecking ball.
Lately, we flatten things with wrecking balls to make "green space," and if you want to preserve something historical, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get historical status, and then another set of hoops to get funding. Sheesh.
Ah, crapitalism … If your heritage doesn't make a profit then bulldoze it and build a McDonalds.
It heartens me (at least with occasional good news from the Pasadena bloggers) to see the heritage and environmental action groups beginning to make some headway over commercial interests, Robyn.
Perhaps things are beginning to turn around. Better late than never.
No castles here, dammit, 'though I will visit a few mansions and send/post pics as I get them. The castle looks like a glorious place to have art exhibits. I'm conceited enough to think some of my own paintings would look just fine on those old stone walls - not the pretty boats, Dive, but bigger more swashy efforts. *Sigh.*
Here, if it looks like a castle you can bet it's one of those styrofoam covered with a thin coat of textured cement of some sort. All movie set, not meant to last construction.
The art galleries are not in the keep, Speedway, but in the much larger, sprawling bulk of buildings behind the castle which started life as mediæval barracks and a prison before being renovated. The central rotunda behind the keep houses the café and the galleries and museum spaces radiate out from there in a star shape. There's a big, two storey modern art space with regular exhibitions which would hold your paintings really well.
Oh. OK. But I love the keep. One of these days ...
They change things round so often in there that I suspect nobody would notice if you quietly hung a few pieces on the walls.
What an incredible castle! And to be featured in Monty Python makes it all the better. I don't care what anyone says but I love the white daisies. They sprout up in my garden because they are a native species. I let them grow.
Such an amazing castle! (I was going to use "incredible" but Neetzy beat me to it). I would definitely explore it if I were in Norfolk. Fun to learn the history of it, too, including its use in M Python Flying Circus.
It's positively modern looking, at least on the outside. I prefer the ancient, blackened inside, but I like it all.
Jeez, so much America bashing today.
Yay daisies, Neetzy. If only I could let them grow and still mow the lawn. I need an intelligent lawnmower that leaves flowers standing.
Ms.M, it's definitely worth exploring, though it will take a few days to see it all. The place just sprawls out in all sorts of unexpected directions.
Petrea, nice as it is to leave the grimy bits inside, the Castle and Cathedral would suffer serious damage were the corrosive black gunk from traffic fumes not cleaned off regularly. The cleaned Caen stone looks beautiful in sunlight, especially in the mornings and evenings when it glows with pink and orange, and of course, they were built to look that way.
Apologies for the America-bashing; it just slips out when I'm not looking.
Wonderful post - so many memories from knee-high to quite recently. Where have the mummies moved to? Shame, I really associate the castle with them. Bet the polar bear is still around?
The mummies are in one of the galleries off the rotunda. The last time I was there, the old stuffed animal exhibits were being hidden away. Fun as they were when we were kids the days of Victorian stuffed trophies are on the wane. There were still a few dotted about the place. I'll have to make another trip and dig around for them.
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