The castle at Aberystwyth

The Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth is somewhere I’ve had cause to visit a few times recently. As well as a university and a funicular railway (which goes up the cliffs to the north of the town; there’s a park and a camera obscura at the top), Aber (as it’s known locally) has its own castle which dates back to the late thirteenth century.

It’s a ruin now, but unlike a lot of castles it has the advantage of being free to access at any time of day. It dates back to reign of Edward I as part of his campaign to conquer Wales; like the better-known castles to the north at Caernarvon and Harlech, it was the work of one James of Saint George, one of the greatest castle-builders ever to have lived (he’s also known as Jacques de Saint-Georges d’Esperanche; until the mid-twentieth century, historians had assumed that James et Jacques were different men from the same place – a village in south-eastern France – who both happened to be castle-builders, but it’s now accepted that they were the same person).

In the early 1400s, the famous Welsh rebel leader Owain Glyndwr (whose name is sometimes anglicised as Owen Glendower) captured Aberystwyth Castle and made it his headquarters, which probably explains why this castle was the first to have cannons fired against it when Henry IV attacked it in 1408. Over two centuries later, the castle was briefly a Royal Mint during the reign of Charles I but, like many a British castle, it was slighted (rendered unusable as a military installation) on the orders of Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, going to the seaside was becoming popular with those who could afford to do so; the previous fashion had been for spa towns like Bath, Cheltenham and Royal Tunbridge Wells, but after it became known that George III preferred sea-bathing the trend shifted towards seaside towns. This was also a time when, thanks to various wars with France, rich Britons who would previously have travelled to Europe for the Grand Tour looked to domestic destinations instead. Aberystwyth proclaimed itself to be the ‘Brighton of Wales’, and the castle became a popular picturesque ruin with those who visited the town. The late eighteenth century was very much the age of the picturesque, thanks mainly to the Rev. William Gilpin and his 1770 trip along the Wye; he defined ‘picturesque’ as ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’, and this had a great impact not just on late eighteenth century tourism but on the Romantic movement that was to follow.

A picturesque ruin is very much what Aberystwyth Castle is today. I rather like walking over the wooden bridge from the war memorial to the old D-shaped tower with the gateway in it, and then either passing through or around it (there being not much left by way of walls) and then wandering among the ruins. I clamber up onto some parts as, quite a few other people do. You can, if you’re confident, make it up to the circular tower on the northern side; the views from there are pretty good. I’ve even spotted students having an evening barbecue up there! To the east, the ruins of another tower with plenty of jutting-out bricks could present more of a challenge; perhaps the casual would-be climber-of-ruins should give this one a miss.

Amid the ruins, there’s something you don’t see in many, or even in any other, castles – a stone circle. A puzzle, but not for long (there are plenty of information boards around, even a series of mosaics about the castle’s history down by the road that skirts around it down on the seaward side). It isn’t anywhere near as old as the castle, and it wasn’t added to make the place more picturesque back in the eighteenth century. The stones were in fact put there in 1916, to celebrate the Eisteddfod (Welsh literature and music festival) that took place in Aber in that year – the symbolism is that there are 13 stones, one for each of the 13 historic counties of Wales.

Roasted salt and paprika almonds

A quick one, and a good one. How to make plain almonds better if you’ve got people coming round (or even if you haven’t)? Roast them with some salt and paprika of course! Dad put us onto this one, and it could be more simple.

Start with 300g of plain almonds. Roast them in the oven at 180°C for fifteen minutes. When done, put in a bowl and stir in a knob of butter and a teaspoon each of sea-salt (flaky is best) and smoked paprika. Make sure all the nuts are coated, then stick them back in the oven for a couple of minutes to dry the coating.

Then leave them to cool, and when they are, serve. Apparently they can be stored in an air-tight container for up to three days. I say ‘apparently’ because in my experience they’ve never lasted for that long!

(Source: BBC Good Food website)

A first-time sighting at the Minack

Wherever I go, I do try to keep an eye out for the birds. You never know what you might see. A case in point was on Dartmoor a few days ago, when a Hobby swooped across the road about twenty yards in front of me. When did I last see a Hobby? Years ago. Incidentally, the Hobby is just about the only bird whose Latin name I know off by heart – falco subbuteo, and yes that has a lot to do with the old table football game.

A couple of days later, I was down at one of my favourite West Country locations, the Minack Theatre.

I reckoned I knew what to expect, bird-wise. Gulls overhead. Jackdaws on the cliffs. Gannets diving out at sea. But then, looking out to sea from the stage, I saw something flying out from the cliff below that I hadn’t bargained for. Black, but a glossier black than you get on a Jackdaw. A little bit bigger than a Jackdaw, but more slender-looking. Red, curved beak. Even though I’d never actually seen one before, I knew at once what it was, from a lifetime of glancing at pictures of it in bird books when flicking through the pages about the crow family. A Chough.

The Chough (it’s pronounced ‘chuff’) is the county bird of Cornwall and has been a Cornish icon for centuries. Legend even has it that King Arthur’s soul entered the body of a Chough after he died (which led to the belief that it’s considered unlucky to kill one), while over in Kent the bird has long been associated with Thomas Becket to the point where three of them can be seen on the Canterbury coat-of-arms. Back in Cornwall, due to loss of habitat they were extinct in the county by the early Seventies. Then in 2001, they were seen again – a few of them had flown over from Ireland and settled on the Lizard Peninsular. Since then, numbers have steadily grown to the point where there were twelve breeding pairs last year. So things are looking up for the Cornish Choughs.

As for my lone sighting, It was gone in a matter of seconds so I didn’t even have time to grab my binoculars, let alone take a photo. Although I kept an eye out at the place where I’d seen it for some time afterwards, this would be one appearance at the Minack with no repeat performance. Maybe next time. For now, I’m very happy to report another ‘lifer’. And I will, of course, continue to keep an eye out for the birds.

A visit to a ruined manor house in the Cotswolds

In the Cotswolds, the ruins of a medieval manor house can be found by the banks of the Windrush, a tributary of the Thames. Minster Lovell Hall is located behind St Kenhelm’s church in the Oxfordshire village of Minster Lovell (located between Burford and Witney) and it’s a pleasant place to visit and wander among the ruins if the weather’s nice. The place was built in or around 1440 and was used as a manor house until the mid-eighteenth century, after which is was partly dismantled and abandoned. The ruins are listed and administered by English Heritage, but there’s no charge to visit.

The original owners, after whom the hall and the village are named, were the Lovell family. The most interesting member of this noble family is the last of them, Francis Lovell, the ninth Baron Lovell who lived at the time of the Wars of the Roses. He was a friend of Richard, Duke of Gloucester – to whom he was also linked by marriage, their respective wives being cousins. Richard had him knighted in 1481, and when he seized power and became King Richard III two years later he upgraded the Lovell peerage; it was as the first Viscount Lovell that Francis held the Sword of State at his friend’s coronation. Lovell’s closeness to the King resulted in him being mentioned in a famous piece of doggerel which was posted on the door of St Paul’s Cathedral by a Lancastrian supporter in 1484:

“The Catte, the Ratte and Lovell our dogge rulyth all Englande under a hogge.”

To explain: the ‘hogge’ refers to Richard himself, his personal badge being a white boar. Lovell is of course ‘Lovell our dogge’, his coat-of-arms having included a silver wolf. The ‘catte’ and the ‘ratte’ were two of Richard III’s other principal supporters, Sir William Catesby and Sir Robert Ratcliffe.

Naturally, the fates of the King’s main followers were intertwined with his own. Richard III, as is well known, was killed at the battle of Bosworth Field in Leicestershire on 22^nd August 1485 – the last King of England to die in battle; what happened to his body afterwards would remain a mystery until 2012, when his remains were found underneath a Leicester car park. Ratcliffe died on the battlefield with his king, while Catesby survived, only to be captured and subsequent executed by the victorious Lancastrians (a notable descendant of his was Robert Catesby, one of the leaders of the Gunpowder Plot).

Lovell also fought at Bosworth, following which he was able to evade capture. He went on to become a leading figure in the Yorkist revolts that plagued the early part of Henry VII’s reign. He’s reckoned to have been behind an attempt to have Henry murdered at York in 1486, and a year later he played a leading role in the attempt to put the pretender Lambert Simnel on the throne – an attempt that came to an end at the battle of Stoke Field in June of that year. Lovell survived that battle too, but after that he disappears from the pages of history.

Some said that he lived in hiding for many years afterwards – and it is at this point that the history of Minster Lovell Hall crosses into legend. In 1708, the skeleton of a man was found in a secret chamber at Minster Lovell Hall, and it was assumed that that was the skeleton of Francis himself – who, so the story goes, hid out at his ancestral home with only one faithful servant who knew that he was there; the plan was that Lovell would be kept under lock and key with the servant bringing him food. Unfortunately for him, the servant died without letting slip about his master and so Lovell, locked in and with no-one left to bring him food, starved to death. It’s an interesting tale but it does seem unlikely, as Francis Lovell’s estates were forfeit after Bosworth, with the hall being given to Henry VII’s uncle, Jasper Tudor. Hardly somewhere for a Yorkist fugitive to go into hiding.

I was also interested in the place because the hall also has a literary association, playing a key role in John Buchan’s 1931 historical adventure The Blanket of the Dark which is set in the Cotswolds during the reign of Henry VII’s son, Henry VIII. This story, not one of Buchan’s better-known works but still highly readable if you like historical fiction and can get hold of a second-hand copy (I got an old Penguin one, original retail price 2s 6d), concerns a young Oxford scholar by the name of Peter Pentecost who is told that he is in fact the son of the Duke of Buckingham (Edward Stafford, who in real life was executed for treason in 1521). Buchan was always a master of describing the countryside in which his stories were set, and with The Blanket of the Dark he showed that he was as at home in rural Oxfordshire (for many years he lived in Elsfield, about three miles north of Oxford; his ashes are buried in the churchyard there) as he was in his native Scottish Lowlands. The ordinary people who appear in the novel – beggars, small farmers, foresters and suchlike – are treated with a high degree of empathy and, as is the case with Katrine in Witch Wood, there’s an intriguing but ultimately elusive love interest (as they usually are in Buchan’s novels; in this case, she’s called Sabine and one contemporary of Buchan’s was moved to comment that the one quibble he had with The Blanket of the Dark was that Buchan didn’t spice things up a bit with Peter and Sabine, but one can hardly have expected the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister to have done that).

Like many a fictional character before and since, Peter gets caught up in events that he cannot hope to control; at the time of the Pilgrimage of Grace, he becomes the subject of an ill-fated plot to put him on the throne which climaxes when king and pretender meet face-to-face at an abandoned Minster Lovell Hall after the latter has rescued the former from an over-flowing Windrush. Henry is portrayed in less-than-flattering fashion, with Buchan adding some compelling descriptions of him: “the face was vast and red as a new ham, a sheer mountain of a face ... this vast being had the greatness of some elemental force ... power of Mammon, power of Antichrist, power of the Devil, maybe, but someone born to work mightily in the world.” The Blanket of the Dark is a really good, perhaps even great, work of fiction that, although Henry VIII does make an appearance, focuses more on the ordinary people of rural England (the Cotswolds, specifically) than on high intrigue even though there is something of that; this is at heart a story of what Buchan succinctly called “a world of which there has never been a chronicle; the heaths and forests of old England”, and it’s the better for it.