Castle and Cathedral

Hello dear ladies!

Thank you for the wonderful response to my last post - recipes to follow in a couple of days! I now have 200 followers!!! Thank you so much to my followers...I really do appreciate having you here.

We had a fabulous day out today in Lincoln. En route to a visit to the in-laws we stopped at Lincoln Castle. I had never been there before and was looking forward to seeing some history. I was amazed at how in tact this castle is.

We walked along the castle wall and then down into the grounds. There are even dungeons! Very nasty and dark down there. I was thinking about all those poor souls chained to the walls over the years, in the dark and with rats scuttling about (for a dungeon isn't complete without rats). And there was the inevitable graffiti from a thousand school trips carved into the stone.

This is what happens to naughty boys!

A game that the Mr and I used to play before Little S joined us was to see who could find the most mason marks - those intriguing little signatures of the mason who worked on the building. The boy is old enough to join in now and we had fun trying to find the marks.

He looks familiar!

The very steep climb up one of the towers

The view from the top

A very corpulant George III

One of the very grand entrances

In a building in the castle grounds we saw one of only four remaining Magna Carta documents written in the most beautiful Latin script on vellum. Incredible that any of them survived at all! Even though I come from a part of the country that is full of ancient buildings and actually live in a very old village (and house), I am still awed by the age of such documents (800 years) and always try to imagine the hand that wrote them.

After tea and plum loaf with cheese (MUST find a recipe for plum loaf!) we wandered out into the old town to the cathedral directly opposite.

 

We couldn't go in because the Bishop was there so we walked around it. It is a huge place, high Gothic and very grand. There seemed to be gratuitous use of buttresses but I don't mind that - I'm quite partial to them. I also love gargoyles and there were plenty to see here.

All in all it was a marvellous trip back in time, to an age of cruelty and brutality but also of great beauty as witness by these amazing pillar carvings.

Have a great Sunday! xxx