• the home of the Russell family (coal barons) in the late 18th and 19th centuries
• barracks during WWII (the mark of which is an ugly appended bathroom block on one side of the building - you would have thought that a 200 room castle would have been sufficient for the army needs)
• a Pyrex laboratory, where they used the larger rooms as laboratories - maybe this explains the extent of gray 1950s linoleum on the floors
• home to a private family since the 1970s... some of the basement rooms serve as a book repository for boxes of books from the old family publishing business
• apartments for random folks, including my host Richy Brown in the geology department at Durham University... which is how I ended up there.
I was in Durham as the external examiner for a PhD thesis. Durham is 4 1/2 hours by train from Bristol, a train journey that heads north to Birmingham and then diagonals northeast across the rolling green midlands, and through the northern cities of Leeds and York before reaching the small cathedral town of Durham. I arrived in the dark and rain; it was nice to be met by Richy at the station and taken to dinner before we drove five miles to Brancepeth Castle. The castle forms the locus of a small town with a line of neat brick houses but no amenities... not even the near-ubiquitous country pub. After dropping my things in Richy’s apartment, he took me on the “ghost tour” of the nether regions of the castle, armed with an LED flashlight. The first stop was at the vampire kit on the wall (break glass in case of emergency to reach garlic or the cross, whichever best serves your purpose!). And then
through the musty basement rooms piled with boxes of books, floored with rubble and apparently sometimes home to bats. The basement tour was followed by a brief tour of some of the grand and partly renovated rooms of the main floor en route to my home for the night. My room lay along a gray linoleum hall; it was large and sparsely furnished with very tall ceilings, lovely tall wood-framed windows and a bed warmed by an electric blanket and cozy blue and white checked comforter (but I didn't think to take a picture).The next day I awoke in the dark to clear skies and Venus twinkling through the grand windows. After a shower in the (modernized) WWII bathroom block I found my way through the maze of ground floor rooms and up the stairs to Richy’s apartment for breakfast. As the sun gradually came up (Durham is noticeably farther north than Bristol), I requested a daylight tour of the interior, followed by the exterior, of the castle before we headed in to the University...
Chad’s visit to England
Working backwards... during the second week of Octobern, nephew Chad visited, en route home to California from the country of Georgia, where he had just spent six weeks doing field work. He arrived in London on a Sunday morning, have flown overnight from Tbilisi. I met him in Paddington station in London (near the bronze statue of Paddington bear). Although clearly tired, Chad managed to stay awake all day, enjoying the luxury of being in a country where he not only understood the language but also recognized so many familiar places and names.
We wandered along the south bank of the Thames (and laughed at a little Mexican restaurant called Wahaca - clearly they had given up with the Mexican spelling!), crossed the Jubilee bridge near the London Eye and admired Westminster and Big Ben en route to Regent Street, where we met Alison and Mark for lunch at Nopi restaurant - run by the chef Yotam Ottolenghi, the author of our favorite cookbooks (Chad and Emma both got Ottolenghi cookbooks for their birthdays). Then a stroll back to the south bank and time for Chad to take a shower before we all re-convened at the Globe Theater for a production of Macbeth (known here as “The Scottish Play”). We ended the evening with a beer at the George, an old coaching tavern that is now run by the National Trust.
Chad and I spent Monday in London.. more walking exploration and then a boat trip down the Thames to Greenwich. We started to walk to the Observatory, but couldn’t resist visiting the renovated Cutty Sark on the way. The allure of boats. But we did learn some good trivia about the boat, the best of which is the origin of its name. Apparently from a Robert Burns poem, “cutty sark” is a Scottish term for women’s undergarments! Who would have guessed? After lunch we climbed the hill to the Greenwich observatory. On a gray Monday morning in February, the observatory was pleasantly quiet. Not even a line for a 0˚ meridian photograph! And plenty of time to admire the view, and the stark contrast of new and old that pervades London (well, everywhere I guess, but somehow the contrast is much more dramatic in London than elsewhere).
The other day of note during Chad’s visit (well, maybe I should say the other day of photographs) was our trip to Stonehenge. We embarked upon the trip at Susie’s recommendation, which included walking to Stonehenge from the small town of Amesbury, about 3 miles east of the site. The area around Stonehenge is now managed by the National Trust, which has developed a trail system that includes several of the archaeological sites of the region. The trail follows the contours of the downs, the flint-rich chalk formation that yields material for tools and stone walls in addition to imparting the charcteristic rolling hills. We were surprised to find that Stonehenge itself lies only on a local high, but below the surrounding hills, so that some of the first views of the stone monument are from above. Another surprising feature was the sheer number of manmade landscape features - mostly barrows (we only half-joked about barrow-wights in memory of Tolkein).
But Stonehenge itself really is impressive, despite the highway that runs just below it, the ubiquitous busloads of tourists, and the almost cliched first view of the stone circle. We made one circuit with the audio tour and cameras, and then made another circuit just to soak up the sense of place.
After a picnic lunch near the parking lot (and surrounded by starlings, which Chad and I decided were actually much more spectacular birds that the North American pests... perhaps it is just that they thrive in their home environment) we continued on the barrow trail, and then back along parts of “the avenue”, the original uphill entrance to the site. By then the clear skies of the morning had given way to a ceiling of white fluffy clouds, and the air had the crispness of fall (or autumn, to use the British phrase... I am always teased when I use the term "fall").
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