Wardour Castle

After a fantastic breakfast of potatoes, bacon and French toast unlike any French toast I'd ever had (with herbs grilled in the egg instead of drenched in syrup), we had planned to walk over to Polly's for tea but as we were walking out the door, Matt suggested we go for a drive instead. 

We ended up in Shaftesbury, about a half hour or so away from Salisbury, where we wandered a little bit before walking down to a little cafe called the Salt Cellar.  Unfortunately, although the view is stunning from their front door...

...the service was terrible.  We sat at a table for about ten minutes as the waitstaff blatantly looked the other way when Matt tried to catch their eye.  So we got up and left.  Tthe brownies at the next cafe were worth the wait, though.

On the way home we stopped off at Wardour Castle.  It's set so far off the main road you begin to wonder, more than once, as you feel sick from all the twisty roads, if you've taken a wrong turn or if there even really is a castle.  There is, though, and it was so stunning I took over a hundred photos!  Thankfully, I will only subject you to a tiny handful.  :)   

Due to the sun, I couldn't get a very good photo of the front of the castle -

 
but the back was really the photo worthy side anyway.

 

Its one thing to wander around the ruins of a castle but they have actually repaired the floors so you can explore all four floors and really imagine what it would have felt like to walk up the winding staircases, dressed in the gowns of the 14th century.

Perhaps you might even pause on your way to the hall for dinner to peer out the window at the changing leaves of fall....

If it were four hundred years later, though, I guess you might have paused to carve your name in the stone while your parents weren't looking.

 

Graffiti from the 1800s!

A little Wardour Castle point of Alan Rickman interest: I didn't know this until Matt
pointed it out (obviously, since I didn't even know the castle existed until we passed the sign and he asked if I'd like to check it out) but Wardour was used as Robin Hood's ancestral home in
Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Anyway, if you come to visit me from the states, we'll  most definitely take you to see this castle in person.  It was really amazing.

When we got home we had just enough time to get snarf a bit of frozen pizza and change before heading out to Southampton with Matt's mum to see The Sound of Music.  Really fantastic.  I've been battling a pretty terrible case of homesickness, though, for about the past twenty four hours (since we had a nice, long Skype chat with my parents) so, oddly, I was in near tears for almost all of the performance.  I have no idea why - it's not like Austria reminds me of Ohio or anything and, even though Mom and I have watched lots of musicals together, The Sound of Music was never one of them.  Anyway, all of that homesickness stuff is a post for another day - or perhaps not a post at all. 

I need some cathartic knitting, I think.  I haven't really sat down to knit in about a week so I think I'll channel my Ginny Finished her FLS jealousy in to a couple hours of knitting of my own.  Matt's at work today, it's too cold and rainy to walk anywhere and I'm getting pretty good at pushing the overwhelmed feelings away and ignoring the stacks of boxes to unpack in the conservatory....