Wanderung 21

Lands Ho! Scotland, England, Shetland, Iceland, Newfoundland

August - September 2009

Friday, September 18th, 2009: Leeds Castle, England

After breakfast with Lois and Phyllis, I drove us all to Maidstone on the M-2. Traffic was very light and we managed to complete the drive in just over a half an hour, arriving shortly after Leeds castle opened for the day. After parking, Lois and I walked the trail through the gardens up to the castle while Monika and Phyllis took the shuttle bus. The ponds and bushes of the formal gardens were nice, but nothing outstanding. Peacocks and peahens were everywhere, giving their usual outlandish squawks. I more intrigued by some kind of huge fig bush with spiny stalks and absolutely gigantic leaves.


 

After we rejoined the others at the castle entrance, we walked across an honest-to-goodnes moat and through an arch to get to the castle. Leeds Castle is not what I would term a "fighting" castle, of course. In fact, the original castle built by Lord Fairfax had been completely renovated into a modern manor house in the early 1900s, as I recall. Even though modern, the interior was furnished with pieces from different periods, and we toured these suites of rooms for several hours, interrupted by lunch, of course!

The self-guided castle tour is laid out so that one first walks through a set of rooms on the lower level that are renovated to look like they may have appeared back in the 1300-1500 time period. The re-creation of the fancy royal bedroom was particularly interesting, but I also enjoyed the fine examples of inlaid wood work in various chests and cabinets.

The wall decorations were also very interesting. Arms and armor were hung at various points, which added to the old-fashioned wood doors to create the overall ambience of an old castle. But the wall tapestries were real, genuine, 400-500 year old tapestries from Germany, Belgium, and various other locations, and they were simply beautiful. As much as I wanted to take flash pictures so that the finely-wrought detail of the threads would be visible, I stopped myself because I knew that the flash would ultimately help degrade those tapestries and I just couldn't be a party to that.


 

The upper floor of the castle was in a much more modern style as it served as a residence of the last owner until the 1970s, as I recall. The bedrooms were fancy, the library was huge and impressive, and the saloons and day rooms were beautiful, but it was just "new" stuff to me. I don't consider myself a historical snob, but somehow the Art Deco period was not what I was hoping to see in an English Castle.

Back outside, we all had lunch at a restaurant located on a rise just across the moat from the castle. The balcony of the restaurant, in fact, afforded the best panoramic views I think you could get of Leeds Castle in the middle of its artificial lake. Very pretty.

Lunch re-energized us all for some more walking and we took advantage of that to walk up into a formal garden area complete with an aviary. The hedges, as we had come to expect in England, were immaculately trimmed. I was so much taking that for granted that I had to kind of mentally shake myself and remember that such perfection takes a team of gardeners dedicated to maintaining those perfect shapes. The garden area was also apparently where all the flowers were concentrated and a few of them were still in bloom although it was by then very late in the season.

The attached aviary was alive with colorful parrots, cockatoos, and other exotic birds. They were squawking ad screeching and seemed really to enjoy seeing us as much as we enjoyed seeing them! One plaque mentioned the long 60+ year life spans of some of the birds and how that presented a problem when the birds outlived their owners, a point I had never seriously considered before.

Lois and Phyllis started back to the car while Monika and I continued on to see if we could find the maze, but we were both drawn off course by a crowd of people surrounding a small fenced off area that looked vaguely like a pony-sized corral. I had no idea what would happen but we stopped to watch with the other folks and were treated to a display of falconry! England has a long tradition of falconry going back to the post-Conquest period I think, and the falconer that conducted the demonstration was a young, enthusiastic, and very expert man. He carefully showed us several very different birds and explained their history, background, and personalities in a thoroughly engaging manner.

The first bird he flew was a white-tailed eagle. It was, of course, a very large bird and had in fact a six foot wingspan, so when it swooped over our heads it was a quite impressive sight.

The next bird was some kind of English owl. I had not known that owls fly by day but the falconer informed us that owls were opportunistic and could hunt either by day or by night. Contrary to popular stereotype, this particular owl was slightly stupid and slow on the uptake, but with some encouragement from the trainer he got through his routine.

The third bird didn't fly at all. It was a small rattite bird from South America very much along the lines of the North American road runner of the desert Southwest. It had a tall, thin, gangly physique with long slender legs. That physique was a bit misleading, however, in that the bird could jump vertically well over six feet straight up even though it could not fly, a fact demonstrated by the trainer holding a bit of food for it whilst standing on a stepladder. The bird simply lept up vertically to snag the treat and fluttered back down.

The fourth bird was the fastest hunting bird in the word, the gyrefalcon. It hunts by folding its wings and dropping like a stone from the sky down onto its prey, often exceeding 100 miles per hour in the process. The trainer played a game with this bird in which he had it whip in right over our heads toward the center of the ring where he was whirling a target over his head. The bird actually seemed to enjoy playing this game and I know I am anthropomorphizing outrageously but I got the impression he was enjoying showing off for us. He came screaming in so fast and low that he actually touched the hair of the woman standing right next to me and made her, of course, flinch downward. I meanwhile, was vainly trying to get a shot of that speeding bit of fluff and feathers, but he was so fast and sudden and took a trajectory so low over the ground and heads of the people (I do not lie when I say he missed us by inches) that I don't think I ever got a proper shot. The photography was frustrating, but the high speed aerobatics of that bird were a thrill to watch.

Knowing that Lois and Phyllis would be waiting for us, we hustled back and found them at the bus stop. This time Lois accompanied Phyllis on the shuttle bus while Monika and I walked back through the formal gardens. Along the way I got a decent shot of the peacocks that roam the grounds of Leeds Castle, and we all had fun shopping at the gift shop at the entrance before we hopped back into the car for the drive back home.

On our drive back to Hythe we stopped at a big Tesco store just off the M-2 motorway that our GPS had located for us. Having the location of attractions, grocery stores, train stations, airports, and everything else not only at our fingertips but also with turn-by-turn directions to get there was just a godsend for us in that situation. We bought some nice rolls and haslet (a British kind of meatloaf, I think!) to use with the last of our Laughing Cow cheese wedges for dinner. We also found a computer bag on sale that we ultimately used to pack all of the books, calendars, and miscellaneous sheets of paper which we had accumulated during the journey for boarding our cruise ship the next day.


 

Copyright 2010 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Map of Scotland Map of England Map of Rest of Lands Epilog

August 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
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9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
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30 31
September 2009
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30

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