Raglan’s gift shop was a ten-foot long trailer up on cinderblocks with the wheels pulled off and painted matte grey.
Obviously, the castle was amazing. (I can only imagine they’ll close the whole thing off to visitors if they ever build a proper shop, so here’s hoping they never do.)
We were able to range both above and below ground here, the best part being the tower seperated from the rest of the castle and at least five stories high (British style) with a ‘basement’ level that let out onto a green walkway along the moat.
Raglan (there’s a great virtual tour here) is compact castle, far more so than Chepstow, and it didn’t see the level of modification between generations (there were really only two masters, a father and a son), it’s really an amazing design that served very well in a defensive capacity towards which it was never really intended to be used. It withstood a seige by Parliamentarians in 1646 (I believe for something like four months), during which the main tower ‘repulsed bullets of 18 and 20 lb weight, hardly receiving the least impression by 60 shots a day’. After virtually everyone else surrendered, Ragland followed suit, after which Cromwell ordered the main tower slighted so as not to be useful as a point of defense in the future. Three months of tedious battering at the tower with pickaxes’, they sent in sappers to remove enough wooden struts to allow one of the tower’s walls to be partially pulled down… damn shame.
We spent quite a bit of time at this keep. Very cool. My favorite: a picture Jackie took of the corner of the keep where the main apartments once stood, accessed from the fountain green via a grand central stair.
After that we took off the other direction from Abergavenny to Brecon (past Buckland Hall, no kidding) to hit all the shops there again. As mentioned, I’d already been there and knew they didn’t have any goblets (and that if they did, my much more quest-oriented friends would get them), so I headed to the public library’s free internet access to relax.
After an hour there, we motored up to a cunningly concealed craft shop in the Beacons, built into an abandoned train stop (and using three permanently parked passenger cars, still on the tracks). Again, no goblets, but a brilliant fellow hand-carving wooden bowls (of course) and really great walking sticks (something else I saw often, really wanted, and couldn’t possibly pack for the trip home), so no purchases for me. If I’d wanted coffee mugs, I’d have been happy — Jackie was :)
We went home to pack for the drive back to London and I took a few shots of some of the randomly occuring statues around the B&B. Meanwhile, Margie did research on smoke-free, well-reviewed places to eat in Abergavenny. We concientiously waited until almost seven to drive down, only to find out that “smoke-free” is Welsh for “only open in the daytime or we’d go out of business”, so Jackie and the Consortium drove back to the Nant Ddu while the rest of us ate in the relatively smokeless smoke-free section of a bar called the Colliseum, where the food was cheap, pretty darn good, and a much shorter drive home.
I got home, took a bath in the ridiculously well-appointed tub in our ensuite and finally got completely caught up on the notebook journal for the first time since buying it.
