Day 18 - Nottingham

Off to another great start with a cooked breakfast - not included with the accommodation, but at  £25 for the 4 of us, and the room only £135 for 3 nights, it seemed like a good price. Mind you, I think the renovations going on in some of the other rooms has possibly helped to keep the price down - hasn't added to the ambience, but if it keeps the cost down I am more than happy.

Uneventful drive to Nottingham to drop Julianne off for a day of work, whilst we headed into town to check out the castle. Patrick's navigation using Google maps [again, Mum, Dad, Liz and Allan, we'll explain when we get home] was excellent. Got a little bit disorientated trying to find a car-park, but, as so often seems to be the case, it is when we (I) try to be smart and disregard Google's advice and go it alone. Reading road signs a bit more carefully helps too.

The castle has a rather interesting history. Started off life  as a wooden fort only a couple of years after Billy C. came up trumps at Hastings, as it was an excellent site to guard the new kingdom from the northern hordes. A few hundred years later and it was decided to......stoneify it, at which point it apparently ranked second only to Windsor castle as the most magnificent castle in England. Had a number of additions over the years, and was where Rixchard III spent his last night before rushing off to get killed on Bosworth Field in 1485 - the last monarch to die 'in the saddle' so to speak. Also the site of the rise of Oliver Cromwell's parliamentarian movement which eventually lead to the overthrow and execution of whichever monarch it was at the time [Google it - that's what I've been doing for most of the historical stuff]. A few years later when one of the Cromwellians thought that his boss was getting too big for his boots he had the castle razed and left in ruins for many years - a fairly impressive dummy-spit in anyone's language. The land was eventually bequeathed to whoever the first duke of Newcastle was, and he built the ducal palace that pretty much looks like the current building - but of course there was to be a catch; the locals revolted against one of the later dukes and torched it, leaving only a burnt-out shell, to be left this way for about 50 years before it was rejuvenated as one of England's first council-run museum's. And again, as with the museum at Preston, it holds an impressive collection of interesting exhibits, well presented and very informative. The highlight, however, was the guided tour through the caves under the castle, not least because the guide was so enthusiastic and entertaining - he would even run (in his suit) between various points of the tour - as Patrick pointed out, fairly pointless, as he needed to wait for everyone to catch up, but it was a reflection of his infectious enthusiasm and clear love of the subject matter he was presenting. The tour ended up below the castle conveniently next-door to 'The Trip to Jerusalem' pub, allegedly the oldest inn in England, built in 1189, where of course we had to rest awhile and recuperate from our exhausting museuming. Unfortunately our imbibing was cut short by a request from Julianne to come and pick her up, which of course we dutifully did......eventually. As it was nearly dinner time anyway, we decide to head back to the pub for dinner rather than trying to find something on the way back to Derby. And of course one (me) had to try the outrageously cliche-named Robin Hood ale - turned out to be rather nice, but ever so embarrassing to actually ask for - the price one has to pay for indulging in the whole tourist experience.

As for Robin Hood, he (or at least the vague concept of what we think of as Robin Hood) is covered fairly extensively in the museum, where he has a well laid out display all to his theoretical self, and you will also find any number of Google sites dedicated to the legend/myth/folklore or whatever, so I shan't be boring you here......any more than I have.

As something of an aside, owing to the rather primitive (!!) nature of this tablet I am working on, the 'check spelling' function is very temperamental and, combined with the dodgy keyboard, some mis-spelling gets overlooked and editing is nigh on impossible due to technical difficulties too boring to go into here - suffice to say, in hindsight, it might have been better to invest in a notepad (the electronic type) to maintain these blogs.