Castles, Rhododendrons and the Hunt for Hadrian's Wall

The day began with the tour of a castle, and ended with a wall......sort of.

We're in Northumberland, England, an area that for centuries found itself in the midst of a struggle between Scotland and England.  So, how could we resist checking out one of the oldest castles in Great Britain?  And, it certainly is THE oldest that Marty and I have set foot in.

Warkworth Castle:

In 1124, David I (son of Queen Margaret and Malcolm III), gave this castle to his son, Henry. 

The Keep is an amazing structure, with arched doorways, and extremely thick walls.

Here you can see the windows that would have held stained glass for a chapel in the Keep.

The kitchen was huge, and held two ovens in addition to a bread oven.  You can get an idea of just how large the oven is by seeing Marty standing in one of them. 

The place was filled with all sorts of interesting rooms and cubbies, but this one was probably Marty's favorite.

The view from this castle wasn't bad, either.

The tour was great,  but it was time to travel to our next destination for the day.

We headed out of the town to a place called Cragside.  This is the huge estate that belonged to Lord Armstrong, and it was the first house in the world to be lit by hydroelectric power.  This place was amazing.

The house sits on the side of a crag with thousands of rhododendrons on the estate.  Lord Armstrong was a self-proclaimed inventor, and in the 1880's this house had hot and cold running water,  central heat, telephones, a Turkish bath and a hydro elevator for the serving staff to carry food from the kitchen up to the serving rooms...all designed by Lord Armstrong.

And, the most famous of all was the incandescent lights that transformed beautiful vases into lamps that still sit in the house today.

Now, I ask, how is that for clever?  A great use for something that would otherwise just collect dust.  

The house was huge and had some very unique decorating.  Here you see tiles on the hallway walls.

Loved this set of stained glass windows

The kitchen reminded me of the one in Downton Abbey

And this fireplace in the drawing room was really a bit too much.

I could go on and on.....but I won't.  Instead, I want to know just how many of you knew that a man named Thomas Crapper invented the first 1 piece pedestal flushing toilet?

Am I the ONLY one out of the loop on this one?  Marty seemed to think this should be common knowledge.  Really? 

 I'm holding out on my friend, JoAnn, hoping that she's on the same page with me regarding this one.

And, I bet that my friend Rebecca knew this.  Because she always seems to know this kind of stuff.  I'll be interested to hear the feed back on this.

Back to the Armstrongs.  They apparently loved Rhododendrons.......so much so that they planted thousands of them on the estate. 

So, you think I exaggerate?

 We drove along 6 miles of road on the estate, and everywhere we looked, we saw them in bloom.

You can even see them on the edge of the lake

Ok, so you get the point.  We were lucky to have visited Cragside when we did, because next week the rhododendrons will be bloomed out and the magnificence of the grounds will be considerably less.

It was time to head off on our quest to see Hadrian's wall, the main purpose for us venturing south into England.  We both figured that it would be an easy feat.  The wall is clearly marked on the map....running parallel to a little road.

Find the road, and we'd find the wall......right?

I didn't want to see mounds of green.  I expected to see fragments of a wall.  We stopped at an information center, and were told to drive west (the opposite direction of our B&B) and that we'd see it in its full glory.

Well, we drove for quite awhile, and spotted another info center.  Then, we realized that we might never actually view it from the road.  We would need to park the car, pay & display, then pay a fee to walk quite a bit from the road in order to actually get a first hand look at the wall.

The wall that we had seen when we first got on the highway was on a hillside next to a road where there was nowhere to pull off to view it in the fields. It seemed to be "pay and hike" or "forget it."

Well, it was getting late, we'd been driving a lot already, and we had dinner reservations near our B&B which was nearly an hour away.

So, we took this quick shot of Marty at the info center with the wall in the background.

On the way back to the car, Marty convinced me to take his picture  with a lamb in the pasture,

but the lamb got scared and bolted before I could get the shot.  (It was probably the red jacket, don't you think?)

Then Marty got the brilliant idea that I would take  photos of the wall from the car  while he was driving.  Let's just say that a LOT of the photos were rather interesting, but this one wasn't bad.

And, here he was actually able to pull into a drive, when I popped out of the car, took the shot, and jumped back in.

This was NOT the historical experience that I had anticipated.

But Marty seemed OK with just being able to say that he saw Hadrian's Wall.  

And if he's happy, then who am I to argue with that?