Ah! It's been a bit of an impulse day! I was in Shrewsbury for a meeting and having had that, I was driving merrily back towards the North West, wondering where I would be by the time my stomach signalled it was too long past lunch, when I saw a sign for a castle.
There's so many brown signs on the road these days (you can buy them I think - which explains why you see tourist signs these days pointing to "Lil's Burger Caravan"). Anyway, I wasn't going to stop for a lunchbreak and therefore thought a quick ten minutes look at a castle I'd never even heard of might be fun.
This is Moreton Corbet, which is almost two castles in one. An older castle has a few remains dating from the 1200s and this shell dates from the 16th century. It was originally built, not by a Norman, but by a Saxon who had found favour with the new rulers in our country. A rare castle then - although apparently the Saxon, Bartholomew Toret, fell out with King John and was thrown in jail in 1215. The castle passed into the hands of the Norman Corbet family when Toret's heiress married into the family a couple of dozen years later.
I started off at the 16th century block and then walked through to the remains of the older castle. Part of the keep tower still stands and some of the outer wall, though little remains of any rooms. The most complete part is the gatehouse which had been remodelled in the 1500s.
Walking out via the gatehouse I passed though a fence with two very unusual "gateposts". I was now in the driveway to a church, St Bartholomew's, which had a very fine old building nearby - the old rectory perhaps. I didn't go into the church as I still get twinges of guilt at sightseeing on a working day. How ridiculous that is considering I could have legitimately taken an hour for lunch and in any case had been away from home for two nights... Well, I spent perhaps a quarter of an hour altogether and had driven a massive 4 miles (counting both the journey from the main road and going back) in a diesel hire car that reckoned it was doing 56 miles per gallon.
It was whilst looking at the church that I got an inkling of where the "gateposts" had come from. I wonder where the other two were? I was also amazed at the number of helicopters that were buzzing about my ears. At least ten had flown over during my visit and some of them were very low. Looking up the castle on the Internet just now, I found I was just a short distance from an RAF helicopter training school. So not the castle to go to for peace and quiet then!
There is a ghost story here, of the Puritan who was a guest and who outstayed his welcome, being thrown out of the castle. He cursed the new block so that it would never be completed and it is said that his ghost haunts it still to make sure it won't ever be. It wasn't ever finished in fact and the Roundheads setting it on fire certainly helped the ghost put the kibosh on the Corbet family's building aspirations! The bright sunshine today though, certainly didn't have me thinking of ghosts and hauntings! It's good sometimes to go aside from your route on impulse!
Just a thought to add...
ReplyDeleteI wonder if they should have said "helicopter pilot training school"...?
Surely you can't just throw a stick and shout "Fetch!" ???