Stratford upon Avon Part Two - Digging deep.

Yes, I know this is the third post about Stratford, not the second. I've decided to keep reviews of eateries separate so I can find them more easily later, so this is part two of the non-food aspect of the day. 

After a disappointing start to our day in Stratford we had really enjoyed lunch at The Vintner, and stepped back out onto the Elizabethan streets in reasonably happy mood.  We strolled to the end of Sheep Street and pondered the idea of turning right and wandering back in the vague direction of the car. On a passing whim, however we turned left and strode off to look at some Elizabethan streets. As previously noted, Stratford is blessed with something of a surfeit of ancient timber framed streets and they really do look impressive.

As we ambled along I caught sight of a sign in one of the windows bearing the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust logo declaring that this was "Nash's House". Because I have an excellent memory, and I am always keen to obtain value for money, I recalled that if you spend fourteen pounds on a ticket to the Shakespeare Birthplace Museum, you are also entitled to admission to Nash's House. I'll be honest, I had no idea who Nash was, or what might be found in his house, but still smarting from what I felt to be the terrible waste of money at the Birthplace Museum I reckoned we should at least avail ourselves of the opportunity to get in out of the rain.

My wife concurred, and so we stepped out of the rain and into the Seventeenth Century. You see, it turns out that Thomas Nash was the husband of Shakespeare's granddaughter, and the ground floor of his house has been furnished as it would have been in Nash's time. Glossing over the fact that this appears to suggest that Nash had a gift shop and a cash desk in his front room we waved our tickets at the nice man on the desk and walked through into what I took to be the dining room. "I'll be doing a talk in about five minutes, if you're interested" called the man as we passed. We expressed polite interest and wandered off to look at the downstairs rooms.

We nearly didn't stop. You see, while the interior of the ground floor might have been furnished in the style of the 1600s, it was not, in and of itself, particularly interesting, and since none of the pictures on the walls seemed to be labelled I began to wonder who the people in the portraits were, and more importantly, why I should care. I also had no real conception about where I was - at this point I didn't know about the connection between Nash and Shakespeare, knowledge which the powers that be seemed to have assumed that I possessed.

Still, no matter. Just as the thought that this was even less impressive than the Birthplace began to form in my rebellious brain the nice man from the ticket desk took his position in the corner of the room and invited visitors to listen to his talk about the house and the "project". Ever eager to learn, we crowded round and were treated to a fascinating ten minute run down of the history of the house, and why it was important. He ran through the history of the house and Shakespeare's family, but rather more importantly, the history of the house next door - or at least the house that used to be next door.

You see Nash's house is currently next door to a vacant lot which looks an awful lot like a building site. In fact it's the polar opposite of a building site, because Nash's House is next door to the site of New Place, the former home of one William Shakespeare. New Place is long gone, demolished by a former owner to avoid paying rates* and the site is now a massive archaeological dig. "But before you go and look outside," advised the nice man, "take a look at the exhibitions upstairs where we have many artefacts found here, and from our archives."

So we did. The first floor** of Nash's house contains an exhibition of objects from Shakespeare's time displayed in context with a character from the Bard's many works, so items used for eating and drinking, for example, are displayed with Falstaff. All very interesting, but what really caught my eye was the collection of finds from the New Place dig. There's nothing earth shattering here  - no quill pens or inkwell's bearing the inscription "Property of William Shakespeare" or anything. but what is there holds much greater fascination - for me at least - because what is on display are those everyday items that make up the unnoticed clutter that makes life run smoothly. I was particularly caught by a small collection of marbles, some ceramic, some glass.  Were these once the playthings of Shakespeare's ill-fated son Hamnet?

An unanswerable question, of course, so we stepped outside into the rain to take a look at the dig. As it was unapologetically lashing down - the main trench was basically empty but there was plenty going on in the gardens that lie behind the Nash's House/New Place frontage. Immediately behind the buildings is a small Elizabethan style flower garden, but behind that is a large lawn. On the lawn there is a collection of large bronze sculptures representing some of the plays, some large holes filled with students and a couple of marquees.

The student filled holes were "test pits" intended to give a snapshot of the activity that might have taken place on the space where the lawn now sits. The general consensus seemed to be "outbuildings", although at the time we were there they were getting very excited indeed about a layer of corroded metal that might have been buckets. The rain increased in intensity so we left them to it and ducked into one of the marquees.

We were met by a jovial bearded bloke who appraised our forty something visages with a twinkle explained that he was in charge of the kids activities and invited us to join in. The activities were simple but fun - placing events onto a timeline, matching events to coins, digging artefacts out of sand to learn about stratification, it's a shame it wasn't busier but there were a few kids getting their hands dirty and I suppose it was getting late in the afternoon.  From there we had a look around the second marquee, where more students were freezing their fingers to the bone cleaning finds from the various test pits on the lawn. We chatted for a bit, and there was more general excitement about the unidentified corroded metal. "It's probably a rubbish pit!" enthused one mud encrusted young lady, before rushing out again to get back in the hole.

Archaeologists eh?

There was a lot of Stratford left to see, but as I said, the afternoon was wearing on so we didn't visit Shakespeare's grave, or the Royal Shakespeare Company. We did spend about an hour standing on a bridge watching two coots looking after their chick, and however good lunch was, and however much we enjoyed the dig at New Place that chick really was the highlight of the day. 

Sometimes it's the strangest things that stay with you...

*Nope. Not kidding.

**Or second floor if you're American.

Lunch in Stratford-upon-Avon: The Vintner's Tale

Before we go on to whether there's anywhere good to eat in Stratford, a quick note about the last post, in which I was unsure about how much we'd paid to get into Shakespeare's Birthplace. Well, yesterday I was rummaging around in my jacket pocket, as you do, and found the tickets for both Shakespeare's Birthplace and WarwickCastle. So, as a point of order I can now confirm for the record that as a couple we paid £28.00 for the Birthplace (2x£14.00) and £22.80 (2x£11.40 - but we did get half price admission) for Warwick Castle.

The Birthplace kept us occupied for about an hour, and we weren't terribly thrilled with the experience. Warwick Castle was a fabulous experience - if you forget the food (and believe me we're trying) and filled an entire day. I'll leave you to decide for yourself which provided the best value - as you'll see in a later post, there is a little more to come from the Birthplace - but I suspect you can already guess which one I'd go back to...

Anyway. Food. We're rather fussy about eating out, and have been known to spend longer looking for a place to eat than we have spent eating in it. However on this occasion I'd done a bit of research on the interwebs and so we had a vague idea that Sheep Street might be the place to go. With the aid of the handy little map we'd picked up in the tourist information centre we navigated our way to what would seem to be Stratford's restaurant centre.

We made our way up and down the street and were pleased to note that, in spite of the presence of the pub belonging to a chain of mediocre pub/restaurants* most of the food establishments there seemed pretty good. Menus were interesting, varied and suggested that they were prepared by people who knew what they were doing.

We eventually settled on The Vintner, an impressive timber framed facade which looked fantastic and proclaimed itself to be "The place to eat and drink". Who were we to refuse?

Stepping through the door we found ourselves in a relatively small bistro area which fairly buzzed with conversation and the happy ringing of cutlery on crockery. We were met by a smiling member of the black clad serving staff (why do servers in restaurants always wear black?) who directed us up the stairs and seated us at a cozy little table for two. The decor was a pleasing mix of dark wood and light walls with flashes of colour provided by jars of preserved peppers and tomatoes. The building dates from the late fifteenth century, and the temptation to make the place all "Ye Olde Worlde" must have been pretty powerful, but at the same time any kind of wholesale modernisation would not only have been unforgivable, it would also have looked strange. The Vintner strikes an excellent balance, blending modern design within the ancient timber frame.

As our drinks and menus arrived - note to self, The Vintner in one of those rare establishments that will serve sparkling wine by the glass - we mused on whether Shakespeare might have bought wine from this building. As I said, it was built in the late fifteenth century and it was certainly in use as a Wine Merchant's premises at the time Shakespeare was living at New Place**. The possibility that we'd just walked through a door that the adult Shakespeare might actually have walked through was oddly tantalising and somehow resonated more than the rather flat and sterile vibe we'd experienced at the birthplace. I'm pleased to note, incidentally, that the Vintner itself doesn't play up this possibility. There is no mention at all of Shakespeare inside the restaurant, and only a passing mention on their website.

We were still musing on whether Shakespeare might have visited the place to order a butt of sac when the food arrived. As I so often do, I'd ordered a burger. Because my wife has more imagination, she went for a twice baked Gruyere Soufflé with Watercress and Beetroot. In an attempt to keep up with this level of sophistication I upgraded from the Vintner Classic Burger to the Vintner Piggy Burger, which was essentially the Classic Burger with the addition of some barbecue pulled pork on top. Served with fries and "fully garnished"*** I have to say that it was delicious.

 I eat a lot of burgers in a lot of places, and have developed a scale which gives them a score between 1 and 10. The worst burger I have ever eaten - served to me in a hotel on the north coast of Scotland - was  0.5. To date I have never awarded more than an 8. I reckon that The Vintner served me a 7.5, which is, I have to say, high praise indeed. The burger itself was seasoned to perfection while the pulled pork topping was succulent and bursting with flavour. They lose out a little because they insisted on calling the chips "fries", but since the "fries" were pretty close to perfection - crispy and golden like a chip should be - I'm happy to forgive them.

Nothing had died to make my wife's soufflé, so naturally I didn't try any. She herself declared it to be "Alright". She was a little underwhelmed by the texture apparently, although the watercress and beetroot salady thing that came with it was pronounced "really nice" so I think I'm declaring Mrs Snail's meal to be a no-score win.

Our hunger happily sated we were then left with that most difficult of lunchtime queries. "Would we like to see the dessert menu?" Always tricky this. The thing about having dessert at lunchtime is that you know you'll feel over full all afternoon, and you'll feel guilty because you're trying to cut down on all those sweet things. On the other hand, well, it's dessert. The afternoon was getting on though, and feeling that we'd wasted our morning by trekking around the birthplace we wanted to get on and see a bit more of Stratford. So, with slightly heavy hearts, but hopefully somewhat lighter girths we declined dessert and asked for the bill.

It's a decision I still slightly regret, because as we stood to leave the table behind us was served with a tray full of glasses overflowing with the most indulgent Eton Mess I have ever seen! The waitress caught my eye and grinned. "Sure we can't tempt you?" We were tempted indeed, let me tell you. Still, it does give us a reason to go back...

And, should we ever find ourselves in Stratford again, go back we shall. Mrs Snail's soufflé may have been a little lacklustre, but then I have no real idea how one would go about lustreing a soufflé, so I'm minded to overlook it. In general the food was excellent, the service was impeccable and the ambience of the place was friendly and inviting. One of the top two dining experiences of our whole two week expedition - and one I'm keen to repeat sometime relatively soon!

*I'm not naming them, but you know you're picking from a list of about five, and since they're all basically the same it doesn't really matter.

**Which of course is why the place is called "The Vintner".

***If I'm honest I have no idea what that means. This came with some lettuce and tomato, onion and pickle. It was lovely, but "fully garnished"? In the eye of the beholder, I suspect. I could have added bacon - which in the absence of pulled pork I would have done, or Monterey Jack Cheese - which I have never seen the point of. The Americans are very good at a great many things, but cheese making is not one of them.

Stratford Upon Avon - Part One: A Shakespearean dissapointment.

Stratford-upon-Avon is a Warwickshire town dominated by the ghost of one man. William Shakespeare looms over everything, and there is perhaps a danger that the whole place will become a bit of a Shakespeare theme park. This would be a shame, because it's a rather beautiful place, with pretty Elizabethan streets and some esoteric little shops that would be worth a visit even if the Bard of Avon had hailed from somewhere else. Still,  I guess there are worse things for a town to base its economy on - although as you'll see, personally I think that might be a mistake.

I remember visiting Stratford as a young child, and thinking about it we must have been in the old two birth caravan that my dad had adapted to sleep four, although I can't for the life of me remember where we stayed on that occasion. I can't remember much about the town either, save for a vague image of a lot of timber framed houses. My first introduction to Stratford as an adult was driving through late on a Saturday afternoon trying to find somewhere to buy a telly*, and I quickly came to a couple of conclusions.

Firstly, in common with a lot of very old towns and cities (York and Warwick spring immediately to mind) Stratford was not designed for cars. Clearly that's largely because the street layout was decided on a long time before the automobile was invented but I think it's also true to say that there hasn't been much effort made to accommodate vehicular traffic in the years since the internal combustion engine became widespread.

Secondly, if you don't know the area finding anything is nigh on impossible. I'd been promised a "big Tesco, open 24 hours" where I was pretty sure I'd be able to find a small TV for a reasonable price. You would think that such a thing was easy to find - I mean, a massive superstore with its name emblazoned in huge red letters is a pretty tough thing to hide, wouldn't you think? Well, tough to hide it might have been, but the good people of Stratford seem to have managed it, because in the five nights we were in the area, I never did manage to track it down.

Still, as I took what appeared to be another wrong turn, I spotted a sign bearing the legend "Retail Park" and pointing in the direction I was already going, so I followed it and found a pretty big retail park sporting all of the usual massive chain stores. There I did indeed manage to find a small TV which I bore back to the caravan in triumph. I'm sure a proper travel writer would tell you the name of the retail park, and give you all some idea about where exactly on the edge of Stratford it might be located, but since I didn't note the name and was unable to find it again, I've begun to think of it as the "Brigadoon Retail Park". Besides, this blog isn't supposed to be giving you shopping tips.

Anyway. That was my first glimpse of Stratford itself. It wasn't until a couple of days later that we went in for a closer look. I don't know why, but I was expecting parking to be difficult. We arrived mid-morning having made a moderately late start - we were on holiday, after all! I figured that any parking that might be available in the centre of town would get snapped up early on, but we were very pleasantly surprised. Having done a couple of loops around the town to suss out where the car parks were, we decided to have a go at the Marina car park, by the side of the river a mere stone's throw from the Royal Shakespeare Company's theatre.  Six pounds covered the whole day, which seemed cheap enough** so we grabbed our stuff and set out to explore.

Stratford is, without question, really rather pretty. It is also rather compact, so walking around the centre of the town doesn't actually take very long and if you walk around Stratford for long enough you're going to end up outside Shakespeare's Birthplace on Henley Street. So it was with us. The house itself occupies rather a long frontage, and predictably sits directly opposite a souvenir shop.  the house is a rather imposing timber framed wattle and daub affair, of the type that would have been common back in the fifteen sixties when Shakespeare was born.

The entrance to the house, where Shakespeare grew up but did not live as an adult, is not through the doors that callers would have used when the Shakespeare family lived there. No, the Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust have built a new building alongside which, appropriately enough, put me in mind of the foyer of a modern theatre. We stood outside for a few minutes debating whether to fork out the obscenely high admission fee. We've had a discussion during the writing of this entry as to whether it was twelve pounds per person or fourteen pounds per person. We can't remember, and the website doesn't appear to tell you, so for the purposes of this blog I'm going to round the figure down to "too bloody much!"

We eventually concluded that visiting Stratford and not looking at at least one Shakespeare property would be silly, and starting at the beginning, with the birthplace, seemed to make sense. So, we took a deep breath, stepped inside and bought tickets for the grossly overpriced and massively disappointing attraction.

Damn, I've given away our verdict, haven't !?

To be fair, I don't know what I was expecting. I mean, when all's said and done, it's just a very old house. It's not even infused with the genius of his writing, nor could the walls tell of meetings between the Bard of Avon and the great actors of his day. Shakespeare's playwriting and acting career didn't really kick off until after he'd quit Stratford for London, and when he returned, rich and successful, he didn't go back to his birthplace, he had a swanky new house ("New Place", about which more later) built a few minutes' walk away.

The house on Henley Street was Shakespeare's Dad's house, and can tell us far more about how middle class merchants and artisans like John Shakespeare lived that it ever will about the glove maker's son. That shouldn't be a problem, mind you. I mean yes, the life and times of the greatest writer of his - and perhaps any - generation would be interesting, but the lives of ordinary people are interesting too.

The exhibition you must walk through to actually get to the house is well aware of its audience though, and mentions little about John Shakespeare and the larger Shakespeare clan. You start by gathering in a large alcove around a TV screen which seems to be showing "great moments from Shakespeare at the movies". I ground my teeth a little.

For a start I hate being told what I have to look at in a museum, and the reason you have to huddle around the telly in a little group is the fact that the doors to the next section of the exhibition are firmly closed, and won't re-open until the TV section has finished.  Seriously. There we were, grown adults blessed with reasonable intelligence, but we're not allowed to look at anything else until we've seen some out of context clips from some other people's interpretations of some Shakespeare plays.

The clips were of well known actors taken from excellent film versions of the well known Shakespeare plays, and they delivered them as brilliantly as you might expect. But by presenting them in this "famous quotations from Shakespeare" manner the museum reduces Shakespeare to nothing more than a "quote generator". This debases Shakespeare's work and by taking  away the context of the story reinforces the idea that if you can spout off the occasional one-liner, you "know" Shakespeare in some way.

Shakespeare is about story. Take that away and it's meaningless***.

Still. Eventually the montage of random clips came to an end and the we were permitted to proceed, past what was perhaps the only really interesting thing in the room, a case holding a small gold ring, found nearby and engraved with the initials WS. Could that ring have once adorned the hand of William Shakespeare? We will of course never know, but you can't help being tantalised by the possibility of a physical connection between then and now.

You then move through into another room which features some artefacts associated with the domestic life of the Shakespeare family, and wider life in Stratford, including the base of the old market cross where John Shakespeare might have stood to sell gloves. Then the next set of doors opens and you move on to a third room, where you are treated to a video presentation about Shakespeare's life, times and work narrated by (I think) the noted Shakespearean actors Dame Judi Dench and Patrick Stewart. It's not at all bad, and best of all there's a copy of the First Folio in a case below the screen.

Finally, at long last, the final set of doors open and you step out into the garden, and then into the parlour of John and Mary Shakespeare's house. It's a small room, with an uneven flagged floor, a few sticks of furniture and a helpful guide who welcomed us to Shakespeare's birthplace and explained a bit about what we would see while we were there. At least, I assume that's what he did. If I'm honest I don't remember a single thing he said - I was paying attention, I really was, but none of it stuck.

So, we moved on, down a rather narrow corridor into a spacious and well lit room with a work bench in one corner, many animal pelts and hides, and a small, quietly spoken little man wearing Elizabethan dress in the corner.  His job was to explain a little bit about the art of glove making, and the way business would have been conducted in John Shakespeare's day. I have to say, he was just a little bit creepy - I think it was the way he didn't appear to blink even once during his presentation. We moved on, venturing up a narrow wooden staircase - which the nice young man in the parlour had told us was original**** - and began to explore the upper floors.

There were three rooms upstairs. One, which would originally have been the bedroom for the Shakespeare girls (because it was furthest away from the fire...) was dedicated to a sort of timeline display which detailed the history of the house as a tourist attraction. It seems that the building was revered by many even while it was a private house. I couldn't help wondering what the tenants who followed John and Mary made of it all. The centrepiece of this room is the window that used to reside in the room where Shakespeare was actually born. In days past, when vandalism was more derigour, it seems to have been the fashion to scratch your name into the glass - presumably because visitors felt the house should have a souvenir of them. A kind of reverse gift shop, I suppose. Close inspection rewards the visitor with a veritable who's who of nineteenth century letters. Dickens, Twain, Wordsworth, they're all there. The cult of Shakespeare has deep roots, it would seem.

 The middle upstairs room is the room where the Shakespeare boys would have slept, although I'm going to hazard a guess that the walls looked considerably different then, because if young William and his brothers had the decor currently installed there is no way they got any sleep. The very helpful guide in the room explained that the walls had been covered with painted canvas fabric to a design that was contemporary with the house. Basically the fabric had been painted white, and then designs from mythology had been painted on in black. The result was, well, I think I'm going to go with "striking". The guide explained that the design was based on fragments of decoration that had been discovered in an Elizabethan pub, which explained a lot. She also opined that in her view such a design would have been hung not in the bedroom, but in the parlour as a talking point. "Far too expensive for a bedroom" she declared, although she was quick to add "of course, that's just my opinion" - presumably in case the archaeology police were listening. We were inclined to agree with her, mind you. Her theory made much, much more sense.

And so we moved on, into the final upstairs room. The master bedchamber. The room where William Shakespeare was born. And presumably conceived, if you think about it. The room seemed to me to be long and thin - almost corridor like. There was a fire - which we were informed in Shakespeare's day had to be doused to embers at eight every evening, in common with all domestic fires in Stratford, such was the Elizabethan fear of fire. Such fear made perfect sense of course, densely packed towns made mostly of wood and thatch catch fire with remarkable ease.

There was also a small crib, and a bed - small by modern standards but which in the 1560s would have qualified as a double, and a sort of pallet bed that slotted neatly underneath it and would have been used by whichever Shakespeare children were too big for a crib but not yet old enough to be trusted with an unsupervised candle. It was all rather strangely Ikea. There was no mention by the guide as to whether this was the famous "second best bed" that Shakespeare left to his wife in his will, but I suspect that it was not. This, after all, was not his house...

From the bedroom we descended another staircase into the gardens of the house. There we found a pair of actors who, at some mysterious but presumably prearranged signal would introduce a short passage of Shakespeare's work, and then perform it to whichever members of the public happened to be passing. I was in two minds. I mean the actors were good enough at what they did, and unlike the pointless video soundbites at the entrance to the museum they did at least try to put their speeches into context. It was still an oddly sterile environment for the work of the Bard, and if I'm honest, it did not seem that the actor's hearts were in it.

A quick turn around the gardens, which were nice, but nothing really remarkable, led us to the exit turnstile, which led up not into the freedom of Henley Street, but into the house next door, which also happened to be the Museum gift shop. We spent a few minutes poking through the predictable tat, and found nothing worth buying. An so, finally, we stepped back onto Henley Street feeling mildly miffed. It's not that the Shakespeare's Birthplace Museum was awful - it wasn't. But it did all seem a little, well, uninspiring. Add to that the fact that as a couple we'd spent as much on visiting this museum for a couple of hours as we had on visiting Warwick Castle  - just a few miles down the road - all day, well. Ultimately it was weighed, it was measured, and it was found wanting. I certainly wouldn't bother going again.

At that moment of course, we had more pressing matters to concern ourselves with. It was lunchtime, and we needed food. More on that - and the rest of the afternoon in Stratford in the next post. Suffice to say that the day improved, a good lunch was eaten and another of Shakespeare's houses made amends for the place of his birth.

See you next time!

*There were special circumstances. More on that in a future post.

**Now, I know I made a fuss about paying exactly the same charge for parking at Warwick Castle in an earlier post, but this is different. Nobody was going to charge us for walking around Stratford.

***Sorry about the rant. In my day job I'm an English teacher in a large urban secondary school. I love Shakespeare, but am firmly of the believe that if you're not going to do his work properly - which requires the context of the story at the very least - it's better not to bother.

****It's the only thing I can remember him saying.

A day at Warwick Castle part two: Eagles, burgers and scandals!

Although our day at Warwick Castle got off to a shaky start, the efficiency and helpfulness of the staff, the magnificence of the state rooms, the vibrancy of the courtyard and the downright coolness of the trebuchet went a long way towards redeeming the place - and the trebuchet was immediately followed by another show which to my mind was even cooler.

You see I love anything that flies, but I especially love eagles and the next show on our agenda was "The Flight of the Eagles". I've seen a lot of falconry displays in a lot of places over the years. I can honestly tall you that I've never seen one as good as this before.  Because my wife is lovely, and perhaps because watching a giant catapult chuck stones wasn't her idea of a good time, she left the trebuchet demo before the end and nabbed us some seats at the front, right next to the roped off falconry arena.

So there we sat, on slightly uncomfortable bench seating while a bloke dressed as a medieval peasant* explained to the crowd that he would be flying three birds, that they would be large, that they were mostly harmless, and that he'd be really grateful if people didn't do anything that might startle them. The falconry arena is positioned just outside the walls of the inner courtyard, and as he spoke my eyes wandered around the castle ramparts, and something caught my eye as it moved behind the towers. Something flying. Something big.

I turned to my wife to point this out to her, and as I did so Paul the falconer raised his gloved hand and a North American Bald Eagle swooped over the grey crenulations to land on his wrist. The crowd gasped, and Archie the Eagle began to show off. Again and again Paul the Falconer launched this massive creature from his wrist, and Archie flew circuits over the crowd and behind the castle. Until that point I'd never seen an eagle in flight with my own eyes**, and it really was astonishing to see.

I mean I'd read in books that adult Bald Eagles have a wingspan of around six feet, and I know what six feet looks like. But when you actually see a bird fly over you, and you can actually see that if it stood in the middle of your living room and flapped its wingtips would brush the walls, well, it's a little different. Without descending too far into hyperbole the sight of something like that stirs something primal inside you. I can certainly see why our ancestors worshipped them, and why so many nations use the eagle as their official symbol. They are just beautiful birds.

Archie wasn't the only bird that Paul the Falconer had to show off. After half a dozen circuits he was flown back to the aviary area where the birds spend most of their time, and Paul introduced us to Heather the Grey Eagle Buzzard. Smaller than an eagle, certainly, but no less beautiful, Heather was something of a novice and Paul used her to demonstrate how a young bird can be trained to fly from post to post, and to the glove. A fascinating display, although I have to say that Paul made it look easy and I suspect that it isn't.

After that, we were introduced to Stan the White Tailed Sea Eagle, whose display was similar to Archie's, but no less spectacular for that. We left the falconry arena agreed on two things - that the display had been worth the price of admission on its own, and that we were definitely going back for the afternoon show, when four different birds would be on display. This we duly did, and were rewarded with displays from Ernie the Eagle Owl, A Griffin Vulture whose name I never did catch, Merlin the Bald Eagle and Nikita the Stella's Sea Eagle.

The afternoon show was hosted by Steve the Falconer, who had been Paul the falconer's assistant in the morning show, with Paul taking on the assistant role. This suggests that Steve is probably the senior of the two, or that Paul drew the short straw, for reasons that will perhaps become clear.

Ernie, for all his impressive six foot wingspan is still a young bird, and so Steve used him to demonstrate the same training techniques that Paul had used with Heather. As we'd seen them all before this could have been a little dull, but in common with every other staff member we came across on the day, Steve had a line of patter that kept the interest of everyone. The fact that Ernie was cuter than a really cute button didn't hurt any either. He was quite a grumpy character, and at the end of his display Ernie took off to a nearby tree. Steve the falconer said that this was quite normal, and they'd get him down later so there he sat, watching the rest of the show with thinly veiled avian contempt.

The Griffin Vulture was something of a contrast. While the eagles of the morning had been graceful and Ernie had been grumpily aloof, the Vulture was a screeching maniac of a bird. Steve flew him from the arena to Paul, who was standing at the top of a bank at the bottom of the castle ramparts, maybe twenty feet above us and a hundred yards away. The Vulture took off from Steve's wrist and soared over the corner of the arena, never flying more than six or seven feet from the ground as he rose up the bank to Paul. This meant that the spectators standing at that corner got a particularly up close and personal view of him - cue much gasping in surprise and ducking out of the way as this utterly insane creature made pass after pass.

When the vulture finally skulked into the holding pen at the side of the arena*** we were introduced to Merlin the bald eagle. Merlin is a much younger bird than the venerable Archie - who is twenty four years old and also happens to be Merlin's dad. Again, his display was much like the bald eagle display from the morning show, although it was spiced up by Steve's trick of throwing food into the air for Merlin to catch, and the fact that Merlin ran away for a bit - after three or four circuits instead of looping round the back of the castle and returning to the glove, he just buggered off. This worried Steve a little. Not because he feared losing his eagle "he'll come back when he's hungry" was the attitude there. Now he was worried because the final bird to be flown that day was Nikita the Stella's Sea Eagle. She's slightly bigger than Archie and Merlin, and he was concerned that if Merlin tried to come back to the glove at the same time as Nikita he would basically be squashed flat under their combined weight.

Still, he gave it a go, and I'm pretty glad he did because Nikita was something else. Bigger than all the other birds we'd seen so far, she was clearly finding the blustery conditions difficult. This led her to approach the glove by sort of parachuting down almost vertically from a great height. She was amusingly wobbly, in a deadly sort of way. With the assistance of Paul the Falconer, who by this time was stationed on the castle walls, Steve then got Nikita to fly to the top of one of the towers, where she looked positively mythical. As I said, these two shows would have been worth the price of admission on their own.

In between these two eagle shows of course, we had to fit the rest of our day, so let me take you back in time a bit to the end of the first show. It had finished at lunch time, and so we set off in search of something to eat. This turned out to be a more difficult and depressing quest than any knight of old had undertaken. It would appear that, at the present time, Warwick Castle is not a tourism destination that aims to attract the gourmet.

There was, to be fair, rather a lot of choice. In the undercroft beneath the State Rooms in the inner courtyard there was a carvery. Now, under normal circumstances the word "carvery" on a restaurant sign is all we need to make us keep moving, but we checked it out anyway. I think all I need to tell you about this place was that the entrance was also the entrance to the toilets. I'm not kidding. Not being carvery fans in the first place, we decided to pass.

That left us the selection of burger, hotdog and noodle type kiosks in and around the inner courtyard.  We might well have given those a go - I for one am always up for a burger - but the weather was looking dodgy and the idea of eating outdoors was frankly unappealing. That left us with just one choice. We headed back to the main gate, and the Coach House family restaurant.  I have to say that, food snobs as we are, our expectations were not high.

We were still massively disappointed.

My wife ordered a chicken sandwich of some kind. It might well have been the case that a chicken had been sighted in the vicinity of the bread, tomato and lettuce combination she was eventually served but I think it's safe to say that it didn't stop. As for my burger. Well. As previously stated, I'm always up for a good burger. As the old joke would have it, "there's nothing like a good burger, and this was nothing like a good burger". It was trendy enough, they served it on a board and everything. It was, however, barely edible. It wasn't the worst burger I've ever eaten**** but it ran a very very close second.

This was, frankly, tragic. I mean, it's not as though they didn't care. At least three times during what I'm going to refer to as our "meal" the chef, or at least a man in chef's whites, came and asked us if everything was OK. I suppose we could have been honest, but I doubt there would have been anything they could have actually done if we had been. I mean, how would you react to somebody telling you that their work was so poor you actually don't know where to start describing your levels of dissatisfaction? Besides, Warwick Castle is a corporate enterprise. The poor schmuck in the kitchen probably had less control over the slop he was forced to cook than we did. Giving him aggro about it just seemed unsporting.

To add insult to injury, lunch still set us back the thick side of thirty quid. I can just about tolerate cheap food when it's actually cheap, but this, frankly was just taking the micky. It really wouldn't have been hard to do the same thing, for the same price, with decent ingredients. The staff clearly cared about what they were doing, they just needed to be given better tools to do it with. My honest advice though, is that if you ever go to Warwick Castle, take a picnic.

As you can imagine, we didn't linger over lunch, and set off back into the inner courtyard to see what we could see. On the way we passed another of the myriad of Medieval Peasants who haunt the castle grounds. He was standing at the edge of the fortification ditch which surrounds the courtyard walls shooting arrows at a target on the other side. We paused to watch for a second, and soon found ourselves in conversation with the archer. It's a conversation that will long reside in my memory as one of those totally unexpected pleasures life sometimes drops in your path.

He was a fantastically knowledgeable and enthusiastic man who regaled up with stories about great feats of archery from history and the power of the longbow. He explained how the archer was deployed in battle, and why English and Welsh archers were so successful against the French. He explained the different types of arrow that would be deployed against different types of target. And then, with a sheepish grin, he apologised for "coming over all history channel" on us, and took off to collect his arrows from the other side of the ditch.

After out little impromptu history lesson, we'd come over all cultural again, so we ventured back inside the castle (just as the sun came out, thus also illustrating our impeccable sense of timing) to explore a late Victorian house party, referred to in the guidebook as "A Royal Houseparty, 1898", but in the signage as "Secrets and Scandals", presumably because somebody in marketing finally got around to visiting the exhibition and reacted to the stories contained within in much the same way I did - that upper class life in the late nineteenth century was essentially an edition of Jeremy Kyle waiting to happen!

I have to say, the whole thing was brilliantly done and both The National Trust and English Heritage could learn some lessons from the way history is presented at Warwick. We'd seen waxworks when we toured the State Rooms earlier in the day, and so were expecting them here too. What I wasn't expecting was for the woman sitting at the writing desk in the first room on the tour to stand and greet us with a polite "good day". As one might expect, she was the epitome of courtesy and grace, and avoided falling into the trap of being pushy and making the visitors join in, which so many costumed historical role players do.

The conceit here is simple. In 1898 the Countess of Warwick threw a weekend party for some selected guests - including a young Winston Churchill and the Prince of Wales. As you tour the reception rooms, bathrooms, bedrooms and library you come across these characters (in waxwork form, the graceful and courteous woman was the only actor involved) who, through the medium of recordings, video and "hand written" display boards tell you their stories.

So, you discover that The Countess's youngest daughter was not the daughter of the Earl and that she'd had a long affair with the Prince of Wales which she'd recently ended because she'd fallen in love with somebody else (who also wasn't her husband). Apparently when the Prince got her letter informing him that she no longer wished to have "Mistress status" he was so moved by the beauty of her letter that he showed it to his wife, who thought it was lovely.

Seriously, I'm not making any of this up.

Meanwhile the young Winston is telling anyone who will listen about the wonderful new weapons with which he is looking forward to quelling the Empire with, aristocratic women gossip in bedrooms and the point is made that the rules by which this society operated were not the rules that everyone imagines. Victorian prudery was a feature of the middle class, but the aristocracy were shagging around all over the place. The only difference between them and the folk who now appear on Jeremy Kyle was the fact that they didn't talk about it.

The tour ends in the bedroom of the Price of Wales, who is gazing at a portrait of his former lover, the Countess. But because this is Warwick Castle and not a National Trust property, the portrait talks to you***** and gives you a final insight into the lives that the inhabitants of the castle lived in her day. All of that is contrasted by the occasional glimpse you get of the servants.

 The tour is possibly the best history lesson I've ever had, and certainly many orders of magnitude better than the tours of National Trust owned properties I've visited over the years. Normally when you visit a country house you get a sense that time has stopped, that everything is frozen in aspic for polite people to enjoy quietly. Here there was a real sense that the visitor is involved - there's a genuine buzz, and a very pleasing absence of velvet ropes - at Warwick you're not kept away from the exhibits, you're encouraged to explore and interact. We were surprised and impressed, let me tell you.

By this time, the day was getting on, and we wanted to make sure we got as much value as we could out of our tickets. I couldn't resist taking a walk on the castle walls, so I took off up a very very steep flight of stairs while my wife, who dislikes heights, explored the courtyard and waited for the next free show, the "Warwick Warriors" to start.

There's a sign at the entrance to the rampart walk which warns the unsuspecting visitor that the walk is one way, and that it involves many steep steps. Now I've taken that walk I have to say they need to put that warning in a much MUCH larger font. There are three towers on the route, the first has a staircase that is very long and very steep, the second is even longer, even twistier and even steeper. The third is no picnic either. These were the stairs that Paul the Falconer would later have to sprint up during the second eagle show, and so the reason I concluded that Steve the Falconer was either the senior partner, or the lucky one. 

The view from the top is fabulous, but once I'd got there and was contemplating the walk back down I couldn't help thinking that the whole thing would have been massively improved by the addition of either a fireman's pole or a zipwire. In the absence of such means of getting down, the walk did begin to feel a bit like a really long queue, as the stairs and walkways are narrow, and there is therefore no way of walking faster than the person in front.

Still, I got down eventually, and just in time to see the Warwick Warriors perform in the middle of the courtyard's central lawn. My wife had spent an amusing twenty minutes watching more Medieval Peasants chasing ducks and peacocks out of the display area, but by the time I got there tow knights in armour were battling away with big shiny swords while another man urged them on. As the fight concluded this "ringmaster" character shouted "MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS FIGHTING! THAT'S HOW IT WAS DONE!"

Then, item by item, he explained why, in fact, what we'd just witnessed was utter, utter nonsense. "See this shield?" he cried, holding up one of the metal shield shaped shields the knights had been using. "USELESS!" The shield was hurled away as he explained why metal shields were no good on a battlefield. Wooden shields, covered in leather would absorb the force of a blow. A metal shield would not.

We went on to learn that most sword fights lasted no more than a few seconds, and that the maces that bishops and senior clergy would carry into battle satisfied the clerical prohibition on edged weapons, but would still turn your head into coleslaw. This last point was demonstrated by hitting a cabbage - which we were told is roughly the same density of the human brain - with the kind of mace known as a "nobbler". The end result was, indeed, coleslaw, which I presume was later gathered up and served in the coachyard restaurant.

Because we were anxious to get to the falconry arena before the start of that second show, so we didn't see the end of the Warwick Warriors. As we left they were engaged in a spirited discussion about the merits of a big sword when compared against a pole axe. Given that the purpose of the show was to bust some myths, I would imagine that the pole axe won.

And that was it. A very full day indeed. We arrived at just before ten thirty, and left at about five in the afternoon. At no point during the day were we bored, and if you ignore the food, we were not disappointed by any of the sights and shows either. On that measure, Warwick Castle has to qualify as a good day out - especially when you consider that there were free shows we didn't have time to see. There had been an Arthurian "Sword in the Stone" display and some jousting that we'd missed while doing other things - another reason to take a picnic which you can eat while watching stuff.

If I were to criticise the place, then the walk from the car park to the main entrance was a pain, and I really didn't like the many ways they kept trying to squeeze an extra quid out of you. For example, for a fiver, I could have fired three arrows at a target. Children could, for a fee visit the "Knight School" enclosure to learn how to handle the wooden sword they'd just been sold, and then pay to paint their own shield. I shudder to think how much money your kids would want you to spend on them while they were there. Even while we were watching the Warwick Warriors free show a man came to try and sell us a flag...

Still, all the optional additional charges are optional, and as I said, there was more than enough stuff that was included in the price to fill our day. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and I'd recommend the place to anyone. Just make sure you don't pay full price for your tickets!

*Or at least what Warwick Castle thinks its customers think a medieval peasant dressed like. Imagine any of the extras in BBC's Merlin and you're about there.

**Actually not entirely true. I once sat on a boat in the rain at the far end of Loch Dubh while a very excited man pointed at two dots at the top of the cliff above us. He assured me that they were golden eagles. After a bit, the dots flew off. The eagles at Warwick were a little more in your face than that...

***And he really did skulk. It's the most descriptive word I can think of for the way he moved.

****That was in a hotel on the north coast of Scotland. If I ever get over the trauma I may tell you about it someday.

*****because it is a video screen, obviously...