As you may have gathered, we love a good castle. As the
afternoon sun finally began to challenge the drizzle and greyness we decided to
round off our day on Dartmoor with a visit to a little Motte and Bailey style
affair in the picturesque village of Lydford.
Snuggling cosily in the stage coach route between Okehampton
to the North and Tavistock to the south the collection of pretty stone cottages
sits on the site of "Hlidan", an Anglo Saxon settlement founded by
Alfred the Great as part of his fortifications against the Vilkings, who were
ravaging his kingdom from the east, and the Cornish, who were lying in wait on
the other side of the Tamar, presumably waiting to overwhelm the Devonian
locals with savoury baked goods.
Just slightly north of the village is the rather beautiful
Lydford Gorge, a natural feature cut into the rock by the force of the river
Lyd. This steep sided river gorge sports a pretty spectacular thirty metre high
waterfall and "The Devil's Cauldron", a deep pothole. I don't know
any of this from personal experience, mind you, because the site is owned by
The National Trust, who would have charged us £5.90 each for the privillage of
having a quick look. Earlier in the day we might have forked out, but we were
not that far from closing time and after a quick discussion we decided that it
probably wasn't worth it.
After all, we are
from Yorkshire, which means two things. First of all, the Yorkshire Dales are
literally ten minutes from our front door, which means that if we want river
gorges, incredibly high waterfalls and deep potholes, we don't have to go all
the way to Dorset to find them. It also means that, as Yorkshire natives, we're
as tight as the proverbial duck's arse and as a result there was no way we were going to fork out the thick end of twelve quid to see
something we could see closer to home for free.
So, we pulled a U turn quicker than a cabinet
minister with an unpopular policy and headed back to Lydford proper, pulling in to the ample (and free)
public car park opposite the pub. Because we're all high tech and cutting edge, (and
because it was free - I mentioned that we were tight didn't I?) I'd downloaded English Heritage's audio guide
onto my 'phone (thanks to the free WIFI in the pub the day before - sometimes I
bloody love living in the future) so we didn't cross the road to the castle
immediately.
Instead the guide directed us to turn right out of the car park
and down the road a bit to a little field on the right hand side of the road
near the old post office. It's not an obvious landmark, and had the guide not
directed us there we wouldn't even have noticed this unremarkable little patch
of grass. Aside from a slight mound running through it seems to be completely
featureless. That mound is important though - because it's the remains of Anglo
Saxon defensive earthworks, which means it's a direct physical connection to
the men and women who defended Alfred's kingdom of Wessex more than a thousand
years ago.
An unimpressive bump in a field to some, perhaps, but to me it's basically time travel, and I love time travel!
Still, there is a limit to the amount of time even the most
avid archaeology fan can spend looking at a bump in a field, so we turned
ourselves around and ambled back towards the castle, which stands next to the
pub on the northern edge of the village. The castle is administered and
maintained by the fine folks at English Heritage, is free to enter and is open
at all times. If you don't have the handy audio guide on your 'phone as we did,
there are plenty of helpful display boards around the place. I'd recommend you
watch your step, and probably don't go there in the dark - the hill that the
castle stands on is smallish but reasonably steep, and the interior of the
castle itself boasts steep staircases and some pretty hefty drops.
As castles go, it's a reasonably modest affair - and this
might well be because technically it isn't a castle at all. As I said at the
top of the post, it looks like a
pretty standard Motte and Bailey castle, a two storey square stone tower atop a
small, steep hill. It seems to me rather likely that it's meant to look like that, but it is in reality something of an
architectural fraud. It's certainly old - the castle we see today was built in
the thirteenth century - but it wasn't built as a castle, and it wasn't built on a hill.
The audio guide informs me that back when the structure was
first put together it was in fact a three storey tower with the ground floor at
what is now street level. The "hill" that the two visible storeys now
appear to stand on was actually added later, basically by piling copious amounts
of rubble and soil around the ground floor, so that the top of the mound
effectively turned the first floor into the ground floor. It seems that at the
time this was done, most of the former ground floor was filled in with rubble,
leaving only a small "dungeon" type space. That rubble has now been
cleared, and if you make your way down the steepish metal stairs and examine
the walls you can clearly see where there used to be doors and windows.
For most of its active life this "castle" was a
prison and courtroom, serving as an office of the royal Forest of Dartmoor, and
also housed the "Stannery Court", which had jurisdiction over the
Devonian tin mines, and the miners that worked in them. The Stannery Court made
the place infamous for its ferociously hard line approach to
"justice". The Lydford website gives this chilling example of the
kind of punishment that could be meted out here:
" the penalty
upon any miner found guilty of adulterating tin for fraudulent purposes was
that three spoonfuls of molten tin should be poured down into his throat."
In other words, not just "death" but "really
horrible and painful death".
The place was also used by the Royalists to imprison
captured Parliamentarians during the Civil War. It's not all incarceration and
misery, mind you. Lydford was also the site of a royal mint in Anglo Saxon
times, and the silver "Lydford Pennies" were valid as currency throughout
Wessex. Indeed, some of them made it to Scandinavia - perhaps pillaged by the
very Viking Raiders that Alfred the Great founded Hlidan to defend against.*
We really liked Lydford and its castle. I suppose it helps that
we visited the place in the sunny afternoon of what had been a pretty bleak and
miserable day, but it really was a pretty little place, and it's always fun to
have free reign of a "castle" - even a slightly fraudulent one.
Should you find yourself on Dartmoor I'd recommend giving it a look. There's
also a rather nice church that's also worth a look by all accounts, situated just
next to the castle, and the earthworks of the original Anglo Saxon castle just
on the other side of that.
Sadly we missed both of these landmarks because by the time
we'd done with the castle it was starting to get a bit dark and we were keen to
head back to the 'van. Maybe next time, eh?
*Oh, alright, it's equally possible that they were given as
payment for goods the Vikings were trading - either way they have a rather nice
collection of the little silver critters in the Stockholm museum...
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