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...