Everyone needs a local ruin – and this castle is (was?) mine! Today’s adventure was a local bus ride to Kenilworth to visit the castle, and dodging a few rain showers in the process. I’m gunna give you a basic history and then a massive photo dump!
Kenilworth Castle has a fab history. It was built initially in the 1120’s as a Norman-style keep – thanks to the royal chamberlain. Then a bunch of famous rich people (e.g. King John, John of Gaunt, Henry V, Robert Dudley (Earl of Leicester)) added on to it over the centuries with a heap of fancy-schmancy additions, walls, state rooms and lavish palace furnishings fit for a Queen (Queen Elizabeth I to be precise). It was a royal palace for much of it’s history, which peaked in the 1580s ish. It had a lake (mere) and hunting forests and a bunch of other stuff that rich people needed back then.
Then it got smashed and the lake drained in the 1650s after the English Civil War – the parliament dismantled fortifications to stop them being used by royalists (I think!). It went to ruin pretty soon after that (except for a gatehouse which people still lived in in the 1930s). The ruins became famous – thanks in part to Walter Scott’s 1821 novel ‘Kenilworth’, which romanticised the story of Robert Dudley, his wife, and Elizabeth I.
It is now a heritage site and has heaps of history to learn and a bunch of tourists like me walking all over it. There was an art exhibition in the ‘Great Hall’ (thats what the odd sculptures are in the images below).
