connoisseur of castles?
I’ve spent a month and half in Europe this summer. Coming to a place that has such a different type of history than that I’m used to learning and seeing in the US has been so interesting. Europe to me has always been a little romanticized in my head because I’ve never left the US before this summer and so many great works of literature, both fact and fiction, take place here. Now the tragic characters of Shakespeare’s plays were not everywhere and I definitely was overdoing how amazing Europe was in my head, at least a little, there’s a part from my imagination that didn’t fail, all the castles!
In France, England and Ireland I’ve been to more castles than I ever thought I would see let alone be able to walk through. And while castles are great for many reasons (princesses being one of them) my interest in these castles took on a more preservation aspect even after the class had ended in Paris.
Compared to the castles or palaces we saw in France; the ones I saw in England were closer to Versailles or the louvre. Kensington palace and Windsor castle
had much more of the elegance you saw in the palaces in France. However, the preservation was a little different because of the fact that England still has an active monarchy that lives in these palaces and who owns the parts the public were allowed to go in. When I went to Windsor castle you could go into a separate wing from where the Queen and Prince Albert live now but you could see parts of the castle that were used more frequently in the past. You could see the war rooms and bedrooms of former kings and queens. Whereas in Versailles there weren’t whole wings of the palace where people lived now so you could walk through and see more. Windsor looked similarly to how it would have looked hundreds of years ago both inside and out. Kensington was a bit different because parts of were newly renovated and opened to the public. There were whole rooms in Victoria’s suite that had wall to wall carpeting which shocked me to see in a palace that was built hundreds of years ago, it also just did not look right. Kensington also being an active home for the royal family for generations was changed over and over again by its occupants. One of the tour guides there explained how when new German, protestant leaders came into Kensington in the 18th century they destroyed old furniture, threw out paintings never to be seen again and painted over ceiling artwork because they wanted it to look more like their home in Germany. Now this broke my preservations heart a little bit thinking of the furniture we could still have but it also is understandable because these castles were not just historical landmarks, they were people’s homes.
The castles in Ireland more closely resembled the medieval castle we saw in Provins in France. They seemed to be less about decadence and more about protection. I’m Particularly talking about Kilkenny castle and the Blarney castle. They both were former homes to powerful families in Ireland and were used as both watch towers and forts as well as homes. Kilkenny castle was beautifully preserved as well with original ceilings and artwork from when the family redid a room in the 19th century to grand staircases looking the same as to how it would’ve in the in the 17th and 18th centuries. You can walk through Kilkenny castle and truly see what it used to look like for the people who lived and worked there hundreds of years ago with little imagination because they have time period furniture and decorations in every room. The Blarney castle is not like that. It is more like a ruin of the castle that once was there because it is not preserved to look like how it once did. The cool part of that though was that you got to walk through it, up the tiny spiral staircases and into the rooms to get to the top of the castle where the famous blarney stone is. This allowed you to see just how narrow every doorway/ staircase was and how a castle would have been set up in the middle ages of the Irish country side you just had to use more imagination to picture what was inside because it was empty inside.
(Pictures are Windsor castle, inside Kilkenny castle and Blarney castle)