Wales: Chirk Castle

I spent just one day in Wales during this trip to the UK – some day I will return to explore further. This post describes the first half of our day trip, to visit the amazing Chirk Castle, and the Chirk and Pontcysyllte Aqueducts – more on those two incredible feats of engineering in the next blog.

We set off at 10am and didn’t get home till 9pm so it was a very long but truly splendid, action-packed day. After an hour’s drive, leaving behind the bountiful farmland of the Cheshire Plains for the rolling hills and valleys of north Wales, we arrived in the little town of Chirk and easily found our way to their impressive castle – my only castle visit on this trip but what a cracker!

Chirk is part fortress and part family home. Built between 1295 and 1310 by Roger Mortimer de Chirk, it was originally part of Edward I’s ‘Iron Ring’, a chain of fortresses built across northern Wales to keep the rebellious supporters of Welsh ruler Llewellyn-ap-Graffyd in check. The land was granted to Mortimer for his role in killing Llewellyn and his two young sons. 

Though not particularly tall, Chirk is still a formidable structure, hunkering down on top of a hill, perfectly positioned for defence. What we see today, however, is not what the castle originally looked like, as this illustration from a signboard at the castle clearly shows. The front third of the castle, comprising two drum towers, and the barbican gate on the south side, are now gone. This may well be a reflection of the castle’s history. During the Civil War in 1644, the governor of the castle had his men use stones from the battlements to drive off an attack by parliamentary forces.

During the medieval period Chirk’s fortunes swung between glory and disgrace – five of its owners were executed for treason, and during the Tudor period Chirk Castle was held by the crown, until Elizabeth I gave it to her favourite Robert Dudley. In 1595 Chirk was sold for £5000 (that’s the equivalent of 12 million pounds in today’s money) to Thomas Myddleton, a rich merchant who rose to become Lord Mayor of London. He was the one responsible for converting the castle from fortress to family home, and Chirk remained in the Myddleton family for the next 400 years, until it passed to the National Trust in 2004.

One of the staterooms, with its amazing ceiling

The Long Gallery, left, and the dining room, right

Evidence from its military past and a charming sign in the servant's hall

The castle’s life as a fortress is very apparent, in the crenellated battlements, in the interior displays of coats of arms and old weapons, in the guard tower with its eerie dungeon deep below ground. But the interior also provides ample evidence of the wealth, the status, and the eclectic nature of its various occupants. The staterooms are magnificently appointed, with the intricately decorated ceilings I love so much, with lavish furnishings and tapestries, there's a fabulous 17th-century Long Gallery and a well-stocked library – my neck was craning in all directions to take in the splendour of it all.

And the gardens were equally magnificent, with beautiful rose gardens close to the house, a clipped and shaped yew hedge, long expanses of lawn edged with glorious borders of flowers and shrubs, a small pond with waterlilies, some large old specimen trees, a double Haha (a Hahaha?) overlooking fields of sheep, and a lime tree avenue with a large statue of Hercules as the focal point at the top of the rise.

Hercules, a lead statue that was commissioned by Robert Myddleton in the 1720s, was my particular favourite. He used to stand outside the castle’s main entrance, with a companion figure of Mars, but, poor chap, he was moved to an outlying woody area in the 1770s. And there he languished, away from the public’s gaze, quietly deteriorating until the R.A.F. used one of their helicopters to rescue him in 1983. The National Trust has since restored him and placed him in this prime position in the avenue.

As well as the 5.5 hectares of garden surrounding the castle, its 480-acre grounds also include longer woodland walks and, apparently, a well preserved section of Offa’s Dyke. Unfortunately, we had lots more to see so needed to move on – but, before we left this superb place, we got photos of the very grand, though now mostly disused entrance gates and the very pretty flower-festooned black-and-white gatekeeper’s cottage.

Details of our adventures during the rest of this one-day visit to Wales follow in the next blog.

The gatekeeper's cottage and the entrance gates

A summerhouse in the gardens

England: Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire

This must surely be my favourite of all the historic places I visited in the UK on this trip!

The Tudor-era Little Moreton Hall, a wonky black-and-white complex of buildings, was built progressively from the late 1400s to around 1610. As the Moreton family’s wealth accumulated and they wanted to impress their peers and betters, they added extra wings to their manor house, which now ranges around three sides of a central courtyard.

We took a guided tour so had an informed introduction to some of the history and features of the house. In the Great Hall sits the trestle table where the lord of the manor would have sat to eat. The table consists of two separate pieces, the supporting trestle and the one long wide piece of wood that sits on top, the board. As our guide explained, a lot of modern English expressions originate from that board. For example, when you played games on it, you were playing ‘board games’. To ensure you didn’t cheat at those board games, you had to keep your hands ‘above board’.

Actors would stand on top of the table so everyone could see them perform, hence the expression ‘treading the boards’. A couple of smaller planks would be fixed to the walls to hold the cups, hence the word ‘cupboard’. ‘Board and lodging’ refers to food and accommodation because the guests’ food was served on the board. ‘Half board’ and ‘full board’ comes from the same idea and depended on how much food was placed on the board for the lodger to eat. ‘Sideboard’ came from moving the board and trestle to the side of the side of the room to make space for other things, like dancing. Fascinating stuff!

There were many more interesting things to be found in the sparsely furnished interior. The bed is a modern reconstruction of a traditional Tudor four-poster, with a truckle bed alongside that was pulled out from under the main bed at night for the occupant’s servant to sleep in. The drapes on the four-poster were for privacy, as much as for keeping out the drafts! Next to the bedroom is one of the house’s toilets, an exceedingly drafty garderobe. Did you know clothes were stored next to these rooms because the stink of ammonia (from the urine) helped keep the moths and other insects at bay?

One particularly striking feature, to be found in the Parlour adjacent to the Great Hall, is the wall paintings, dating from c. 1575-80, which were only discovered behind the Georgian wood panelling in 1976. The paintings include imitation marble and Biblical scenes, some painted directly onto the plaster and others painted on paper which was then pasted on to the walls.

Two impressive fireplaces can be seen by visitors, both dating from Elizabethan times. The one in the Upper Porch Room (above right) depicts the figures of Justice and Mercy, on either side of the Moreton coat of arms and those of the Macclesfield family – John de Moreton married Margaret de Macclesfield in 1329.

Little Moreton Hall was almost completely constructed of green oak, which is partly why nothing is square or right-angled, with undulating floors and skewed window-frames. It’s the Victorians who were responsible for the black and white colour of these old buildings – originally the oak was just left to weather so would have ranged in colour from brown to silvery-grey and the plaster, which includes cow dung, would have been a more creamy colour.

The 68-foot-long Long Gallery (above) was a late edition at the top of the southern range, meaning the two floors underneath it were not intended to carry its weight, meaning its floor is extremely wonky and the whole has had to be reinforced with an ‘invisible’ steel support structure to prevent the house from falling down. The Long Gallery became popular during Elizabethan and Jacobean times, as a place to entertain guests and a place to walk for exercise when the weather outside was inclement.

The Hall Porch (above left), constructed around 1480, has some particularly fine examples of the type of decorations popular in those times. According to a signboard at the house: ‘The Elizabethans delighted in “grotesques” – an unnatural or un orderly composition for delight sake, of men, beasts, birds, flowers, etc ... They also loved “dainty” and intricate patterns, derived from the Moslem “moresque” and Flemish strapwork, and used them to embellish everything from friezes, windows and ceilings to gardens.’ In this photo of the porch, you can see trailing vine designs, cable mouldings in the columns on either side of the doorway, and the very popular quatrefoil patterns that were carved out of solid wood.

I particularly liked the wide range of window designs to be found throughout the house, with patterns of rectangles and squares, circles and triangles that all seem to complement the decoration of the timber framing. 

The large bay windows (above) were added to the Great Hall in 1559, as you can tell from the words that run along their tops: "God is al in al thing: This windous whire made by William Moreton in the yeare of oure lorde MDLIX” and above one of the windows on the ground floor (shown here at left): “Richard Dale Carpeder made thies windous by the grac of God." 

Note the small line above and between the letters ‘e’ and ‘d’ in the word ‘carpeder’ – this indicates that the person painting the inscription realised they’d left a letter out.

Little Moreton Hall is one of the most fascinating, atmospheric, intriguing, pretty, evocative, engrossing, and enchanting places I have ever visited. If it’s possible to fall in love with a house, then I did that day. The whole place seems to have been lifted straight out of a fairy tale!