Bamburgh Castle

Since we have the school holidays upon us, and since my health is (infuriatingly slowly) getting back to normal, the lad and I took a trip down to Bamburgh Castle yesterday. It’s only an hour and a bit down the road from here, and I haven’t been there for years and years.

We managed to take the wet, wintry weather with us, so anyone in Northumberland who was enjoying the onset of Spring should have been warned of our coming, to be strictly fair. We loaded up our German refresher course on the car stereo and donned our arctic service underwear and off we went.

It was a good day out – I’m not going to attempt any sort of serious tourist review of Bamburgh – it was too cold for us to see everything on offer (we swerved the walk down to the sandhills – we can die of hypothermia doing that sort of thing at home).

There has been a fortification on this site for thousands of years, and it really is a terrific looking place, but somehow it doesn’t quite feel right for an ancient monument. It is a real place, with real history, but it has been destroyed a number of times – most notably by Edward the Kingmaker – and much of the rebuilding that has taken place has been aimed at making it a nice place to live. People still live there, for goodness sake, and the state rooms are in excellent condition. There was a hefty amount of refurbishment done in the 18^th Century, and the Earls of Armstrong (that’s the engineering Armstrongs) made it an elegant and comfortable home from the 1880s onwards.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s an excellent place to visit, but it doesn’t give you the immediate step-back into history you might expect. It’s all very well maintained and very obviously has buildings from all sorts of periods. They have an interesting little museum for the Armstrongs – mostly of aviation and marine specimens – and the state rooms hold a wealth of examples of armour and weapons.

I believe that in the village church there is a monumental window for a young cavalry officer killed at Waterloo, but we didn’t get that far. Too cold. Nick liked the tea-room and the dungeons best (he took the photos) – I think I liked the artillery pieces on the walls, which included a splendid 6-inch Georgian mortar and a carronade. Apparently the whole lot are about to get sand-blasted and refinished, so this will remove 200 years of paint in short order.

Nice castle – I liked it. It looks like a proper, kid’s idea of a castle, and it’s mostly in very good shape, which is why it has been used for so many films.    

Edinburgh Castle

Yesterday I took my son to visit Edinburgh Castle. We tried to get there last year, but found ourselves at the back of a 3-hour queue for tickets, so thought better of it. Yesterday we took advantage of a truly beautiful day and the slack tourist season, caught the local train from North Berwick, and we were at the Castle gates by 10:30 – excellent.

We had a really good trip. I can’t remember being at the castle for 20 years at least, though I used to go there a lot – for a little while I was doing some research at the Scottish United Services Library, courtesy of Bill Thorburn and Bill Boag, and I was a frequent visitor. Had a temporary pass and everything. That is as near as I ever got to being a military type.

It’s changed a lot. The War Museum is all newly laid out, and I think may be in a different building now – it’s very well done, anyway. I found Sir John Moore’s hat, and duly noted that the caption has been changed. They used to claim that it was the hat Moore was wearing at Corunna, but now it states that it is a hat previously owned by Moore, which was kept as a memento by his friend Lord Lynedoch (that’s Sir Thomas Graham to you and me). Let’s just assume it was on his head at Corunna, shall we?

We visited the Scots Dragoon Guards museum, and also the excellent little Royal Scots museum, which is just next to it, and which gets rather light traffic because the tourists have just done the Dragoon Guards, and it looks like it might be more of the same. Very good, anyway.

We watched the One-O’clock Gun being fired (BANG!), and enjoyed what was obviously an otherwise quiet day up there. Great views over the city and over the Forth Valley. We didn’t bother with the Scottish Crown Jewels – history or no, that’s girly stuff.

It’s good to take the trouble to visit your local tourist sites – it’s so easy to take them for granted.

The Grand Old Duke of York - at the top of the hill

Gunner's eye view - good position to put an 18pdr shot into the

Balmoral Hotel, or the Bank of Scotland, or the fantastically expensive

apartments in Patrick Geddes' lovely Ramsay Gardens

The Royal Scots storm San Sebastian - flat wooden figures

Issued to all storming parties

WW2 poster - I wonder how many servicemen spent their

leave helping with the harvest?

WW1 recruitment poster - the happy boys go off

to fight for the Empire 

To close, an old - and probably apocryphal - tale of Edinburgh's One-O'Clock Gun. I don't know much about the history of the gun, but it has been fired every day except Sunday for as long as anyone can remember, officially as a time-check signal for shipping in Leith Docks, but also as a tourist tradition and a sort of family planning aid for the city's pigeons.

At some unspecified time in the distant past, the story goes, it came to be the turn of some local reservist unit to carry out the ritual firing. The officer in temporary charge of the task found that the procedures, which involved telegraph messages from Greenwich and a dropped signal cone (on the Nelson Monument, at the far end of Princes Street), were far too complicated for the Reserves. Using his service issue binoculars, he could easily see the big clock in the concourse at Waverley Station, and so his boys duly fired the damn thing when that clock said one o'clock, and then, presumably, they retired for refreshment.

Sadly, the railway company also had procedures and traditions, and one of these was that they used to keep their station clocks five minutes fast to encourage their passengers to be there in time. On the first day of this new, improvised system, when the gun went off, a little man appeared at the station, checked his official pocket watch, shook his head and arranged for the clock to be advanced the regulation five minutes. The following day, the same - station clock shows one o'clock, boom, the man checks his watch and fixes the clock. After a few days things were getting very confused - the citizens of Edinburgh were disgruntled with the gun going off earlier and earlier, and the customers of the railway were not happy either. Goodness knows what the ships made of it all.

I think there are lessons there for all of us. If there are established ways of doing things, have a good think before you change anything.

And if you are out at night, wear something white.

Unless it's snowing.