Kenilworth Castle - Celia Rees

Kenilworth Castle from the remains of Mortimer's Tower (the main medieval entrance)

Last week, an old friend from New Zealand came to visit. We were thinking of places to go and I mentioned nearby Kenilworth Castle. By coincidence, Kenilworth was the first castle she'd visited when she came to the UK as a student to study at Oxford. It was the first castle she'd ever seen and she remembered marvelling at the size, the age, the beauty of the ruins. Although I only live a few miles away, I'd rather taken it's proximity for granted and hadn't actually visited for many years.  

Kenilworth Castle is one of the great historical sites. A royal castle for most of its life, it is one of the finest surviving monuments of its kind. It's big and impressive. Built of the local red sandstone, it sits on rising ground, on the outskirts of Kenilworth town, at the meeting of two ancient trackways and the confluence of two small rivers. 

The Great Tower

The oldest part of it, the Great Tower, was built by Geoffrey de Clinton in the 1120s. It was added to significantly by King John who dammed the two streams, flooding the low lying land around, so the castle was surrounded by a wide body of water called 'the mere'. The top of the dam was widened to become a tiltyard, used for jousting and tournaments. 

John of Gaunt's Great Hall. 

Leicester's Building

The castle changed hands, as castles do. It  was granted to Simon De Montfort who then lost it after his defeat at the Battle of Evesham by Henry III. Kenilworth was an exceptionally strong fortress, surrounded by water, with an Inner and Outer Court and high curtain walls. Some of De Montfort's followers withdrew to the castle and withstood the longest siege in English medieval history only to be defeated by starvation and disease.  Henry  III granted Kenilworth to his younger son, Edmund, who became the Earl of Lancaster. The Lancastrians set about making it even more impressive, John of Gaunt adding a Great Hall. 

The castle remained in Lancastrian, then Tudor hands until it was granted to John Dudley by Henry VIII in gratitude for services rendered. 

Kenilworth then came to John's son, Robert, Earl of Leicester and favourite of Elizabeth I. In a bid to impress the Queen and to improve his rather shaky social status, Robert Dudley embarked on extensive improvements to the castle, adding the tower block known as Leicester's Building specifically to provide private lodging for the Queen on her visits in 1572 and 1575. 

He had the mere re-flooded, so that she could go boating and created a Privy Garden for her private enjoyment. The garden has recently been restored by English Heritage. It was surrounded by high hawthorn hedges to protect the queen from prying eyes and furnished with a marble fountain, obelisks and an aviary. The parterre is set out with beds planted with herbs and flowers. Each bed has a central standard holly. In the language of flowers, the holly bush symbolises deep desire. A subtle, or not so subtle, message from Leicester to his queen. 

Leicester also added a new Gatehouse, the only part of the castle to survive intact the 'slighting' it got by the Parliamentarians after their victory in the English Civil War. The Gatehouse became a private dwelling, remained so until the 1960s and has only recently been opened to the public. 

Leicester's Gatehouse

After its 'slighting', the castle became a Romantic Ruin and an early tourist destination, popularised by Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth, painted by J. M. W. Turner, visited by Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria. It was rescued from completely falling down by bouts of restoration in the 19th and 20th centuries but Romantic Ruin is how I remembered it before this recent visit. English Heritage took over the care of the castle in 1984 and the extensive work that they have undertaken has transformed it, not only preserving and restoring the fabric of  the castle but making its history come alive. 

Sword play in the remains of the Collegiate Chapel 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

SNAGGLE-TOOTHED BEAUTY by H.M. Castor

Last week I returned, not to the county of my birth, but to the county of my growing-up: Warwickshire. In terms of castles and stately homes, the county has an embarrassment of riches, including Warwick Castle, Charlecote Park, Ragley Hall, Baddesley Clinton, Coughton Court, Upton House and Kenilworth Castle. This last is a ruin; having been a fortress palace of great importance for many centuries, used by monarchs from Henry II to Henry VII, and famous as the place where Robert Dudley played host to Elizabeth I for an exceptionally long visit (19 days) in 1575, it was then ‘slighted’ by the Parliamentarians during the Civil War – and descended gradually, thereafter, into a fully ruined state.

(‘Slighted’, incidentally, seems to me a rather marvellous term - it retains a whiff of the drawing-room faux pas while in fact meaning here the partial destruction of a building so as to make it useless as a stronghold. Poor Kenilworth Castle had its battlements, parts of its outer bailey and one wall of its great tower destroyed.)

I have visited Kenilworth many times over the years, and have always felt keenly what a shame it is that that castle is a ruin. I have spent my visits reconstructing it in my mind, putting in floors where none now exist…

…and viewing the bits of detailed decoration that do remain as grief-inducing indications of just how much we have lost:

Which, of course, they are. However, on last week’s visit, I decided to adopt a different attitude. I decided simply to look. Not at what Kenilworth would have been, or ought to be, but at what it is. At art exhibitions, I am a great one for conscientiously reading all the labels and somehow not giving myself enough time or mental relaxation to look properly at the pictures. So to look – for once – at the castle, as far as possible without interpretation, was my task.

Thus, this blog is something of a photo journal. And a photo journal without labels. I didn’t want to concern myself with which bit was built by John of Gaunt and which by Robert Dudley. (Though if you are interested in finding out more, there is a very full article on the castle here.)

I noticed, instead, the shapes made on the surface of the stone by centuries of exposure to the elements:

…and how the depredations of the weather have turned a set of worn steps into a water-smoothed cascade:

I looked at the rhythm of shapes:

I thought how, in some places, it was as if a hungry monster had simply bitten bits off the building:

And I marvelled at what a ruin gives you: a view of the secret textures of the building’s fabric – it’s like a cake or a loaf that’s been torn open, so that you can see beneath its crust:

Finally, of course, I looked at the unavoidable graffiti. In doing so I was reminded of Eleanor Updale’s comments in her recent blog here about the different values we place upon things depending on their age. For, while the recent graffiti gave me an outraged shudder, some of the older examples had me peering in fascination:

…and had they been still older they would have positively entranced me (show me 16^th century graffiti & I swoon!). Even so – and it must be the bibliophile in me – I admit I do always tend for fall for a nice font:

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK (where it is newly available in paperback - whoop!), and by Penguin in Australia.

H.M. Castor's website is here.