Wray Castle, England

Wray Castle in the Lake District looks like a rather gaudy version of a medieval castle. It is in fact the product of the Victorian Gothic craze.

Wray Castle entrance (with working portcullis!)

Back of the castle

James Dawson had the castle built in 1840 after his wife inherited a large fortune. He died in 1875 and the castle and lands passed through various relatives. In 1929 the estate was donated to the National Trust. It came without furnishings so most of the rooms are empty.

The castle is being refurbished a bit. In the library, they are recreating the  original look by painting shelves on the wall. The project is ongoing as we visited, so there were plenty of books without any titles!

Adding bookshelves the easy way

The library fireplace

The children were more interested in the castle building room, which is a large room by the front (maybe the original dining room?) that has foam blocks perfect for making one's own castle.

J makes a tower taller than himself!

L makes a roof for her castle

Inside L's castle

The former office had a display on the restoration and maintenance of the castle, including a computer hooked up to a camera on the roof. A small joystick let visitors move the camera around. We almost couldn't get J away from this!

L dressed up as a worker in the office

Further on is the Morning Room, which has a nice breakfast nook and various samples of wallpaper they are thinking of putting up.

Morning room with swatches

Very ornate fireplace

Down the hall is the servants' quarters and kitchen, no longer in use and still in need of some TLC.

Cupboard in need of restocking!

Fireplace in need of some work

Upstairs has even more interactivity for the children. A small closet had "jellyfish bean bags" as L called them. They are perfect for crashing on, if you are a small child. Next door is a crafts room where children can make crowns or draw pictures.

Cushy room

Crafty Room

Across the way is the dress up area, featuring a throne room and indoor castle. J also loved this and had a hard time leaving the castle within the castle.

Dressed up for the throne room

Queen Mum and Sir J

The castle will not be left undefended!

Other rooms upstairs chronicle the (relatively) brief history of the castle. Beatrix Potter (she of Peter Rabbit fame) spent a summer here when she was 16 years old. She later moved to the area and bought up a lot of the nearby property.

Photo of, um, Beatrix Potter

At the front of the castle is a billiards room. The National Trust has acquired a table and is in the process of putting it back together so visitors can play a bit.

Billiards Room with pieces of the slate table on the sides

Nice ceiling!

Another upstairs room has been converted into countryside, including some tree stumps that showed how old the trees were.

Enter through the gate!

The house is quite well outfitted for children to play and is probably very popular on rainy days in the Lakes District. We had nice weather during our summer visit and couldn't complain of crowds.

View from the front door gate of the castle

The children really enjoyed visiting this castle and were sad to leave. We bought ice creams at the shop on the way out, so that brightened at least L's mood.

Lake District Bit and Bobs, England

Here's some stuff from the Lakes District that didn't merit their own posts.

Keswick is one of the little towns in the area that has a nice museum/art gallery and a pencil museum. We thought the pencil museum might not be interesting to the children and the art gallery/museum was closed for renovations, so we had a snack in town instead. We found a fun shop by going through this passage:

We didn't see any packhorses in the court, just a colorful name I suppose.  Yes, sometimes L prefers her jacket to be backwards.

Grasmere is famous for its gingerbread shop. In addition to local poet William Wordsworth, of course. The gingerbread shop was started by Sarah Nelson in 1815 (when Wordsworth lived there) and the recipe has been handed down from owner to owner faithfully for two hundred years. It still tastes great. The shop didn't have any parking so my wife ran in and we tried the stuff back at our hotel.

J-approved gingerbread

Proof that it's the real thing

We had a brief stop in Windermere (the town, not the lake) to get some tourist information. We saw a fancy hotel on a hilltop and a fancy store selling all sorts of housewares.

Windermere Hotel with the Lakeland sign and the train station

The streets are typical town thoroughfares--slightly narrow and largely charming.

A pub we didn't stop at

Typical busy street

Fell Foot Park, Lake District, England

At the south end of Lake Windermere is Fell Foot Park, a National Trust site that is mostly parkland. Of course it has the usual tea shop and playground. We visited both.

The tea shop had some really good stuff. Bacon and sausage butties satisfied our hunger and gave us energy to explore the playground. On our way, we saw an unusual boat house and some barbeques that we couldn't quite figure out either.

The tea shop

Boat house with an interesting gate

Barbeque?

The lake was quite picturesque if a bit high. The past day or two had been rainy, raising the level of the water. The boats didn't seem to mind.

Not much beach left

The kids led us quickly away from the boring lake to the exciting playground. It has a lot of the classics that the kids like--zip lines, bouncy riders, and various climbers.

L zips!

J zips!

Riding the duck

Rope ladder climber

Logs aplenty!

L is not quite tall enough for this one yet

New to us was the small maze perfect for their size.

L escapes the maze!

A hanging sailboat made things exciting for everyone. It was big enough for adults to get in. The three-point suspension made for some semi-realistic tossing sea motion.

L in a wobbling boat

J and L finished up their visit with a climb in a tree, which is part of their 50 Things to Do Before You're 11 and 3/4 challenge.

Separate but equal efforts

L happy to be free from shoes!

Rydal Cave Hike, Lake District, England

During our visit to the Lake District, we wanted to hike out to one of the caves. We parked by St. Mary's Church in Rydal. The trail head was across a busy street. The trail itself is across a swollen (at least it was swollen at the time) river, the Rothay.

Cautious children

What's that tree doing in the middle of the river?

The path soon rose up the hillside, leading us to some greener pastures.

A nice meadow

Our way led to a stile separating the path from a small road. The children have mastered stile-technology, so getting through was no problem.

Stile in the distance

The kids didn't even need my help

The road became a spooky path after a short way.

Expecting the Headless Horseman any minute!

The hill is leaking!

The path brought us out to some amazing views of Rydal Water and the nearby hills.

Rydal Water

J and a hill

A spooky tree--they should move it back by the road!

With the recent rains, plenty of little waterfalls and rivulets were pouring down the hill.

J washed out by a waterfall

Subterranean river becomes terranean!

A full creek

Sadly, the hill wasn't the only thing getting wet. The children's feet were a little water-logged and they became grumpier as they went along. Eventually, they decided to turn back. I went on for another couple of minutes and discovered the cave!

The turn in the path to the cave

The cave in August camouflage

The entrance

Unfortunately a small but substantial chasm separated the cave from the path where I was. I could have climbed down and back up (maybe) but it would have taken too long to catch up with Mommy and the children.

A pity about the pit, it was worse than the picture shows

I headed back down the path and soon caught up with the children. We did see the hills again and played some poohsticks at the river before we returned to the car.

Hill with a farm on the left

The Raging Rothay

A quick trip back to the hotel provided dry socks and shoes so we could have other adventures.