Wales and other tales

One quick update before we discuss more interesting things - I've found an old version of Rhapsody and the music has been resurrected! Yippee!

So, the time has come to speak of many things, of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings...

First, my holiday at the beginning of June to Monmouth and the surrounding areas in Wales exceeded all of my expectations. The countryside in Wales, even in the borderlands, is quite green, hilly and beautiful. As an added bonus, Wales also happens to have one of the highest concentrations of still-standing British medieval castles and abbeys. So many in fact that during our 4 day visit we were able to visit 5 castles and 1 abbey without driving further than 10 miles from Monmouth!

Many of the castles we visited had similar structural features (as many were built in the original Norman "great keep" style of the 13th century), however often the castle sites were extremely distinctive. This distinctiveness often came as a result of who owned the site and the way in which it was open to the public. Since so many castles exist in Wales and are in various stages of ruin, not all of them are owned and 'open' by heritage or historic preservation organisations. Quite a few are actually owned by normal people who usually live in a home on the grounds and simply 'have a castle in their back yard.' If you think I might be throughly jealous of such people, you wouldn't be wrong.

My favourite of the castles we visited was Usk castle. It was one of these privately owned castle sites. The castle and site were cool for so many reasons, but the top 3 are:

1) It was totally unsupervised and you could climb all over the ruins and explore everything 'at your own risk'. We took full advantage of that. (see pictures below)

2) It had a little hole in the wall right when you walked in that had a sign under it that said 'look inside'. One of the scariest moments of my life. I'll just leave it at that.

3) The castle had 'guard geese' and a set of chickens running around the grounds (remember this is basically in someone's backyard). The Guard Geese rocked - they are such nasty buggers and I was quickly convinced that they are indeed more vicious than guard dogs. (see below)









Right, I'm going to have to hold off on spinning further yarns this evening as the time is getting late...stay tuned for the exciting description of my first music festival in the UK...