Warwick Castle

21^st May 2011

The UK has many castles some of which are in ruin; others have been turned into tourist destinations. We have been to many different types of both of these. This weekend we headed out to Warwick castle which is now for tourists. It is part of the Merlin group. This group owns most of the good theme parks in the UK, such as Alton Towers and Lego land just to name 2. We thought excellent let’s go to Warwick castle as it should be a good day out after all it’s run by the theme park experts. We had heard there are knights there and they also have jousting. This was going to be excellent…. it wasn’t. Turned out it was just alright with a big touch of let down.

We started the day by going to St Albans by train to get a car ride there with Craig (a lucky friend who has a car) and set off on the 1.5 hr journey to get there. We arrive around 11.30 am, to find a big queue for tickets. We have a 2-4-1 voucher, although there were 3 of us we had a plan. Find another odd group and ask them if they wanted in on the cheap ticket. The plan back fired as everyone else had the same 2-4-1 voucher or even better had a free ticket! Stuck now with a dilemma of asking almost everyone if they wanted a cheaper ticket or get some karma. We went with the karma, we got the 4^th discounted ticket and gave it away to someone who didn’t have a freebie for their group of 3 and were at the end of the queue. Know I can hear you asking “Glen if you found an odd group and gave them the ticket why didn’t you sell it to them?” that was because their 3^rd ticket was for an OAP (old age pensioner) so it was already discounted.

With our good karma deed done for the day we went inside. We notice there are a lot of kids around, I mean a lot! We quickly check the what’s on board to find out there is no jousting! The website doesn’t state when it will be on either just turn up and hope its on….gr8 plan. We see that the great trebuchet is on at 12. We walk very quickly and take our seat. 10mins later after hearing about how they wind it up and what happens with the firing they finally set it off. Sitting in anticipation as its about to fire………    then it goes, you hear nothing but see the weight drop and the arm go up and the rock or ball (not sure which) goes flying through the air, not a huge distance as the size of the trebuchet would suggest but a reasonable distance. They would have to be bloody close to a castle to cause any damage. All of this happened without any noise being heard by the crowd. That was it show was over.

Being disappointed as was most of the crowd (you can sense these things) we went on to watch the birds of prey flying around the castle. This was more interesting as the birds are pretty big and it’s cool to have them swooping over your head. We had to eat our lunch quickly and cover it so the birds would not attack us crazy seagull style for our food.

With the bird show over we headed in to the main section for a character tour of the main hall and private rooms of the castle. This was by far the best part and the actor who spoke to us was excellent. The crowd grew and grew at times it was hard to get into a room to hear him speak. It was good to hear about the history of the castle and more history of King Henry VIII.

Next on the list was the Mill where they produced electricity for castle. There was meant to be another character tour on here but we had to find the guy and ask him if it was happening. It was but it turned out to be a private tour. With him telling us the information about the mill and the power. Problem was he told us everything we already knew! While we were waiting for him to get there we read all the information boards. He just repeated what was on them.

I would suggest that the castle is fun for kids and it can be alright for adults. Just don’t go in with the mind that there will be knights with swords, jousting and all that cool medieval stuff you read about…it just isn’t there.