Woolly says – With Jo working for the summer season my days out are limited by her rota and apparently the need to get her second vaccine, MOT the car and spend some time with daughter Zoe, talk about feeling neglected! This week is the vaccine part and having considered my options and after a little research I had come up with a plan.
The Mammoth’s plans usually scare me but for once I felt he had a good idea.
Woolly says – I’m always full of good ideas it’s just that some people don’t recognise them! With number two vaccine scheduled for 2pm I made sure that my carer was up and ready to go giving us plenty of time to explore the days delights. The sun was beating down, Alfie was panting and our tires were heading to a small village near Oswestry called Whittington.
With a population of less than 2500 the village has been inhabited since prehistoric times, and may have been a Dark Age fortress of some note, with an extensive settlement recorded in the Domesday Book. As we pulled into the carpark it appeared to be a throughfare for traffic and not the sleepy hamlet I had hoped for. The main feature however looked most impressive.
Approaching the gate house, I considered the history of Whittington Castle.
The earliest structure on the site was a simple motte and bailey castle until William Peverel of Dover started work in 1138 to create the current structure. The title was passed to the Fitz-Warins in 1204 by King John. A Licence to Crenulate was issued for Whittington Castle in 1221 and in 1222 the castle was repaired and fortified, by 1223 the castle was being besieged by the Welsh leader Llywelyn the Great and was then given to Llewelyn Prince of Wales but was restored to the Fulk-Warins in 1282.
In 1638 the castle and lordship was acquired by marriage by the family of the Lloyds of Aston Hall which is situated 4km south of Whittington and this family has retained possession of the castle up to the present day. Over the years parts of it started to collapse and by the late 18th century the castle site was laid out as a fancy garden with pebble-laid walks and various brick structures, sadly but the 19th century it was no more than earth and vegetation covering the majority of it. Today it is a small rather quaint ruin.
The gatehouse was small and housed the usual shop that every castle requires in the 21st century with nothing of great note I wandered across the wooden bridge which provided access over the moated area which was now the local pond for the ducks, geese and swans.
The inner section consisted or a partly ruined tower which sported notices not to climb, this didn’t deter the one family who not only allowed the children to climb all over it but the father as well. Jo and I stood watching them and I could clearly see Jo’s stern teacher stare at their activities.
A short way across the courtyard was the now defunct well and a few foundations that gave little clue as to what they had once been, it was actually a tiny castle in comparison to many and I had to wonder how many people had been able to live there given the amount of land it covered.
Having wandered along the area where the original moat would have continued to run, we arrived at the café housed in the other side of the gate house to the gift shop less than twenty minutes after arriving.
I think we had both expected it to take more time and knowing that my small friend was disappointed I suggested some tea and cake and an opportunity to watch the bird life on the pond.
Woolly says – I never say no to a slice of Bara Brith and a cuppa and it turned into a rather pleasant half an hour. Having wiped the sticky crumbs over Jo’s jeans we wandered slowly down the drive and stood admiring the red brick Church of St John the Baptist which had been built in 1747 before turning and heading into a rather strange graveyard.
A war memorial stood in the middle a of large patch of green with some lovely old tombs along one side, at the far end was a rather curious site, that of a large number of gravestones all lying on the ground.
Obviously, they had been moved from their original site but you had to wonder where the bodies that had once been under them had ended up!
With the clock hands moving we drove through the lanes and onto the main road where the vaccine centre was currently housed, as Jo disappeared inside leaving me in charge of the mutt, I kept my paws crossed that she wouldn’t be so ill after this one and that it would allow us to travel more freely once the traffic light system allowed us to actually leave the country for somewhere we would enjoy.