Castle Tour - Blending Ancient and Modern

 I was invited on a tour of the Castle, together with a couple of other ladies who have been involved in helping the Castle Trust, and it was great fun!

First of all, we went into the old site office, where Nepal Bazaar used to be, to change into hi-viz vests, white hard hats and steel toe capped boots, since the Castle is a building site at the moment.  I brought my own hi viz, but it's a long time since I had my own steel toe capped boots (I was issued with a pair when I was on the Castle Mall dig in Norwich, thirty years ago!).

Andrew Williams was guiding us round, and he started outside the castle, where the lawn used to be.  It's all churned up at the moment, but eventually it will be landscaped, and available for people to picnic, or just sit around on.

He started by explaining that he fills in a report for the Clerk of Works for each week of the project.  At the beginning of the renovation, it was thought to be an 80 week job - and they're now on week 166.  Some of this is normal building work delays, but a lot of it is Covid, and some of it is because of Brexit causing delays in materials arriving.

We were standing on some of the new flagstones outside the front door of the castle.  They're the same stone as the steps leading down to the square on the other side of the castle, and the stone was chosen (and agreed on by Cadw, the National Parks and other interested bodies) to look modern, rather than to simulate something old.  He pointed out the gables on the front of the building - three are original, and two were reconstructed last year, and those are built with exactly the same stone as the original, and blend in perfectly.  So the thinking has been that as much of the original fabric of the building should be preserved as possible, but the new parts should look modern because this, too, is just a phase in the history of the building, and in a hundred years, people will be looking at those steps down to the square and thinking how quaint and twenty-first century they are!

Then we went into the entrance hall, which is at the side of the building which was affected the worst by the fires in 1939 and 1977.  That end of the building had been open to the elements.  Now there is a roof, but the re-building has left the space open up all the three floors, with mezzanine galleries.  This is where the modern and the ancient fabric have to fit together like a jigsaw:

The modern brick will not be covered up - behind it is the lift shaft which gives access to all the floors and the viewing platform at the top of the tower.

And at the top of the tower, there are skylights (Andrew said they were supposed to be self-cleaning) which also look very modern:

The black steel is basically holding the building together, and behind the skylight is a good view of the Jacobean chimneys.

Elsewhere, the original beams have been retained, and the original roof was taken down and refurbished with original tiles over most of the area of the roof.