Unfortunately, they did not allow any photography inside. Bummer, because there’s lots of interesting stuff, including the doorway to the underground crypt, which is the passageway Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou go down to discover that she is the vessel of the Holy Grail. However, the room down there in real life is quite small, nothing like what Tom and Audrey emerge into. As the guide told everyone, they go through this door and emerge into Pinewood Studios. Good line. Inside the chapel there are two elaborate carved columns. One is rather unimaginative, the other is extraordinary, with a difficult twisting vine ascending the column. The legend is that the master carver completed the first, but the plans for the latter were so complicated that the master took off for the continent to study the original plans to figure out how to do it. He left his young assistant behind. The master was gone so long, they thought he would not return. The assistant had a dream in which he was shown how to create the column. He executed it perfectly. When the master returned, he saw what his pupil had done, and in a fit of jealousy and rage he struck him with a stone and killed him. The master was thereafter put to death for the murder. At the rear of the chapel there are two carved heads atop a wall. One is the young assistant. The other is of the master, whose gaze is directly at his assistant’s beautiful column for all eternity. Great story. Here are some more shots of the exterior.
The chapel is unique. There are thousands of medieval stone carvings: dragons, green men, unicorns, gargoyles, lions and griffons - even an elephant, a camel and a monkey. There are fabulous creatures and grotesques from medieval bestiaries. On the religious/human side, there is a medieval Mouth of Hell, a depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins, assorted angels and devils, saints and sinners, knights and minstrels, kings and queens, and a heavenly host of musicians. Pillars and arches were filled with leaves, vines, fruit and flowers. The stone ceiling includes a field of stars, the sun, and a crescent moon. In short, everywhere you look are fabulous carvings. You’ll just have to visit to see for yourself.
After lunch, we took off in the drizzle for more ruins, this time Bothwell Castle. This was one of the attractions that was on our Scottish Heritage Trust pass, which allows us entry to any of dozens of castles and ruins across Scotland, but only on any seven days out of 14. So, you’ve got to plan carefully to get maximum benefit. We arrived late in the soggy day, and this would have been our only Trust item of the day. The friendly gate guard told us to forget it, we could have free admission so that we wouldn’t use up one day on just this item. Very nice, but we paid for it by listening to his rather detailed history, delivered in the best/worst accent we had encountered thus far. I think he was lonely, as we were the only visitors.
Bothwell was built on a bluff above a bend in the River Clyde. It was started by Walter of Moray some time in the latter half of the 1200s. Invasion and repeated siege meant that the original design of the castle was never completed and what you see today is largely the work of the Earls of Douglas in the years around 1400. This place was overrun multiple times during the border wars, and was trashed and rebuilt repeatedly. It was interesting in that it had not been restored at all, thus everything you see is “original” from circa 1400. When you think of it that way, its held up pretty well.
Most of the castles/ruins that we’ve seen have had dungeons of one sort or another. This one’s was particularly vile.
It looks better in the right light. Exterior view of Bothwell from the entry road.
Our next lodging was in Sterling, home of Stirling Castle. We hit another jackpot with our B&B (good work, Chuck!), called Castlecroft, and situated on the lower slope of the hill that holds the castle. In fact, as I will relate in the next post, we could and did walk up to it. For now, we just relax with arrival tea and biscuits provided by our host, Laura.
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