Today I did not sleep until a million-o-clock. I actually made it to the table in time for breakfast!

We decided to try our luck at another castle, since the last one wasn't so castley. This time we decided to go to Berkeley Castle.

 

It was significantly castlier. (Miriam and David, lurking around the outer courtyard.)

It was build in the....13th century, I want to say, by the Berkeley family. And they're still living in it today! You couldn't get into all of it. But the parts we did see were pretty neat.

Unfortunately I don't have any photos from the inside, since they asked you not to. The inside had lots of stately furniture and old oil paintings. It even had an oubliette, and a prison cell where some king or another was murdered!

There was even a portrait of one of the former Earls of Berkeley, who was known as Wicked Willy, for apparently fathering about a hundred children (though he never married).

Wicked Willy's father (or grandfather, I can't remember) caught himself a wife by literally kidnapping her. She was trying to avoid his attentions by moving to the other side of the country and not telling him, so he (maybe) got her sister to write her an urgent letter telling her to come quickly, and then promptly kidnapped her out of the sister's house.

That all being said, the girl ended up being a very wise and shrewd woman, and once she got a hold of the purse strings, she brought the estate out of the red and into the black within two years.

This isn't all the castle. It carries on quite a bit to the right.

But you know how you can tell it's a REAL castle?

I mean, besides the murder holes and the oubliette and the archer slits and what not...

Oliver Cromwell managed to bash down a wall! Fortunately for the Berkeleys, old Cromwell was in a bit of a hurry so paid his men a bonus in cash rather than let them hang around and loot the place.

This castle has been renovated abonut a million times (with a big one happening in the 1920's), so it's a funny mismash of styles. A lot of the time who ever was renovating shipped in bits of old churches and stuff to patch up the castle with, so it's all the same age (more or less), but it's from all over the place.

Also, apparently, one of the bathrooms in the private suite is exactly like the one in the Waldorf Astoria, in New York. By exactly like, I mean the last earl bought it from the hotel and had it shipped over for his rather fussy wife.

After Berkeley castle, we went down into Gloucester to find tea and scones (mmmmmmmmm...) and also discovered the Gloucester Cathedral.

Damn. Big ole cathedral.

There was an organ recital going on when we went in. It was kind of epic. Of course, I didn't get a picture of the massive organ, mostly because I was getting my hair blown back.

It sounded a little bit like the Phantom of the Opera had met the Count (of the muppets), had a baby, and that child was drunk and playing the organ.

That being said, it was impressive organing. I just thought it was kind of...mashed.

A set of covered halls circled a courtyard. This is just one of the halls.

We headed back to Cheltenham after that, since we had a dinner reservation.

The food we had was good, but took FOREVER. There's a jazz festival in town and so every place is booked up to the gills.

I got the impression they did not have nearly enough staff to cope.

C'est la vie.

I ate a lemon posset. It tastes like I was eating a dish of lemon flavoured butter, which sounds awful when I say it like that, but trust me when I say:

I wanted to jam my face in that dish.