Shropshire Holiday:: Chirk Castle

I was originally going to try and have this holiday post as several days worth, but when I'd finished adding in all of my photos that I wanted to include for two days, there were already 75 in total(!) which is a bit much all in one blog post. So, as the majority of them were of Chirk Castle, I decided it was worthy of a blog post all to itself.
The castle now belongs to the National Trust and was originally started in the later 13th century as a heavily defendable fortress designed to keep the Welsh under the English thumb. We were lucky enough to get on a guided tour around the castle rooms before it was open to the public, and our fantastic tour guide Huw (very Welsh), didn't hold a grudge at all which was nice.

The inside of the castle is distinctly un-castle-like as it was renovated into a family home by Sir Thomas Myddelton at the turn of the 17th century, and subsequent generations of the Myddelton's have added to it with drawing rooms and long galleries. This staircase is actually a huge counter-lever stair case with the width of the stair you walk on repeated in the walls. The designs and styles have gone from Jacobean to neo-classical and neo-gothic with various styles in-between as thoughts on how the castle should be decorated varied with each member of the family. It's now a bit of a hotch-potch with different styles everywhere and a mass of art, furniture and treasure curiosities collected by generations of Myddeltons.

You can go into several of the large defensive towers, and even into two different dungeons. One is slightly more upper class with a small barred window for those higher status prisoners, and the other is essentially a pit at the bottom. The servants dining room is also open for viewing with its smoke blackened walls due to the huge fire in a small room- that must have been really pleasant to sit en-masse with all of the other servants and eat in!

Being a castle on a hill, the views really are splendid. This is looking out of the front of the castle and over the approach. You can see for miles!

There are flowers all around the outside of the castle, with gardens separated by well cut hedges, especially domed hedges made to look like traditional Welsh ladies hats apparently as ordered by one particular lord of the castle who had a bit of a penchant for them (not sure if it was the ladies or the hats he favoured but his wife wasn't very pleased).

If you walk down a wide, open lawn which appears to go on for miles and miles with yet another cracking view, you reach a ha ha so can go no further into the sheep field. It makes the garden appear to stretch off to the horizon which is really rather lovely and incredible. To one side of the lawn is a woodland area with trees in all different colours and sizes, and to the other side is a little thatched building with open walls that look out onto the lawn itself, providing shelter and shade from the elements. A perfect place to sit and have coffee if anyone will bring it out to you.

There is just so much S P A C E here!

When you arrive at the castle, you don't actually enter the castle straight away as the car park is down by the old stables and outbuildings so you have to walk up a hill (or take the shuttle) to reach the castle. The vegetable patch is alongside the stables and was full of pears, raspberries, pumpkins, onions, beans, apples, strawberries, herbs and flowers for cutting and display.
I love wandering around these gardens but I don't think I would be able to actually plant one myself and keep it going. I'd definitely need a team of gardeners to do it for me!