Bowl us over Castle.....

We know how Gulliver feels now!

 Saturday April 30th 2011

Scaffolding is the bain of our lives, a real pain in the neck. It seems that no matter what castle, stately home, cathedral, church or other major attraction we go and see it is there! So here we are then team Shiltonpig turning the clocks back a couple of weeks to tell you about a nice day out we had at Bowl us over castle (for all you pedantic types out there, you may in fact want to type into Google Bolsover Castle). Bowl us over castle started its life several hundred years ago in the 12th century, around about the time Mr Shiltonpigs mother in law

Ride 'em cowboy

 was born. Its seen some wars over the years and looks a bit worse for wear, for example it doesn't have a roof for the most part. Now forgive me for saying this but, roofs do tend to be handy little things especially in these parts as they keep that annoying thing called rain from your head. Its owned by the English Heritage which looks after the place now, which is jolly nice of them if you don't mind me saying! It is home to the oldest surviving stable in the UK, however I am sorry to report that we saw no horses. Josh on the other hand found a hobby horse which he was able to pretend that he was the Lone Ranger.

Great views

 The other reason this castle bowls us over is the views. It is on a hill, a big hill and you can see for miles, photos never seem to be able to do it justice. They had a medieval day today where you can see a couple of men pretending to be knights practice jousting. For their sakes its a good job that they were born in the 20th century as their jousting skills would have got them killed centuries ago, both of them seemed to really struggle to kill off the cabbages that were on top of the spikes, but Josh loved it and thats all that counts. We only did the one cache today and after a lovely walk around the castle, we then made a dash for the cache!

Josh wishes they would hit the cabbage just once

 Using the new iphone app, we navigated a cache that was just a few metres away, a few metres turned into a few hundred metres and it was all downhill from there....literally. Mrs Shiltonpig was giving Mr Shiltonpig the evils as they both knew that for every step downhill we took, it meant one step uphill on the way back up. The cache was in a great location, in the middle of an open field with wide stretching views and of course one of the best views of the castle...granted even with the scaffolding surrounding some of it. Clever little cache it was too as for some reason it had a wooden swan attached to the nearby branch.

Scaffolding the pain of our lives!

After Mrs Shiltonpig finally accepted that the only way to get back to the car was to walk uphill we made our way back. Of course things were made easier once Mr Shiltonpig promised the family an ice cream, in fact to be honest Mr Shiltonpig has never seen the family move so quick! So another day and another cache!For more info on Bowl us over Castle click on the linky poo.