The week in Arundel

It is Wednesday, and we are getting into a routine of sorts. We've seen the castle, which was quite an eyeful, seeing how the great Dukes and their families live/d...yup, they still live in that huge place.    Apparently the current one drives up and down from London every day...he's in business apparently.  Trouble with the wife, too, I hear.  This is choice gossip from a lunatic called George who gave us a few roistering ditties yesterday at The Swan.  I filmed him giving a song in  particularly poor taste but have decided to leave it out of this entry!

       Here are a few photos of the great pile on the hill:

 This is the chapel of the Dukes of Norfolk, which is a shared church .... half of it is within the walls of the castle and is Catholic, the other half is available for the Protestants or C of E's on the outside..for the 'commoners'.   Only on rare occasions to do they open the dividing screen ...only happened about six times in about five hundred years....!  This by the way is only one of the chapels the Dukes own .... there's another private one inside the castle and it's probably as big again.
I can't show you the best parts of the castle because they wouldn't let us take any photos, but the opulence is unbelievable.  There's an armory full of mean looking pikes, swords, weapons  of mass destruction for the middle ages and still looking pretty well honed. I was impressed by the great hall with two massive fireplaces, huge windows of stained glass and very grand chairs and furniture, and old portraits of the ancestors along the walls....fairly typical of what you would expect in a castle, really.

 
 The gardens are worth a mention....look at these.

 

Since Monday we have walked the nearby wetlands and yesterday hired a car and driven around the area to get off our feet.  Today we drove to look at a Roman settlement (or what's left of it) with the mosaic floors a farmer discovered while dragging a plow over his field.back around 1830 or so.  Then we drove around the back lanes of the South Downs which is rolling countryside, dotted with forest remnants and stone houses with thatched roofs ... everywhere.  We ended up at Chichester, near the sea, and checked out the cathedral. That almost put me to sleep (Dirk and I are probably Cathedralled out).  Two more days then off to France.  England is both beautiful and CROWDED.  History is everywhere, Poms have been lovely all together.