We’re back at Blackness Castle which is apparently in Clackmannanshire, the smallest county in Scotland, it’s not far from Stirling. From the photo below you can see how solid and high the towers are. The gateway that you can see is where there’s a we drawbridge that leads out to the river walkway where supplies used to be unloaded for the castle, directly from ships.
All of the rooms in this castle seem to be barrel vaulted, no doubt for strength. I’m sure that some of the rooms were used in filming Outlander most recently.
There are stairs all over the place as you can see below. It was an incredibly blustery day as it almost always is at the River Forth but strangely as soon as we got inside the castle it felt very safe, quiet and – warm! Some of the walls are around nine feet thick, where they were in most danger of getting attacked by cannon I suppose.
It could feel quite cosy with tapestries on the walls and heavy curtains and maybe a nice carpet underfoot, or at least rushes. I’m not sure if the room below originally had a low ceiling in it. On the right hand and above the window it looks like the remains of a fireplace.
As is often the way with old castles a lot of the rooms have a medieval ‘en suite’ off the main rooms as you can see in the photo below. All mod cons, well it’s a long way up and down to the ground floor. No ‘garde looing’ here! But it does look a bit cold to be dangling your ‘bahookie’ over the hole.
Below there’s even an alcove where you can wash your hands, but I don’t think it’s within the toilet area, maybe a good thing.
I particularly like the windows, the shutters open if you need fresh air.
And I can just imagine this as a good place to read – if there were plenty of cushions on the window seats.
The castle has been modified a lot over the centuries and the photo below show what was the original entrance, which is now blocked up. It’s much bigger than it looks in the photo.
The garden, below was the last bit which we visited, as you can see the weather had cleared by then. It looks quite industrial on the other side of the river, because it is. The blue crane thing to the right of the middle is actually at Rosyth, the naval dockyard. So this area of the River Forth is still about defence!
Blackness Castle became Fort William in Outlander, and it was where Jamie received the lashes from the dastardly Captain Randall – ooh err!
Elizabeth I and her world by Susan Watkins is a lovely book with sumptuous photographs by Mark Fiennes. I borrowed this one from the library just last week, I must admit that it was the photos that really attracted me and I had intended just drooling over all the Tudor portraits, grand buildings, jewels, gardens and paintings of various scenes, but when I began to read it I quickly realised that I wanted to read it all. Despite knowing quite a lot about the Tudor courts and Elizabeth there was still a lot to learn from this book. Elizabeth may have made some mistakes as a youngster but she certainly learnt from them and seemed to know intuitively how to stay on the right side of her people.
