More pics of castle bits - Part II

Here's my follow-up to yesterday's post.

Carreg Cennan Castle
(Go here for more impressive pictures than mine, as well as some historical background.)

Carreg Cennen wasn't as well preserved as Kidwelly, but it had that Romantic picturesque thing going for it in spades. Here you'll see I was so impressed and excited that I started snapping pictures from the bus with still quite a ways to go to get there:


Here's the approach by foot, about half way up the hill the castle commands:



Tired of all that climbing? Here, why don't you set a spell while we cook something up in the castle kitchen:


I am obsessed with arrow slits. It may be because I was an archer in college. But at any rate, here are two pictures of well-preserved ones:




If you thought the castle had an impressive perch from the way we approached it, wait until you see the drop on the other side:


Here's one of the few pictures I took of the layout of the inner parts of the castle, perhaps because I couldn't get as depopulated a shot as I could at Kidwelly:


Carreg Cennen had a special attraction, a tiny cave carved way down in the hillside underneath the castle. The page I linked to above has good shots of the entrance and the vaulted passageway, as well as the cave itself. The only picture I took down there was this one, of the graffiti of the date 1873 (or was it 1875?) carved into the rock, which you can just barely make out in the center-right of the picture:


Tourism of castles is of course nothing new. Though we were 21st century medievalists visiting the remains of a medieval site, in many ways we were performing a very Romantic/Victorian act. There were multiple pasts and presents speaking to us from those stones, which seems all the more appropriate given the attention to medievalism at the conference itself.