Other than going to Paris I did not have any more leave booked until the end of the summer. Being conscious that I hadn’t taken the boys away I decided to have some days out in this country with them, ideally at places they wanted to go to.

As I don’t work on Friday afternoons and had a meeting in York one Friday morning, it seemed a good opportunity to take them to see Clifford’s Tower. I was last there when the ‘insert’ was still under construction and rather than stairs one had to climb ladders to get to the roof. The finished structure is amazing; the roof feels a lot higher up (it is), the views of York are as good as ever; you see more of the actual building as there are more levels; and being able to go in the chapel with its leaning front wall is an interesting, if slightly disorienting, experience. The boys were appropriately impressed and keen to make another trip to York despite the 2 hour journey.

As they were happy to travel down to York again I booked us tickets for Jorvik and Castle Howard. One of the things about the boys, compared with Bella, is that they don’t seem to spend so long looking at things. The best bit of Jorvik is in any case the ‘ride’, which only takes somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes anyway. I find it interesting and informative, but I wish the narrator wouldn’t keep talking over all the things the mannequins are saying: I’d have liked to have heard how people think the vikings and other people from the 9th century spoke (especially as I had just read a book about the Anglo Saxons, which covered the Viking era and Viking rule in England).

Our tour of Castle Howard itself was quite rapid – not helped by the fact that not all rooms were open to the public anyway – and we then had a run around the grounds. The eastern side of the country is so much drier than Cumbria! Castle Howard is interesting because of the family links with Naworth Castle near us here in Brampton; and George Howard was one of the Earls of Carlisle who lived both at Naworth and at Castle Howard. He was also friends with the pre-Raphaelites, including Burne Jones and William Morris, and a talented painter himself. The property has featured on-screen often – perhaps most notably in Brideshead Revisited – and the story of its destruction by fire and reconstruction is an interesting one. So many grand houses have, of course, been destroyed by fire in the past.

Another castle which has undergone much reconstruction over the centuries is Bamburgh. The boys had been there before, with their father, and I had only ever been past it – mostly seeing it in the distance from the train or the A1 against a backdrop of sea; and earlier in the year doing a half marathon that ended there, clambering up over the sanddunes beneath its walls. I hadn’t realised that the Armstrong family who own(ed) it were also the owners of Cragside, the first house to have electricity in the country. Although the ‘main’ Armstrong had developed and traded arms, he’d also invented other things and was a shipbuilder; Vickers-Armstrong and ultimately the British Aircraft Corporation (now BAE, who build submarines in Barrow in Furness) grew from his original company. As with so many things or people, Armstrong wasn’t all bad (the arms business has rather blackened his name in some circles).

The views from Bamburgh are amazing, as they also are from Dunstanburgh: I had promised the boys fish and chips but the trade off was that we drove down the coastal route, as they hadn’t allowed me to go on the beach at Bamburgh (the North sea beaches in Northumberland are absolutely stunning: most of them have miles of clean sand with hardly any people). There’s not really a lot to see at Dunstanburgh but again its story is interesting: Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh were both involved in the wars of the Roses in various ways, which resulted ultimately in the Yorkist Edward IV retaining the throne, followed by his brother Richard (links there to Cumbria: to Carlisle and Penrith in particular as he was Warden of the West March) who was then killed at the battle of Bosworth, heralding the end of the Plantagenets and the beginning of the Tudors. One thing Dunstanburgh does have nowadays however is composting toilets; and the walk from the car park at Craster and back helped justify the fish and chips later.

The final castle Edward and I visited was Lowther Castle and Gardens, closer to home (having also been down to Somerset just before these trips, I was beginning to get a bit fed up with driving long distances). I don’t completely approve of the £ms that the Lowther family has had to restore the gardens and castle ruins, especially as it’s not cheap to get in nor to eat in the cafe, but I do very much like what they have done: and Edward and a friend spent hours happily playing in the wooden ‘castle’ in the woods while I read and made phone calls. It’s another place I thought I’d go back to sometime on my own, so I can look around the exhibition about its history at my own pace and in detail!

Meanwhile my own ‘castle’ is on the market as I’m hoping to sell up and move to Penrith to be nearer the children: which will give me a whole new area to explore in more detail. I was back at Lowther for lunch at the end of a bike ride with Penny just a week after visiting with Edward: as I get to know Penrith and its surroundings in more detail I feel that I could be happy living there.