ThornburyCastle was a kind of crescendo for us. We’d been doing the country the hard way
– driving it – and not really going out of our way to splurge on fancy dinners
and excessive tourist stuff. Pretty much no shopping, snacking on bags of chips
(er…"crisps") from gas stations, sipping warm diet soda in the morning, eating
with the locals, walking around cemeteries. Except for the cameras, we probably
didn’t beam “Yank tourist” on the streets of York (and there were plenty of
tourists there) or Shrewsbury or anyplace else. That’s the way we wanted it. I
spent most days in a t-shirt and ill-fitting jeans.
Thornbury
Castle wants you to dress up. It kind of demands it – actually, it quite literally
demands it if you choose to have dinner there. No sneakers, no jeans. No
t-shirts. Look nice, sire, and we’re not asking.
I can’t
remember the last time I had my car valet-parked. Maybe never…but we pulled
into the courtyard in front of the barely signed reception entrance, and a
valet guy was on us before I even turned the vehicle off. We told him we’d get
the luggage ourselves, and of course I didn't even ask where the car would be.
The reception desk was squeezed into a narrow hallway, barely two persons wide
– odd thing I thought; for so grand a property, you’d imagine some cavernous
Great Hall with chandeliers and stoic looking long-dead bewigged noblemen gazing down disapprovingly at you.
A cheerful young blonde girl named Anna behind the
desk retrieved our reservation, introduced us to their mascot suit-of-armor
beside the desk, and followed us back outside again and over to the car, parked
outside what appeared to be the laundry facilities. We came back through the
archway and up a stone turret staircase into the Howard Room, named after the
family who took the property over in the 19th century and saved it
from slow death by neglect. You met the Howards in our last episode – one of
Britain’s Great Families. Well…we were staying in their room.
The room
itself was about half the size of my single-floor house, and we’re
not kidding. Two stone fireplaces, one of which was actually burning (gas),
a
huge four-post bed,
a great armoire by the door with the date 1708 carved at
its top.
(Impressive…but did they really date their furniture?)
And quiet as a tomb, owing to the fact that we were in a turret, only
one other (unoccupied) room anywhere near and the walls being three feet thick
in limestone. If you held your breath,
the only sound you heard was the faint hissing of the gas in the fireplace.
We
opened a window for some reason, and I wandered over to the table near the bed.
On it, right in the middle and perched regally on a silver serving platter, they
had left a half-filled carafe of …well, I didn't know what it was, and while I
assumed it was complimentary, I kind of wanted to be sure. But I didn't really
want to call down to the desk and ask – seriously, how lame is that?
Fortunately,
Sharon wanted to shower and wash her hair, and she couldn't find the hair
dryer. Perfect excuse. Hey honey, while you’re at it, ask them what this stuff
is and if I can drink it. (Sherry, and please enjoy with our compliments, came
the reply…we toasted to being unapologetically over our heads…)
All this
was very nice, but we still had some light and there was a jaw-dropping church
right next door, St Mary The Virgin.
The oldest building in Thornbury, the
church dates to the 14th century but like many other parish
churches, it sits atop the foundation and retains some building fabric from an
earlier, 12th century church. During their visit to Thornbury Castle in 1535,
Henry and Anne Boleyn attended services here. Large and regal inside, the
church has many memorials to important citizens interred here between the 16th
and 18th centuries, and the churchyard was one of the best and most
varied of any we saw in England.
You got the feeling that this place –
certainly more than the castle itself, which is basically a luxury hotel run by
a foreign company – represents the heart of Thornbury’s history and community.
We
ambled back across the historic bridge between the two properties and wandered
around the castle grounds, even drifting off into what appeared to be the
ruined remains of the stables (maybe servants' quarters), knee-deep in brambles and peppered with
building detritus, some ancient and some not.
Seemed odd – a neglected and
overgrown portion of an otherwise immaculate and brochure-perfect property. I think we were attracted to this corner of
the property by the skeletal building and its overall neglected state. The
ruined-abbey thing had obviously worn off on us – staring at the passage of the
time, unvarnished by high-priced hotel consultants.
We
headed back to room just as it was starting to rain. On the way up the turret,
I caught a piece of graffiti on the turret wall. We think it says ' I C 1703'.
Back in the room, Sharon dropped open the ironing board and gave my slacks a good
press. She dressed up as well.
They
took us to the Baron’s Sitting Room outside the main dining room, a somewhat
somber chamber bedecked with Tudor portraits and shelves of hopelessly
forgotten books, with a bar station squeezed in at one end. I presumed this was
a reading room at some point in the castle’s history.
The impeccably uniformed serving
attendant – don’t know exactly what to call her, since the term “waitress” just
doesn’t seem to fit – showed us over to a little table surrounded by absurdly comfortable
chairs. She sounded French to me, and I said a few words back to her in French.
My periodic lapses into accented English and foreign European tongues drove
Sharon crazy – she is monolingual, but knew well enough that my attempts at sounding
worldly and clever were pretty lousy at best, and a pretentious indulgence at
worst. And they were.
They
brought out some appetizers, and we ordered our dinner. I ordered a lamb dish
of some sort, Sharon ordered salmon. The serving attendant (see, even that
sounds weird…) came back and escorted us into the surprisingly not-grand Tower
Dining Room, a hexagonal chamber where a handful of other tables were already occupied
with diners. The folks at the big table next to us seemed to be celebrating an elderly
man’s birthday; the men were all in suits, the ladies shimmered in old-school,
understated bling and carefully coiffed hair styles.
As we
were finished with dinner – a haute-cuisine thing that I wouldn’t presume to critique;
it was very nice – we headed back to the sitting room, where our serving
attendant (last time, I promise) poured drinks for us.
And she
got to talking. Turned out she wasn’t French at all – she was Polish, and had
learned English from an Italian boyfriend many years before. Somewhere in her
late forties, she got to talking about her daughter and ex-husband, both of
whom still lived in Poland. She was still on speaking terms with her ex, but
her 18 year old daughter had run off unexpectedly the prior spring and disappeared
from view for a period of several months, an understandably worrying thing for
the woman. The daughter had surfaced by phoning
her father a few weeks prior, explaining that she was jobless and living with
some guy in Amsterdam, had no intention of returning to Poland (probably ever) and
had no idea what she was going to do. They were even considering a move to
America.
The
woman, relived her daughter was at least okay, seemed fatigued and melancholy
over the whole affair, and seemed to blame herself for it. Maybe it was the
move to England ? Or the divorce ? We did learn that there is a healthy subculture
of Eastern European émigrés in the UK, especially in the hospitality industry –
in a sclerotic economy (and it’s only gotten worse since then), this influx of
low-wage labor foments some tension amongst younger, and especially jobless,
Brits. We heard this directly or indirectly several times on this trip. The US
has its own issues with immigration; some of the less charitable editorializing
we heard on the subject of the Poles, the Czechs, the Romanians, the Slovaks
sounded eerily familiar.
We
headed back to the room. By this time, it was raining pretty hard outside – the
decision to stay in and have dinner at the Castle was the right one, and if it was
going to rain, better it be at night, and better that we be embraced by the
walls of a 500 hundred year old castle, then during the day while we were out crawling through roofless abbeys and graveyards.
We hit
that bed, sank three quarters of an inch into it as our last descent into inexcusable luxury, set the timer on the TV (force of
habit – I never understood British television in the thankfully limited time I
exposed myself to any) and we were both out in 2 minutes.
Tomorrow - Avebury, Hilperton and missing Swindon.
