Yesterday was yet another trip to Knaresborough, and no, I am nowhere near tired of that town. This one was excited because it was guided by Bob Woosnam-Savage, who is a curator at the Royal Armouries and was a consultant on the fight scenes in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. We toured the castle - which I’d never been inside - and the sallyport, which was a hidden exit through the moat that would only have been used in an emergency. (Sidenote: medieval moats were NOT filled with water. They were medieval trashcans/plumbing, PLUS shards of broken pottery and jagged bits of metal, so that just in case you weren’t deterred by the idea of walking through human excrement, you would stay out of the moat for fear of being sliced up.) Anyways, not a lot of sallyports survive, and many of those that do are just doors in the sides of the castle walls - the one at Knaresborough is an original medieval tunnel with added Victorian stairs. The closest castle that also has a surviving sallyport is Nottingham Castle.
After the castle I got a quick lunch at the Lavender Rooms (above Ye Oldest Chymist Shoppe) with Natalie, Marina, Sarah, and Mark. We ate Yorkshire Rarebit, which is delicious thick bread with a melty cheese/mustard/ale sauce on top, and drank tea. Mmmm! Then it was off to the Shrine of Our Lady of the Crag and the cave of Robert the Hermit. I really enjoyed the Shrine, since I am quite fascinated by religious structures and, well, it’s a chapel carved out of a cave. That was my favorite bit of the trip. After the cave, Natalie and I walked back to the Lavender Rooms and got more tea and cake! I had a delicious Lemon Drizzle cake and Natalie got the Cherry Coconut cake. All in all, a fabulous day!
You can always see more pictures on Flickr (start with that one and click “Next”), and also you can click on these pictures to enlarge them and see captions.
