Kasel Anick

A few weeks back we went made a visit to Castle Alnwick, which in typical English style of dropping phomemic sounds, is pronounced 'Anick'. The castle is the home of the percy family, the Duke and Dutchess of Northumberland (children are grown). It is the largest inhabited castle in England, situated on the river Aln ( I'm beginning to sound like an encyclopedia). In addition, it is famous for being used in many film productions, my guess would be because of the good condition it is in - many of the other castles are ruins. The most famous of those movies being the first 2 Harry Potter movies.

We spent the first while exploring the inside of the castle, reading about the history of the Percy family as well as present day, looking at artifacts and paintings, and finding out about the different uses the castle has had over the years. My favorite painting was one of Algernon Percy, the 10th Earl of Northumberland, who I thought had a rather 80's looking hair and mustache dispite his clearly historical clothing - earl of the eighties I shall call him. My other personal favorite was reading about how since the first world war part of the castle has been used for educational establishments. The first was as a girls high school which had to relocate due to a fire, then a teacher's college (so jealous!), and now St. Cloud's university of Minnisota has a program that runs there.

After that we went to look around the grounds and went on a tour highlighting the different areas that were used in filming of movies. We also learned along the tour the significance of positioning of horses feet in statues. Apparently, one hoof in the air means the person died of injuries in battle, two hoofs in the air means the died in battle and both feet on the ground means they died at some other point in life.

Lastly we went to "Knight's Quest" and tried on medieval clothing as well as went through a spooky maze with a monster at the end that talked in a chipper british accent (it actually was scary for half a second until it started talking). All in all, it was a good time. Though if we had to do it again, we would have paid to go into the gardens as everyone keeps telling us how nice they are.