We arrived in Caernarfon by about 11 AM and we were greeted by more great weather, as you can see in the pictures.Caernarfon Castle is in the middle of the old town, and it's also the seat of the Prince of Wales. HRH Charles, Prince of Wales was invested with the title in this castle by his mother way back - in fact, less than a year before my parents visited the castle in July, 1970. The ceremony to invest the heir with the title Prince of Wales in Wales itself was revived by the Queen. A special slate platform (now permanently installed in the center of the castle grounds) and slate thrones were commissioned for the event. The intent is that the investiture of a Prince of Wales should continue to take place here in the future. I'm not sure what happened previously - I must have missed that information panel in the exhibit.
Caernarfon Castle is not a near total ruin, like Helmsley and Rievaulx are. It's not in decent shape, either - its somewhere in between. Its walls and towers are more or less intact and you can climb most of the towers and walk through passages within the walls. Not much in the way of interior buildings remain. Caernarfon is a smallish castle, and evokes the idealized mental image of what a castle should look like.
A good hour-plus of touring Caernarfon left us satisfied and content. And hungry. We decided to find a pub in Caernarfon for lunch before hopping a bus to Conwy (which is on the way back to Llandudno from Caernarfon, and about an hour away.)
We settled on the Four Alls pub, a free house a couple of blocks from the castle and the surrounding tourist area. A free house means that the pub is neither owned by nor exclusively licensed to a particular brewery. If a pub is owned or licensed by a brewery, its sign/exterior will be clearly marked with the name of the brewery (my great granfather's pub, the Pineapple, was a Robinsons house.)The pub's sign defines what the 4 "Alls" are: the monarch rules for all, the soldier fights for all, the minister prays for all and the merchant pays for all. There is also a fifth All on the sign, if you look closely to the right of the merchant in the lower right quadrant - a devil-like character proclaims that it takes from all.
Next stop - and post - Conwy!!
Interesting VacaKen Sidebar, Entry Six:
I’ve been studying up on digital photography to better use my Canon EOS Rebel T3i DSLR camera. It has several pre-set “point-and-shoot” modes, and those are the settings I’ve primarily used on my previous trips. I bought the “For Dummies” book for the camera, and a good friend of mine who owns a camera shop sat down with me and my Dad to go over the manual settings available (thanks, Brian!). I’ve been playing around with shutter speed, f-stops/aperture and ISO settings on this trip to try and improve the photos I take. What do you think?
By George (yes, a pun on the new prince's name lol) I do believe there is knight peering out from a turret in one of your photos deciding if you be friend or foe!
ReplyDeleteNow these are castle pictures right out of story books and fairy tale movies. The play of light and shadow that you have captured (especially in the photo of the castle hallway) are fantastic as well as the vibrant colors of the flowers in the For Alls pub sign. White noise is tricky. The picture of the steps leading up to the windows with the electric light on the wall us a tough one. I've tried to play around with graph on my camera to make sure that bright light doesn't white out the picture too much but not very good at it yet.
The photograph of the colored houses (?) so close together reminds me of San Francisco without the 90 degree street drops.
Bravo on the pics Mister.
Darlene