Windsor Castle

The symbol for British Rail. We all come to know and love it. Actually, train travel in Britain is really nice--on time, convenient, and gets you to just about anyplace.


Windsor Castle has both state apartments (the big, historical rooms that are use for official functions) and the private residential areas for the royal family and guests, plus a host of residences and offices for the staff. The castle covers about 300 acres and has hundreds and hundreds of rooms. It's supposed to be the one that the queen likes best, and she spends lots of weekends here. (By the way, some students were near Buckingham Palace one day and saw her leaving in a limo--giving the royal wave, no less.) Here you see a mob of wet peasants (with me trailing along behind) climbing toward an entrance of the castle.

I don't know who this guy is, but he opens doors for the souls who get to arrive in actual cars. A couple in their wedding garb showed up and had pictures made in front of this entrance--with him posing in some of them.

What do you do with your moat when you no longer need it to drown the enemy? You turn it into a flower garden. The moat was around the Round Tower, the inner fortification from the original building some time after 1066.

The Round Tower, the highest point, where in the old days you would make your final defense.

There are three sections to the place--the upper, middle,and lower wards. This picture shows just a part of one ward inside of the castle, so you can see how really big the place is.

Yet another view inside the walls.

This is the section that has the state apartments in it, including the famed "Queen Mary's dollhouse." Too bad you can't take pictures inside any of these places. Well, you could do it, but do you recall that dungeon in Warwick Castle and all those guards with weapons?) Nobody actually played with the dollhouse; it was an ornament of sorts. It's huge, as in maybe five feet tall and much longer. Artists painted tiny paintings; writers wrote books for it; winemakers made tiny bottles of wine, etc. The rooms of the actual castle are pretty spectacular. The Wellington Chamber has a table that seats 64 for cozy dinners. The big one can handle something like 160--and the queen has enough crystal, porcelain, and flatware to feed 'em all.

Here's an officer in his dress uniform and with his best upper class accent, showing mummy and daddy around the grounds on a personal tour. I think he's saying, "Now, mummy, if you leap over the fence and make a run for the door, that nice lad over there will shoot you."

This is the inner courtyard where important people arrive for state events. We can't set foot on it.

This is St. George's Chapel, one of the most important parts of the castle. It's where the royals worship if they so choose when they are here. It's where Charles married Camilla. It's the ceremonial church of the Knights of the Garter, the oldest and most famous order of knighthood in England. Each of the 26 knights has a stall in the choir with his/her crest, etc. In this chapel are buried George V and Queen Mary as well as George VI and Queen Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth's mother and father). In the crypt below the chapel are Henry VIII and Jane Seymour (favorite wife and QE I's mom), along with several Georgian kings.

Outside the walls is Windsor Park, with this famous stretch of roadway called the Long Walk. It actually leads up to one of the formal entrances of the castle. And so we bid a fond farewell to the castle.