Ruin at Edlingham Castle by Owen Townend

 

At the end of our weekend away, we came upon Edlingham Castle. We’d passed by the English Heritage sign a few times but it took us till Sunday to visit the glorious ruin.

            Arriving at the main stone path, I realised that this encompassed the full castle grounds. Passing between the stubby walls of the barbican, I saw her reach out and run her fingers across the top, scattering gravel dust. I didn’t remark on this. We were the only ones on-site.

            I shielded my eyes from the sun as I doubled back on the information panel. She kept walking through the courtyard, pulling out her camera. Apparently Edlingham Castle began life as a normal residence, later fortified as the English meddled with Scottish royalty. Three hundred years of social disruption, outright destruction and border raiding. Glancing up, I saw her skid over stray pebbles.

            She was snapping photos of what remained of the solar tower. You couldn’t see much front-on but I knew she was testing how light moved through the windows and around the full height of the roofless structure. While she sidestepped around it in a careful circle, I settled among what the panel called ‘the lodgings’. One of the corners had been eroded just wide enough for me to sit in.

            The view it afforded was, of course, a stretch of scattered aged stone but I enjoyed the way the midsummer light brought out the white among the grey. I searched around for other visitors but noticed only Red Angus cows nudging each other away from wire fences. As I sat there alone, I shut my eyes and focused on the sharp proximity of hewn brick around my lightly shivering knees. I quietened my breath long enough to hear the wind rustle past. For a moment I couldn’t even hear cars zip by on the motorway ahead.

            At last I blinked till I could perceive the faint blue of the sky above. The occasional cloud that curled and uncurled overhead cast brief shadows on the kitchen range to the east. I wondered how soon this would darken me.

            Hoisting myself out of the gap, I crossed the weedy courtyard to move anticlockwise around the sun tower. The intention was to catch her out, maybe startle her at the moment of an ideal shot. Still I was distracted by the thin section of messy brickwork on my side of the tower. A small red amassment of rough curved stones wedged between smooth yellowed rectangles. The design, if that was indeed what it was, baffled me so much that I had to reach out and check that the jutting rocks weren’t actually movable. Fortunately for me and British History, they remained firm.

            Then I broke away from it all and was halfway round the tower before I saw her. She was leaning at roughly the same angle as the left wall was coming away from the rest. The way she lined up her shot, it seemed she was most interested in the black metal bars that were keeping the walls joined together. These were high overhead and I felt a shortness of breath as I imagined everything tumbling on both of us.

            At last she saw me. We exchanged nervous smiles. Pointing my thumb over my shoulder, I led her to a bench that was in the middle of the tower’s southern wall. She put away her camera and joined me in sitting with our backs to the makeshift fortress. Holding hands, it felt like we were propping up the whole structure with our tired lonely shoulders.