Tuesday, March 28, 2017

all the castles in the sky

I had a really long day - it was great and I saw some cool stuff, but I'm totally wiped out. I made a day trip to Lincoln today - it was one of the most important cities in England a thousand or so years ago, but it's faded in prominence quite a bit since then. However, it's home to one of the best-preserved Gothic cathedrals, which was the tallest building in the world for at least a couple of hundred years. It also has a castle, and since I like castles and cathedrals and am also looking for ideas for my young adult book (which I'm planning to get back to asap), I decided to take a day out and explore it.

So I got up early, went to Kings Cross, and caught a train to Lincoln. This was all uneventful, and I wrote some on the train (I took my laptop with me to facilitate this, which means I had to drag it around with me all day - which was a lot of dragging, since fitbit says I took 20000+ steps and climbed 45+ flights of stairs). When I got to Lincoln, I had breakfast before climbing up an appropriately named street called Steep Hill (it is v. steep; also, people weren't always all that creative).

My first stop was the castle. There's a pretty extensive exhibit on Victorian prisons, since part of the castle was turned into a prison at some point - I could write a lot about this, since I actually know some stuff about Victorian prisons, but I'm too tired to write it up right now. The exhibit was interesting, though.

They also have one of only four surviving copies of the Magna Carta - the Bishop of Lincoln was one of the signatories, and he brought his copy back with him in 1215 and the cathedral held onto it ever since. It's now loaned to the castle, since the castle has a special subterranean vault specifically for the Magna Carta (plus the Charter of the Forest, which was signed in 1217; Lincoln is the only place in the world that has both). So it was pretty cool to see that, especially since I was basically the only person in the vault - I've seen one at the British Library before, and also seen a slightly later copy in DC, and in both cases the crowds were insane. Being almost alone with it was nearly goosebump-inducing.

Then I walked around the medieval wall surrounding the castle grounds. Then I went to the cathedral, which was astonishing - and it helped that it was also mostly empty, unlike similarly impressive cathedrals like Notre Dame. Then I had an amazing gluten free tea in one of the shops below the castle, which made me happy.

But the day went a little downhill from there. I was ready to leave town by four, but my train wasn't until 6:15, so I killed time at a bookstore (and bought a book). But then my train was delayed by half an hour, so I missed my connection to London, so I didn't get back to London until nine. By then I was starving, so I had a late dinner in St Pancras and wrote for an hour while I sat there just so I could get some more stuff done - which means I didn't get back to my hotel until after eleven.

So now it's time to sleep, dream of castles, and hope that I'm recovered so I can write a lot tomorrow - goodnight!

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