Latest news with #ruin
Times
15 hours ago
- Times
Seven of the best English Heritage sites to plan a weekend break around
A day out at an evocative ruin in a thrilling location or a romp around a stately home with enviable gardens and an adjoining café serving tea and scones is always a good idea. English Heritage manages 400 such addresses that span our island's history, as far back as 4,000BC, from Kit's Coty House in Kent — the remains of megalithic 'dolmen' burial chambers — to a 1961 Cold War bunker in York. You'll find English Heritage properties everywhere from the Scilly Isles to Berwick-upon-Tweed. Better still, 250 of them are free to enter. With a bank holiday weekend on the horizon, we've picked our favourites. This article contains affiliate links that will earn us revenue There's something about this ruined fort that once guarded the Hardknott Pass at the top of the Esk Valley that really fires the imagination (free; Like Hadrian's Wall, it dates from the second century, and as you wander among the remnant walls and towers it's easy to visualise the Dalmatian soldiers once stationed here, marching to and from its sister forts at Ravenglass on the coast and Ambleside in the Lake District. Get there on the La'al Ratty steam train from Ravenglass (from £16; or drive up and over the terrifying Hardknott Pass, continuing to the charming Drunken Duck Inn in B&B doubles from £150 ( • Lake District v Peak District: which is better? This circular tower, on a rocky headland over the Fal estuary, was one of 30 forts and blockhouses built under Henry VIII to defend England's coasts — it still has an arsenal of guns to prove it (from £13.10). If you're self-catering you'll have it to yourselves when it closes; the Custodian's House (sleeping two) and Callie's Cottage (sleeping four) are within the fortress walls. Otherwise catch the foot ferry to St Mawes (from £9; and visit St Mawes Castle — Pendennis's sister fort — on the other side of the estuary (from £9). Overnight at St Mawes Hotel, then venture to the St Just-in-Roseland church the next morning to see what John Betjeman described as the 'most beautiful churchyard on earth' (open daily, free; B&B doubles from £175 ( • Great National Trust properties to visit The 'did they or didn't they' relationship between Elizabeth I and her handsome master of horse Robert Dudley remains one of the most compelling romances in English history. The queen gifted him this Norman castle in 1563 and he returned the favour by spending a fortune on it, readying it for her visits (from £15). Though the castle is now a ruin, the spectacular privy garden he created for her final stay in July 1575 — a 19-day extravaganza involving fireworks and a floating island complete with Lady of the Lake — has been restored using 16th-century descriptions and archaeological evidence. A young William Shakespeare may have attended or been inspired by the celebration; the town of his birth and the 12-room Townhouse boutique hotel are a 30-minute drive Room-only doubles from £100 ( • Discover our full guide to the UK Pilgrims seeking spiritual contemplation still walk barefoot to this tidal island, and it's reachable by car, along a causeway. The poetic setting lends the site an air of mysticism that is enhanced by its vestiges of early Christianity, from Anglo-Saxon runic name stones to the ruins of a 12th-century priory that replaced the 7th-century monastery (from £9). Children will enjoy the trail inspired by animals from the Lindisfarne Gospels, created before the devastating Viking raid of AD793. They'll love rolling down the dunes under Bamburgh Castle (£19; and spotting puffins and seals on Coquet Island (£20; Base yourself at the Whittling House restaurant with rooms in Alnmouth for local seafood and a stylish night's sleep. Details B&B doubles from £150 ( This mighty fortress is a no-brainer for anyone fascinated by the Second World War (from £25.90). Eighty-five years ago Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay coordinated Operation Dynamo from here, evacuating 338,226 Allied troops in 900 craft from Dunkirk. The story is told in the Secret Wartime Tunnels, while other tunnels are dedicated to the sieges of 1216 and 1217. It's a hit with families too — there's a siege-themed playground, a 12th-century keep and a northwest spur with panoramic views to the White Cliffs. A smart stay is on the cards after your visit at the Rose, just along the coast in hipster Deal. Details Room-only doubles from £110 ( • Best UK pubs with rooms Not content with having a collection of paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and co, this neoclassical stately home on Hampstead Heath is hosting an exhibition of John Singer Sargent portraits of American heiresses this summer (until October 5). Entrance to the house (remodelled by Robert Adam) and grounds (laid out by Humphry Repton) is free, as stipulated by the Iveagh Bequest Act of 1929. Which leaves plenty of money for dinner, bed and breakfast at the Bull & Last, a gastropub in Highgate with seven rooms, one named after Dido Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a former slave, who grew up at Room-only doubles from £170 ( • Best weekend breaks from London The thrilling remains of this Benedictine monastery, towering over a headland above this popular east coast town, will forever be associated with Bram Stoker's Dracula: when the blood-sucking count comes ashore as a black dog he runs up the 199 steps to the gothic church and graveyard at their foot (from £11.80). Whitby is not the only atmospheric abbey ruin in these parts. An hour's drive to the west, in a wooded valley of the River Rye, takes you to the grandly derelict Rievaulx Abbey, which has inspired British artists from JMW Turner to John Piper (from £11.80). And half an hour south of here is Byland Abbey, in yet more idyllic countryside (free). Conveniently, it stands right opposite the esteemed chef Tommy Banks's country pub with rooms, the Abbey B&B doubles from £245 (
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The dark history behind this abandoned castle near Glasgow where Lulu was born
Just a 40-minute drive from Glasgow lies the large ruin of Lennox Castle, a former estate built between 1837 and 1841, which later became a maternity hospital and an "infamous" institution for people with learning disabilities. Constructed by David Hamilton for John Lennox Kincaid, the woodland manor replaced the older Kincaid House. It was later purchased by the Glasgow Corporation in 1927 and converted into a hospital. See the dark history behind the 'infamous' Lennox Castle near Glasgow Lennox Castle is located close to Lennoxtown in East Dunbartonshire (Image: Getty Images) However, very quickly, the facilities here became "vastly overcrowded, understaffed and underfunded," according to The Scotsman. The BBC adds that by the 1980s, standards had gotten so bad that a study by the British Medical Journal found residents to be dangerously underweight and malnourished. Alasdair Sim, the hospital's medical director, even said in 1986 that he had "never worked in a worse pit". The infamous hospital at Lennox Castle closed in 2002 (Image: Getty Images) In 2002, the hospital closed down, a move that reflected the changing attitudes around housing people with learning disabilities within the community. Between the 1940s and 1960s, part of the castle was also a maternity hospital and was the birthplace of a number of famous faces. Recommended Reading: Why this 'hidden gem' steakhouse in Glasgow with 'unreal' food is the best See why the oldest pub in Glasgow is an 'incredible' find and an 'absolute gem' Inside the 'picturesque' seaside town that is the cheapest to live in Scotland These include beloved Scottish singer Lulu, who sang hit songs like Bang-a-Bang and Shout, as well as footballer John Brown, who played for teams like Rangers FC. Nowadays, the castle is still a category A listed building despite suffering from a fire in 2008. Part of the grounds was converted into Celtic F.C.'s Lennoxtown Training Centre, with other parts towards the Campsie-side village becoming a long-term residential development.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi review – a panoramic view of India in flux
The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you 'can only really see a building … once the building becomes a ruin' runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India's former capital. There's no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that 'what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow'. Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as 'an undertaking'. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book opens in 1941, instead of today's sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours. The book revolves around young communist revolutionary Nirupama, whose ill-fated romance with an African American soldier leaves her with a semi-orphan son, Saki (named after the freshly Oppenheimered city). He is our future narrator, assembling history out of scraps of memories, inventions and outright fabrications. The narrative combines the story of her political and emotional development in the chaos of the Japanese yomp through south-east Asia, filtered through that of her son in the years after Indian independence as he struggles to find his voice as an artist, stuck between the two worlds of his parental inheritance. There are a host of other characters – confused apple-cheeked young bluestocking Imogen, gin-soaked upper-crust intellectual artist Kedar, pickpocket turned hidden market impresario Gopal and many other Indians, British, Americans and French of varying political and alcoholic affiliations. The communists did end up winning, of course, for a while, ruling West Bengal as the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They even ran the titular hotel as a state enterprise for 30 long, mouldy, complaint-stacked, orgiastically corrupt years, before it was mercilessly or mercifully privatised to resounding success, sold off in the 2000s by the last stuttering communists, lacking fluency in India's modern electoral language of multi-ethnic sectarian clientelism. They were the ones who changed the city's name to Kolkata, a wan attempt to appeal to Bengali linguistic nationalism, but it wasn't enough – it never is. The hotel isn't as central to the plot as it was to that other great novel about Calcutta hotel intrigues, Sankar's Chowringhee, with its glamour, gossip and Grand Hotel rococo raffishness, and there's none of the densely plotted balletic regimentation of Amor Towles's hotel-bound A Gentleman in Moscow. What we have instead is a panoramic view of second world war-era Calcutta, with alcoholic artists, rambunctious chefs, wily servants, plotting communists, smoky jazz bars, rattan chairs and indolent ceiling fans. The Bengal famine lurks in the background, rural peasants slowly stumbling into the big city, 'skeletons whispering in dialects we rarely heard in Calcutta', first a trickle, then a flood. The hotel isn't just a model of the city by the end, it is 'alive and constantly moving across the planet, sliding from Bengal to Biafra to Cambodia and then back to Bengal, and then going god knows where else' – a metaphor for the horrible glamour of life and death, feast and famine, stalking the 20th and 21st centuries. Joshi has a vast canvas to play with here, and it's heady, sensually described, deeply felt stuff. He has a gift for evocative, Technicolor phrases. Doors are 'like two lovers parting in a puppet opera', the British are 'dried‑up rinds of lime in the evaporated gin and tonic of your Empire', a character's eyebrows are Molotov and Ribbentrop. There's a slight relentlessness to the English and Banglish wordplay – a 'be-mansioned and be-knighted' character and his employee are 'Sir and Sir-vant' – with nicknames and political in-jokes aplenty. Despite its panoramic approach, the novel does often stray into the hotel genre's greatest pitfall, familiar to anyone who ever opened a doorstopper from its 70s maximalist heyday, wherein characters become types, mere bits of stage scenery to take us places and deliver lines: the naive young British woman, the outrageously plucky street thief, the unscrupulous proto-Greene American eyeing the rotting carcass of empire. There's a sometimes cloying tendency by the protagonist-narrator to announce themselves as 'an architect-engineer' constructing a 'story-hotel' 'room by room', and that there is 'no way that I … could have forged a proper narrative, but it was useful to try'. These retrospective passages, narrated by Saki from his abortive career as an architectural historian in 1970s Paris, are the novel's weakest – too knowing, too wry, too pat. But Joshi's ability to render place and time is truly first-rate. I've not read a book by an author this year who so clearly loves what he's writing about. There's an absurd combination of fun and wonder and horror on every page. We can only hope that having taken 25 years to write his second novel, he'll be back sooner with his next. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Rahul Raina is the author of How to Kidnap the Rich (Little Brown). Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi review – a panoramic view of India in flux
The observation by architect Louis Kahn that you 'can only really see a building … once the building becomes a ruin' runs through this book like the Hooghly river through India's former capital. There's no better Indian ruin than Kolkata, a city that still clings to the centrality of its role in the 19th-century intellectual renaissance that buttressed the case for Indian self-rule. The adage back then was that 'what Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow'. Great Eastern Hotel, the second novel from the author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, is 920 pages and well over 300,000 words long. The staff of your local Waterstones will kindly describe it as 'an undertaking'. It is set in and around the still-standing, now eye-wateringly expensive Great Eastern Hotel, which is, as the book points out, a model for the city itself: a place that was once the confluence for an entire subcontinent, where conquerors and subjugated, foreigners and natives met and danced and governed and suffered. When the book opens in 1941, instead of today's sunburnt German tourists, we have whisky, secret societies, spies, anti-colonial firebrands and over-rouged raciness, with the hotel as the stage on and around which the characters play out their political struggles, love lives and artistic endeavours. The book revolves around young communist revolutionary Nirupama, whose ill-fated romance with an African American soldier leaves her with a semi-orphan son, Saki (named after the freshly Oppenheimered city). He is our future narrator, assembling history out of scraps of memories, inventions and outright fabrications. The narrative combines the story of her political and emotional development in the chaos of the Japanese yomp through south-east Asia, filtered through that of her son in the years after Indian independence as he struggles to find his voice as an artist, stuck between the two worlds of his parental inheritance. There are a host of other characters – confused apple-cheeked young bluestocking Imogen, gin-soaked upper-crust intellectual artist Kedar, pickpocket turned hidden market impresario Gopal and many other Indians, British, Americans and French of varying political and alcoholic affiliations. The communists did end up winning, of course, for a while, ruling West Bengal as the longest democratically elected communist government in the world. They even ran the titular hotel as a state enterprise for 30 long, mouldy, complaint-stacked, orgiastically corrupt years, before it was mercilessly or mercifully privatised to resounding success, sold off in the 2000s by the last stuttering communists, lacking fluency in India's modern electoral language of multi-ethnic sectarian clientelism. They were the ones who changed the city's name to Kolkata, a wan attempt to appeal to Bengali linguistic nationalism, but it wasn't enough – it never is. The hotel isn't as central to the plot as it was to that other great novel about Calcutta hotel intrigues, Sankar's Chowringhee, with its glamour, gossip and Grand Hotel rococo raffishness, and there's none of the densely plotted balletic regimentation of Amor Towles's hotel-bound A Gentleman in Moscow. What we have instead is a panoramic view of second world war-era Calcutta, with alcoholic artists, rambunctious chefs, wily servants, plotting communists, smoky jazz bars, rattan chairs and indolent ceiling fans. The Bengal famine lurks in the background, rural peasants slowly stumbling into the big city, 'skeletons whispering in dialects we rarely heard in Calcutta', first a trickle, then a flood. The hotel isn't just a model of the city by the end, it is 'alive and constantly moving across the planet, sliding from Bengal to Biafra to Cambodia and then back to Bengal, and then going god knows where else' – a metaphor for the horrible glamour of life and death, feast and famine, stalking the 20th and 21st centuries. Joshi has a vast canvas to play with here, and it's heady, sensually described, deeply felt stuff. He has a gift for evocative, Technicolor phrases. Doors are 'like two lovers parting in a puppet opera', the British are 'dried‑up rinds of lime in the evaporated gin and tonic of your Empire', a character's eyebrows are Molotov and Ribbentrop. There's a slight relentlessness to the English and Banglish wordplay – a 'be-mansioned and be-knighted' character and his employee are 'Sir and Sir-vant' – with nicknames and political in-jokes aplenty. Despite its panoramic approach, the novel does often stray into the hotel genre's greatest pitfall, familiar to anyone who ever opened a doorstopper from its 70s maximalist heyday, wherein characters become types, mere bits of stage scenery to take us places and deliver lines: the naive young British woman, the outrageously plucky street thief, the unscrupulous proto-Greene American eyeing the rotting carcass of empire. There's a sometimes cloying tendency by the protagonist-narrator to announce themselves as 'an architect-engineer' constructing a 'story-hotel' 'room by room', and that there is 'no way that I … could have forged a proper narrative, but it was useful to try'. These retrospective passages, narrated by Saki from his abortive career as an architectural historian in 1970s Paris, are the novel's weakest – too knowing, too wry, too pat. But Joshi's ability to render place and time is truly first-rate. I've not read a book by an author this year who so clearly loves what he's writing about. There's an absurd combination of fun and wonder and horror on every page. We can only hope that having taken 25 years to write his second novel, he'll be back sooner with his next. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Rahul Raina is the author of How to Kidnap the Rich (Little Brown). Great Eastern Hotel by Ruchir Joshi is published by 4th Estate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
