Wales for a Day

With Nonna and Papa visiting from Texas, we decided to take a day trip on Sunday (also Callum's Birthday) to nearby Wales to see a Castle and a folk history village. 

Our first stop was Caerphilly Castle near the capital of Cardiff.  The drive was very pleasant through lots of green, hilly terrain and over the Bristol Channel. We thought we had taken a wrong turn along the way as we entered a fairly working class neighborhood with no signs of a castle before we turned a corner and saw it looming very large in the bottom of a valley in the center of town.

Surrounded by a large river and moat, it is the largest castle in Wales and the 2nd largest in Great Britain.  It certainly had an imposing front façade stretching widely above the green carpeted lawn.

We followed a tour guide for a while, but soon the kids wanted to keep moving, so we ventured off on our own. 

There were several replicas of catapults and large cross-bows for castle sieges set up inside the outer wall.  It was interesting to hear of the tactics medieval armies used with the catapults such as launching rotting cows over the walls during a months long siege knowing the soldiers inside would eventually eat it when food became scarce.

Inside one of the renovated rooms was an interactive touch screen display table that the kids really enjoyed. 

We wandered for about 2 hours before moseying back out to the tea shop/gift store at the parking lot to have tea.  Scones for everyone satisfied and we then drove a short 25 minutes to St. Fagans National History Museum. 

St. Fagans was an outdoor folk museum that contained dozens of original houses and buildings from around the country that were carefully deconstructed, moved and rebuilt at the museum.  Some of the buildings were from the 1400's. 

It was interesting to see the conditions that people lived in throughout history and realize just how fortunate and blessed we are today. 

The church was very fascinating as it was richly decorated on the inside with murals.  Apparently, when the church was dismantled in preparation for the move, crews discovered ancient residual paintings underneath the whitewash.  As they reconstructed the church, they painted the walls in the style of the original paintings they found.  Callum found the paintings very interesting and gazed at them for about 10 minutes.