Shrewsbury museum and castle (a bargain)

 To round off my Shrewsbury blogs here are a few pictures from the museum (and a little later on the castle). Nicely priced for a Scotsman (£0.00) it has a reasonable selection of stone aged artifacts and some remains from the nearby Roman town of Viroconium as well as some stuff relating to Darwin (a good excuse for stuffing a few animals), some lovely local tiles and pottery and a very fancy bed.

Leading off this rather arbitrary mix is a little statue of an ape based on Rodin's Thinker but very much with the Victorian (and in some places current) controversy over Darwins theorys in mind.

Some Roman glass

A Coalport vase (1871)

The bed is from 1593 although the drapes were made recently.

At about quarter to four,I thought it was about time to wander down to the station and take in the castle on the way back, but not before I'd managed to get myself a cup of tea. So I arrived at the castle at the back of four o'clock. It was priced at a very reasonable £2.50 entrance fee (where else can you get into for that money now a days) but the attendant said that since it was less than an hour to closing time he would let me in for nothing (making the £1.30 invested in a cup of tea very worth while). There's a military museum there which is excellent and you cannot really do it justice in less than an hour and still have time to look at the castle and I suspect that there is some part of the museum linked to the castle itself but I didn't see it, perhaps it had closed by that time.

The castle started out life as a Mote and Bailly castle built between 1067 and 1074 but the mound it has been built on has been covered in flowers and some pretty gardens and on the part where the castle itself was, the owner in 1790 built his daughter a summer house called Laura's tower - this doesn't really help conjure up the brutal quashing of bloody rebellion by knights on half ton horses. The shape of the 13th century extensions to the castle are much more apparent with much of the original curtain walls still being intact. From the walls of the castle, the armys of Edward the firsts time (he that wouldn't leave Scotland alone - it didn't get him anywhere did it?) would have had a superb view of the railway station where the could have spotted rebelious Welsh hords as they were getting off the train.

Laura's tower - probably used mainly for needlework rather than drunken feasts with lots of wine and eating with fingers.

The view from the station.