...Or try high life closer to home
IT’S a sparkling early morning at Warwick Castle, well before the first visitors arrive. I am strolling the battlements of one of our biggest, oldest and best preserved citadels in my fluffy white dressing gown.
In the courtyard far below I spy my breakfast. Our personal concierge is carrying it with all due care from the kitchens. Now for the perilous part.
There is no lift in the 650-year-old tower so he must negotiate the 54 steps of our spiral staircase.
I just make it back at our room before he hammers on our stout wooden door – the only way to announce yourself in a castle. This place is too old for bells.
He sets down breakfast, piping hot under silver lids, at the foot of our hand-carved four-poster bed. We eat to the gentle rustling of the River Avon, wrapping around the castle far below.
If you want to stay somewhere with spectacular views, there is of course a good choice of hotels located in stratospheric skyscrapers around the world. However, it’s harder to find high rooms in ancient places. Cathedrals won’t do – you would never sleep for the bells. That only leaves castles, and fortunately Britain has some of the very best.
They have the deepest pedigree, fabulous history, and those thick walls guarantee a quiet night.
Now, two rooms at Warwick Castle’s Caesar’s Tower have been refurbished with the fine furniture and fabrics the last house guests to stay here 100 years ago – Royals, dukes and Cabinet members – would have expected. The
bathroom is a 21st Century bonus. Past ‘guests’ include Edward IV, imprisoned here in 1469 by the Earl of Warwick, the kingmaker in Shakespeare’s Henry plays.
One of the privileges of staying here is a personal tour of the castle once the visitors have gone.
Our guide leads us through echoing halls, up spiral staircases on to turret tops with views over half of Warwickshire, and into long-locked chambers to see graffiti from Civil War prisoners.
It was too much to expect them to fire up the kitchens just for the two of us that night. The fantasy of an evening in the State Dining Room, a spit-roast pig turning over the flames, a relay of servants toiling up from the kitchens, the mead flowing and minstrels carolling, was a period detail too far. Instead we booked into a nearby restaurant for dinner.
Back in our turret at midnight, we savoured the perfect peace of a slumbering citadel – just us, security and the concierge awaiting our call for a nightcap. Or were there other, supernatural residents that night?
Our guidebook was no help, although there’s plenty of scope, with a millennium of sad stories. But no ghostly aura made it into Caesar’s Tower. We had to be content with the rustling of the Avon below.