Bolsover Castle, topped with turrets, sits at the crest of a hill with the best view in Derbyshire. You could be forgiven for thinking it must be the home of a medieval knight, if not a wizard. But really it’s a gothic, chivalric, romantic recreation of a medieval castle, constructed by a 17th-century aristocrat. He was so pleased with his “new castle” that he took it for his title, becoming Duke of Newcastle.
The castle seems pretty wondrous to me, not least because it determined my choice of career. As a teenager, I read about it in a book describing a treasure hunt undertaken in the 1960s by the architectural historian Mark Girouard. He was looking for traces of the lost houses designed by the Smythsons, a talented family of master masons and designers in Elizabethan England. Their work at Bolsover formed the climax of his quest, and through several lucky breaks I ended up working there myself in my first proper job as assistant inspector of ancient monuments for English Heritage.
One of the castle’s oddest buildings is its Riding House, where each morning the Duke trained his wildly expensive horses in the art of horse ballet. This strange sport was popular at the court of Charles I, and you can still see something like it at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna.
At first sight it seems pointless, and yet the repetitive discipline required to teach a huge beast to leap through the air involved what we would now call mindfulness. To be good at it, you need to be completely calm, and alive to the possibilities of each given moment, qualities needed by any leader. A rider in superb control of a powerful animal was supposed to represent a person capable of taming the unruly animal passions that lie within us all.
The castle is a very English wonder, because it fuses arcane symbolism and architectural ideas from the ancient fortresses of northern England with the then very modern ideas from Renaissance Italy. The Renaissance as it arrives here in Derbyshire looks a bit dodgy to expert eyes familiar with the…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Travel | The Guardian…