James Tucker in Cov

After our trip to St Andrew's, Laura and I went to Edinburgh, my second trip there in a year- I saw in the New Year with Tyler on the edges of a wind-blown Castle Street. This time the weather was much nicer, a crisp sort of autumn day that was still a little too early in the year to be that cool.
As always, the castle was the centrepiece of the town, which we visited this time around. Along with all of the other phases of the building- the old chapel, the practical defences and the Victorian nationalism of the museum buildings, are touches of the community of soldiers who were based here. A small corner of a lower bastion is a graveyard for the dogs of the regiments, including one for a dog named Scamp, which might be visible below. Tom the Gun, the soldier who's fired the one o'clock cannon for some years, now has his own brand of whisky, and his face on all of the signs explaining the whole custom. We left the castle with enough time for Laura to be terrified on Prince's Street when the gun went off.
In the museum quarter was this Andy Warhol exhibit we missed in favour of a locally famous picture of a skating clergyman, and spent a surprising amount of time in the (rather good) park-level expansion's gift shop.
As for me, I was especially struck by how tall the old buildings could be, and how dense the old town must have been. At times there must have been eight or ten floors above, which I think does qualify as a skyscraper.

Windsor Castle is conveniently close to London, and apparently such a draw that there are two separate rail lines terminating there. Choosing the option that avoided going through Slough, which is distressingly close, we headed to Windsor along the southern route, passing through Kew instead. Windsor's also really quite close to Heathrow, and I'd think you could see the castle pretty clearly from the left windows of a plane taking off- it can only be a couple of miles. Despite all that, Windsor is a pretty small and quiet sort of place, still totally dominated by the castle. It rises considerably above the river, and sits beside the 650 acre Home Park and the 5000 acre Great Park, which includes the castle's 3 mile driveway.
The castle's divided into lower and upper wards, and is probably close to a mile long in total. At the dead centre is a circular tower on a mount (right in the picture above), a development of the original fort built by William the Conquerer. The Lower Ward, closer to the town, contains St George's Chapel, the home of the Knights of the Garter, and probably one of the best late-medieval churches I've ever seen. The carving and vaulting are of the flashiest possible sort, and the tombs and statuary from both monarchs and famous knights are fantastic. There's also a collection of Tudor cottages for some of the staff, and a circular group of houses for the choir of the Chapel.
The Upper Ward, nearer the Park, is the bit you can't visit directly. The state apartments, dining rooms and exhibitions are all here, but so are the actual Royal Residences. This bit most clearly shows that most of the castle has been rebuilt in the 17th and 19th Centuries to a sort of story-book ideal. The exhibition of drawings we caught included Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Reubens sketches, and that was a tiny bit of the whole collection. There is also the tour through the great dining halls and so forth, which are impressive, but I liked the drawing rooms and breakfast areas, with their views over Eton (and, alas, Slough) for absolutely miles.