There is absolutely no street parking around here, but we’ve discovered a car park about 400m up the road which has reasonable rates, and doesn’t charge between 5pm and 8am. It’s even cheaper when the app does stupid things and you discover you haven’t been paying. Let’s see if we get away with that or get a fine after we get home.
After a big breakfast we headed off to see the first of two castles, the only two castles on the island.
The oldest is Mount Orgueil, on the eastern side of the island. It was built by the French in 1204, when the were in one of their stroppy moods and had annexed the island. Typically, the English took it back and both the island and the castle were bickered about for the next 400 years.
Mont Orgueil was later added to, changed around and generally enlarged. Then it was decided it was too hard to defend and was largely abandoned in 1600 when Elisabeth Castle was built.
The castle is very extensive (read lots of stairs) and rather intricate (read, “What, another staircase? Where does this one go?”). It sort of melds into the massive granite hill that it’s built on. Even if you didn’t know anything at all about castle building (and be honest, that’s all of us) you’d have to be impressed with what has been done here.
Later in the day – after a drive through the country for no particular reason – we headed to Elizabeth Castle in Saint Aubins Bay. This is an island for 15 hours a day, but you can walk to it on a causeway at low tide. The alternative is to take the ‘ferry’.
We walked over, a popular decision, but caught the ferry back owing to the fact the tide had come in and the causeway was about 5 metres under water. Jersey experiences a 10-metre tidal range.
Since Elisabeth Castle succeeded Mont Orgueil, it looks more like an early-modern fort than a medieval castle. This is because it is. Elisabeth Castle has way fewer intricacies than Mont Orgeuil, but is more extensive. It also has bunkers with large calibre guns, and a fire control tower, added by the Germans in WWII.
And that was pretty much that.
Stephen and Michelle
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