Lancaster Castle

There can rarely be an hour or five pounds better spent than the guided tour round Lancaster Castle.
It is a place of superlatives, the oldest prison still in operation, the oldest law courts, oldest prison cells, the records go on and on.  Being a law court, taking pictures was forbidden, not as matter of policy, but as a criminal offence.
We did not see much of the very oldest parts, from the time of King John, as the castle holds a working prison.  It is a small prison, a specialist centre for drug rehabilitation in the northwest, with a good record for low re-offending rates.
The Shire Hall is the jewel in the crown, built in Georgian times to house the civil court, and still in use today.  It is spacious, with rows of benches for competing teams of lawyers, and a large area for the jury to be comfortable during the long trials.  These are arranged in a semi circle and round them is an even wider terrace of seating for all the members of the public.  It is built like a theatre, because court cases were indeed a public spectacle in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  When not being used as a court, the hall is used to stage plays and performances on occasions.
The semi circular back wall houses shields for every King of England from Richard I to Queen Elizabeth II. There are also smaller shields for other offices, including the Sheriff of Lancaster right up to the present day. The men and women who hold this office, for one year at time, display their ancestral coat of arms, if they have one, but mostly they need to design their own especially.
The room is light spacious and very pleasant, and we spent some time there being regaled by many interesting facts and anecdotes. I have no idea who the person in the left of three portraits hanging above the judges seats is, only that when I heard he was the second, I wanted to ask but never found a suitable moment - who was the first person to grow a pineapple in England?
The criminal court was a different affair, built in the older part of the castle, but with an impressive set of oak benches and panelling laying out the court room.  Again there was terraced public seating, but this was in a long hall, and the whole layout was more cramped. At the back of where the jury sat was a small door, through which a chamber pot could be passed, so that there was no need to delay proceedings if one of the jurors was caught short. At the back of the court the branding iron, used to mark the palm of those found guilty was still in place, long after it had ceased to be used.
On the way in to the court we passed through the jurors' waiting room, where they had the choice of the library or Star Trek videos to pass the time.  This is a pleasant Georgian room, made in the site of the much older court room, the very place where the Pendle witch trials of the seventeenth century were held.
The room where the jurors consider their verdict is a circular room, in one of the towers. It faces out of the castle into the public courtyard, and was used for public hangings in the past. It was all arranged so that hangings could take place in the rain without the executioner having to get wet.
We went into another tower, passing through a passage way cut through the ancient three foot walls, and sat in a circular room, and handled the irons used to chain men prisoners on their sixteen day walk to London before being deported to Australia. This particular ancient tower had a Georgian dome at the top, so as to fit in better alongside the Shire Hall.
The tour finished in another circular room in a tower, complete with a curved door, shaped after being made to fit the room by Robert Gillow, the famous furniture maker. Each of the chairs in this room were made by him, with individual faces carved at the top of each seat back.
Much of what we had seen was very impressive, but the tour was equally fascinating on account of the wealth of historical information and anecdotes that we were told along the way.