Tailer's Family - journeying!
Project: Kent - Rochester
No. 5 - 5:- Exploring Rochester - Rochester Castle - State Apartments - Great Hall
City of Great Expectations - Charles Dickens..
State- Apartments - Great Hall.
Looking back on the illustrative picture - we are looking down into the Great Hall from the Minstrels Gallery, similar to the one in the top right hand of the photograph. These large arches with wooden partitions would have divided this level of the keep into two rooms. The joists for the floor boards would have engaged with the holes below the arches and that groove on the right.
Note the Norman architecture - a capital at the top of a column and chevron decorations on the arch.
This is the level of the state apartments. Here the cross wall is replaced by an arcade of magnificent columns and supporting arches, which separate the Great Hall from the Great Chamber beyond. For most of the time the larger arches were blocked off by wooden, later stone, partitions.
These rooms would have been the most luxurious in the keep, representing the height of good living for the period. Today we can only imagine the trappings of wealth that would have graced this room when a feast or ceremony took place. The hall would have been full of people dressed in their finest clothes, and the walls would be covered with decorative hangings. Guide-board.
'Magnificent ruin!...What a study for an antiquarian!'
The impressive Norman castle at Rochester had a humbling effect upon Dickens, reminding him perhaps of his own mortality. In Household Words he wrote: 'I surveyed the massive ruin from the Bridge, and thought what a brief little practical joke I seemed to be, in comparison with the solidarity, stature, strength and length of life.' In Dickens' time the castle looked very different. Houses and workshops filled much of the moat by the cathedral, the keep and towers were festooned with ivy and the waters of the River Medway lapped the base of the walls. - Guidemap
To see Large:-
farm4.static.flickr.com/3370/3447585562_45d61459df_b.jpg
Taken on
July 18, 2007 at 11.43am BST
Project: Kent - Rochester
No. 5 - 5:- Exploring Rochester - Rochester Castle - State Apartments - Great Hall
City of Great Expectations - Charles Dickens..
State- Apartments - Great Hall.
Looking back on the illustrative picture - we are looking down into the Great Hall from the Minstrels Gallery, similar to the one in the top right hand of the photograph. These large arches with wooden partitions would have divided this level of the keep into two rooms. The joists for the floor boards would have engaged with the holes below the arches and that groove on the right.
Note the Norman architecture - a capital at the top of a column and chevron decorations on the arch.
This is the level of the state apartments. Here the cross wall is replaced by an arcade of magnificent columns and supporting arches, which separate the Great Hall from the Great Chamber beyond. For most of the time the larger arches were blocked off by wooden, later stone, partitions.
These rooms would have been the most luxurious in the keep, representing the height of good living for the period. Today we can only imagine the trappings of wealth that would have graced this room when a feast or ceremony took place. The hall would have been full of people dressed in their finest clothes, and the walls would be covered with decorative hangings. Guide-board.
'Magnificent ruin!...What a study for an antiquarian!'
The impressive Norman castle at Rochester had a humbling effect upon Dickens, reminding him perhaps of his own mortality. In Household Words he wrote: 'I surveyed the massive ruin from the Bridge, and thought what a brief little practical joke I seemed to be, in comparison with the solidarity, stature, strength and length of life.' In Dickens' time the castle looked very different. Houses and workshops filled much of the moat by the cathedral, the keep and towers were festooned with ivy and the waters of the River Medway lapped the base of the walls. - Guidemap
To see Large:-
farm4.static.flickr.com/3370/3447585562_45d61459df_b.jpg
Taken on
July 18, 2007 at 11.43am BST