Adventures with Cecylee ~ Part II The Wall Walks

Lady Cecylee Neville, the protagonist of my first novel Thwarted Queen, was the youngest daughter of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, and grew up in the family home at Castle Raby, now in County Durham. Built by the Saxons, and rebuilt near the end of the fourteenth century by Cecylee’s grandfather John, Castle Raby is a castle of towers. There are Clifford’s Tower, located just inside the gatehouse, built to withstand attack, the kitchen tower, Mount Raskelf Tower (named after family lands in Yorkshire), the chapel tower and Bulmer’s Tower. 

This last has an unusual five-sided plan, not unlike similar five-sided towers found in Denmark and used to stand apart from the rest of the castle. In Thwarted Queen I imagine it used as a keep where everybody went when the castle came under attack. It seems to be the oldest part of the castle, possibly built in Anglo-Saxon times, perhaps to a Scandinavian design to ward off the Vikings. 

It is named after Bertram de Bulmer, a powerful magnate who lived at the time of King Stephen (1096-1154). In 1176, Bertram’s daughter Emma de Bulmer, heiress to the Bulmer estates, married Geoffrey de Neville. In turn, their daughter Isabel de Neville, heiress to the Bulmer and Neville estates married Robert Fitz Maldred, who owned Raby Castle. For some reason, their children took their mother’s surname of Neville, thus founding the great Neville family of the Middle Ages, whose members included Warwick the Kingmaker (1429-1471), one of Cecylee’s nephews.

When Cecylee lived there, Castle Raby was full of armed men. Her father Earl Ralph was made Warden of the Western Marches by Henry IV, and his task was to repel the Scots during numerous border raids. When I visited it back in 2007, the docent told me that there used to be wooden walkways that went from the tops of one tower to the next, which Earl Ralph’s men would patrol constantly, on the lookout for danger. The wooden walkways allowed the men to get from one tower to the next quickly and efficiently, without having to descend twisting staircases to the mud of the courtyards, and climb all the way back up again. In Thwarted Queen, I have a scene where Cecylee herself had to walk on these walkways. Imagine what it must have been like to wear a henin (cone-shaped headdress) with a silken veil fluttering off the end, as you made your way from one tower to another in a stiff breeze!

If this has whetted your appetite for Thwarted Queen, please click here.

The post Adventures with Cecylee ~ Part II The Wall Walks appeared first on Cynthia Sally Haggard.