Secrets of a Medieval Castle

Chepstow Castle, one of the first stone built castles in Wales, construction began in 1067, a year after the Norman invasion. Kevin Hicks has taken students around Chepstow for almost 30 years. Today, he takes you on a special tour of his favourite castle and shares with you some of the secrets he's discovered over that time. 

VIDEO HERE  (31:44 minutes)

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This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I dig castles and always have since I was a little kid.

When we were living in Germany the first time back in the mid to late 1960s, my father's favorite thing to do was to load us and any other neighbor kids hanging around into the Rambler Station Wagon and go castle-hopping - just driving around until he saw a castle or ruins on a hilltop, then driving up to check it out. It was an almost every weekend thing, weather permitting. Sometimes we'd hit a couple a day.

We saw so many damned castles I couldn't keep them straight. When I was stationed in the same area in the late 70s and early '80s, I found myself doing the same thing, only to realize that most of them I had already been to before 12 or 13 years earlier.

When we lived in Germany during the mid 1970s there was a castle in ruins in much the same condition as the one in the video on a hilltop overlooking the town of Hohenecken just a couple miles as the crow flies to the southwest of our quarters. It was built around the year 1150 AD, although I can't remember for the life of me when it was abandoned or why.

Me and all my friends spent a lot of time up there between exploring, partying or just hanging out. We rarely saw anybody else up there.  At that time, it was pretty much overgrown and the grounds were maintained maybe once a year when a crew would come up and spend a day cutting brush. Nowadays, it's been cleaned up pretty good from the pictures I've seen. While I'm thinking of it, you can get a good look of the ruins HERE.

We prowled all over those ruins. There wasn't a wall or tower we didn't scale or a tunnel we didn't explore. I remember once we found a hole in one of the walls and bellied our way down into it and though a short tunnel that had been filled in at one point, finding ourselves in a low room, maybe 3 feet high, with short lengths of chain attached to the wall and stone flooring by some pretty heavy duty anchors. A dungeon, maybe?

If you'll go to the link above and then scroll through the pictures, you'll see an arch with a metal gate. That's the entryway into the castle grounds, although the metal gate wasn't there back in the '70s.

I remember one time I was walking through there with my girlfriend, and Rhonda said it was good luck to be kissed at the gate and me never passing up a chance to try to touch a titty, I pushed her against the wall on the left of the gate to kiss her. She was barefoot and when she stepped backwards she yelped and said that she'd cut her foot, so I bent down to see what she'd cut it on and found something black poking out of the ground. I dug it out and it was a silver crucifix maybe an inch and a half long. It was oxidized but in almost perfect shape other than some minor pitting on the back and the loop at the top where a chain would attach being broken off which is probably why it was lost to begin with. She took it home and showed her mother who took it to a family friend who was a silversmith, and this friend cleaned the oxidation off, then took it to a historian where it was determined that it dated to around 1400 AD, give or take 50 years. I can't tell you how much of a thrill it was to hold something in my hand knowing the last person to touch it was almost 600 years earlier.

When I ran into Rhonda 10 years later, I asked about it and she told me she still had it and was going to pass it down to her daughter.

We took my history teacher up there once and showed him what all we found and the conclusions we'd come to, and he told us we were pretty much spot on, then filled us in on other details that we hadn't thought about like the interior was almost certainly plastered and whitewashed to improve lighting on the inside, he showed us defenses we'd missed, told us the stone ruins just outside the castle walls were more than likely storehouses for grain and feed, shit like that.

We couldn't get his opinion on our dungeon because in his words, "I'm too damned old and feeble to act like a gopher," him being maybe 35 or 40 years old at the time.

All in all, it was a really great place to hang out, explore and learn. And while I didn't realize it at the time, it started a weird thing with me.

Any time I ran across ruins whether it was in Germany or the mining regions of California, I always tried to envision what the sites or structures looked like while they were active, then I'd see if the ruins that remained might've supported my thoughts. Castles were pretty hard, but if it was a mining site up in the Mother Lode or in the Trans-Sierra most of the time I'd be close - here was the shaft entrance, over here was the assay office, next to that was the operations office, here was the blacksmith shop, here was the stables. I mean, it wasn't that difficult - in the remains of the blacksmith shop you'd find clusters of square nails and spikes used for timbering as well as star drills that they were making or sharpening, at the assay office site there would be old clay crucibles and broken glass from beakers, in the stables would be bits of harness or harness hardware and of course right outside the shaft would be a mine dump where the barren waste rock excavated from the shaft was discarded. If there was a mill on site, you could find that site because of the finer rock, the tailings, downhill from that. It wasn't that difficult to do with a very basic knowledge of mining operations back then.

With the mining townsites, it was usually more difficult to get the layout of the town and businesses because there was usually no trace at all left, but sometimes (key word there) they could be verified with old photographs which made for a pretty cool timewaster during the winter months or when I couldn't string along enough days off from work to be in the hills for any period of time. I'd go to the library or local historical society to look up a site or town, and if I found a picture, I'd either make a copy from the library book or buy the publication from the historical society, then take it with me when I went back to the site a month or two later. Looking at the old photo, I'd try and find the exact spot where the original photograph was taken, then I'd take one or two of my own for comparison and pop that sucker in a photo album where nobody else would ever see them. Like I said, a timewaster if you could consider learning anything, no matter how useless, a waste of time.