Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
There was something almost sublime in the misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues. Other houses of less wealth and more modern date had their pedigrees in the history of Lancashire.
We still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South.
"Ho, the Cygnet, the bonny white Cygnet!" They lay in a half-moon, with the westering sun striking full upon the windows of their high, castellated poops. Their great guns gleamed; mast and spar and rigging made network against the blue; high in air floated bright pennants and the red cross in the white field.
These heraldical beasts, it must be admitted whether a restoration in accordance with an old design or not tend to spoil the approach to the Great Gatehouse, for the whole would have gained in dignity had they been omitted and the plain low castellated wall remained unadorned.
Besides, there are many in this world who would rather a thousand times wander by the classic lake of Como, with its theatrical villas and its enchanting sunshine and perfume, or paddle up the castellated Rhine, than scramble here among wild rocks, and woods, and cataracts, with the chance of meeting an occasional savage or a grizzly-bear."
But its main beauty lay in those features by which I knew it to be ice I mean in a vast surprising variety of forms, such as steeples, towers, columns, pyramids, ruins as it might be of temples, grotesque shapes as of mighty statues, left unfinished by the hands of Titans, domes as of cathedrals, castellated heights, fragments of ramparts, and the like.
I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamber yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size.
In feudal times it was probably a small castellated manor belonging perhaps to a knight who could not afford to build himself a donjon on some eminence and to fortify it with walls; but centuries later what remained of the original structure was patched up and considerably enlarged. Now, as I saw it in the dusk, it seemed a very ghost-haunted place.
And set up in one corner, white and ghostly making you stare a minute when you first came inside a ship's figure-head, a three-foot odd Britannia, pudding-basin bosomed and eagle-featured, with castellated headgear, clasping a trident in her hand. She, as presiding deity and
Haddon is situate about one mile south-east of Bakewell, and is one of the most curious and perfect of the old castellated mansions of this country. It stands on a gentle hill, in the midst of thick woods overhanging the Wye, which winds along the valley at a great depth beneath.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking