Just 22 miles from London, Windsor’s a lovely little town - and home to not just one of England’s first-rate schools (
Eton ), but also one of the world’s most high-profile and historic castles.
The Royal Station at Windsor is almost right next to the castle, a huge stone fortress which stands on a hill and towers over the entire area. We arrived at Windsor from London on a clear spring day, and walked uphill to the castle (the Queen was in residence that day - the Union Jack was flying above the castle). Within the solid stone walls of Windsor, we first visited the absolutely adorable Queen Mary’s Doll’s House . Six feet high, and a faultless replica of an actual house, the Doll’s House was so exquisitely perfect it made me wish I were a little girl again! Everything, down to the minutest detail, was there: handpainted china, glassware, delicately embroidered linen, tooled leather books, furniture - all miniature, and all perfect.
After ogling at the Doll’s House, we went on a long, slow stroll through the rest of the Castle, through the stunning English Gothic St George’s Chapel and the State Apartments - the bedrooms, the dining rooms, audience rooms, closets, dressing rooms and reception rooms. The treasures in the State Apartments are unbelievable - china (including Ming vases and Sèvres china), solid gold utensils, loads and loads of weapons (there are swords and guns filling more than two rooms, including the bullet which killed Lord Nelson at Trafalgar), armour, coats of arms (again, one complete room), tributes, prizes from various parts of the British Empire, crowns, an ivory throne, paintings galore, (there are originals here by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, etc) and much, much more.
And the rooms, of course, are themselves quite spectacularly decorated - they’re sumptuously gilded, painted, carved, and tapestry-draped. Quite opulent - the Reception Room , for instance, though a rich cream in color, is so heavily gilded that it seems almost totally gold; and the walls and ceiling of the dining room are, every inch of them, painted with mythological figures in all the colors of the rainbow. All this richness is really rather overwhelming, and after a brief interlude at the guard-post outside where we (like all self-respecting tourists) got ourselves photographed with a poker-faced guard, we came out of the castle and strolled down to the Thames to feed bread to the swans.