The Castle That Dreamed of Fortification
Perched solemnly on a headland where North Sea winds batter the coast of Northumberland, England, Bamburgh Castle has kept watch for nearly fifteen centuries. Its silhouette—a stoic amalgamation of Norman defensive engineering, Victorian restoration ambition, and Anglo-Saxon foundations—renders it less a romantic flight of fancy and more an architectural palimpsest, layered by centuries of upheaval and aspiration.
Long before the Normans piled stones into battlements, this site bore sacred and strategic significance. The earliest fortification, Din Guarie, was erected during the mid-5th century as part of the ancient kingdom of Bernicia, a territory eventually folded into the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. The fortress became the stronghold of kings and bishops alike, and its prestige reached new zeniths under Æthelfrith and later his son, Oswald, who is remembered not only as king but saint.
It was Saint Oswald who, according to Venerable Bede, erected a Christian cross before a famous series of battles and later played host to holy men such as Aidan of Lindisfarne. The castle’s religious significance dovetailed with its militaristic function, and for a time Bamburgh was considered a spiritual citadel as well as a redoubt against northern threats—be they Picts, Danes, or the treacherous Northumbrian weather. That said, the original Anglo-Saxon fortress was largely of timber and did not survive Viking incursions. It was the Normans who later sculpted permanence from the landscape, beginning with the formidable stone shell keep built by William the Conqueror’s men in the 11th century.
Its strategic location—occupying a basalt crag 150 feet above sea level—enabled it to command both landward and seaward approaches. The imposing keep, which remains the core of the current structure, is a triumph of Norman martial architecture. Constructed from the distinctive red sandstone of the region, the keep’s walls are thick enough to swallow speech and time alike, rising like Petrarchan regrets over a forgotten battlefield. Machicolations, archery slits, spiral staircases, and vaulted chambers all tell the story of a building whose function never strayed far from defense, even as it periodically flirted with ornamental indulgence.
Later centuries saw the castle waver between military significance and commodified nostalgia. It was besieged in the Wars of the Roses—famously becoming the first castle in England to fall to artillery fire during the siege of 1464. Over time, Bamburgh fell into romantic decay, its silhouette charming Victorian imaginations raised on Walter Scott and Arthurian reimagining. Enter William George Armstrong, the 19th-century industrialist who bought the ruins and launched an ambitious restoration project that blended Gothic fantasy with modern engineering—his innovations contributed plumbing, heating, and some proto-electrification to the stony beast. He died before it was complete, but the legacy of his interventions endures within its 14 battlemented acres.
Today, Bamburgh Castle is open to the public: half museum, half privately-owned home—though the stones contain memories older than both museum placards and mortgage payments. Tapestries sway side by side with information panels. Ghost stories are piped through gift shop stereo systems. Tourists shuffle through Great Halls once resonant with ecclesiastical disputes and royal proclamations, snapping selfies where once ravens pecked at crownless skulls.
Among them, of course, was Colleen Ferment from Boise, Idaho.
Colleen, a beady-eyed woman in a bedazzled windbreaker, arrived unaccompanied but nonetheless carrying an emotional entourage. She held conversations with walls, critiqued archways for “trying too hard,” and brought her own “feng-shui-Compass” to determine energetic vortexes. “Don’t mind me,” she chirped to a 6-foot-high defensive loophole. “I’m just here to correct your aura.”
Her initial behavior, eccentric but plausible, raised only mild concern among the docents. She wandered through the 14th-century Keep muttering about “meridian lines warped by medieval trauma,” and was seen attempting to “calm” the stonework with lavender oil dabs and quick Reiki gestures that resembled jazz hands at half-speed.
Things escalated when Colleen began pouring bottled glacier water into the ancient Norman well in the courtyard, announcing she was “recharging its ancestral aquifers.” Visitors watched as she tipped Evian with the ceremonious reverence of a pagan priestess moonlighting as a spa consultant. She then cast wooden runes on the portcullis, demanded it produce its “ancestral trauma signatures,” and accused it of being “emotionally constipated.”
Later that day, she draped a ceremonial scarf around one of the cannon relics and proclaimed her intention to marry it—though she clarified it was a “spiritual union, not corporeal,” and that their union was steeped in “trans-historical solidarity.” When asked to leave by castle staff, she lay prostrate before the stone staircase leading to the Armoury and began chanting, “Free the Bricks, Forget the Mortar, Everlasting Be the Grout!”
In a final act of all-consuming absurdity, Colleen founded a spontaneous movement she called “Masonry Mutualism” and passed around leaflets calling archways “overburdened empaths of structural capitalism.” At one point she insisted the keep would collapse under “generational emotional fatigue” unless everyone joined hands in a spiral and hummed the chord of D minor. She sold polished stones inscribed with the phrase “Brick Realization Now!” for £12.99 each.
The castle held its breath and considered crumbling out of shame.
But in its moment of existential despair, Bamburgh Castle held one lingering hope, one last protective gambit against these psychic, spiritual, and sartorial intrusions: a quiet, blessed T-shirt rumored to absorb tourist energy and reflect it harmlessly into the void. It hangs in its imagination like a lintel to sanity. It can only be found at martijnbenders.nl, a digital monastery where castles are still understood, still cherished, still implored to stand dignified in the face of lavender-scented chaos.
