UK Tourist & Leisure Attractions

Looking at Southover Grange in Lewes, which is a popular wedding venue with extensive grounds behind.  We liked the effort the local authority had made to give the town its old world charm, notice the street lamp to the left.

Walking up from the Southover area to Lewes Castle, it was not hard to see that Lewes has changed little over the years, apart from the traffic struggling to negotiate the very narrow streets.  A 'park and ride' is needed we thought.
 

At the door of many Lewes properties they have these old 'shoe scrapers' for scraping the mud off your footwear, a relic from bygone times when the streets were unmade and could be very muddy.  Mike remembers them well!  (Ha, very funny Belinda).

Another very old building in Lewes, this one's a bookshop with most of the books on the outside of the building!  The old beams were sagging and the building seemed to be at odd angles, it must be the age.  Mike knows the feeling well!  (Ha ha again!).
 

Here's Belinda outside Lewes Castle checking the details.  Lewes Archaeological Society look after the castle and museum.

Mike resting on an old gun at the entrance to Lewes Castle.  We had to climb up many steps to get to the main area of the castle, groan, more uphill climbing!  We're not particularly interested in old castles but do seem to explore a few on our travels!  Check out some of our other tourist visits.
 

Looking north-east from Lewes Castle towards Ringmer.  In the foreground is the bowls green where the Kings of old entertained themselves between wars and to the left is the hall where all the old records are kept and are available for study.  The link to the Lewes Castle website is on our links page, together with many other UK tourist links.

After climbing up from down there we were rewarded with some good views.  They had some view details and diagram plates to detail what you were looking towards, very handy.
 

Deep in the heart of the tower... we read the info. display telling us everything about it all.  All interesting stuff, even for non-history buffs like us!

Right at the top of Lewes Castle, and an even better view looking down onto the town.  They'd have seen their enemies approaching from miles away.
 

The narrow spiral staircases were rather awkward to climb.  Imagine then what they must have been like for the old warriors in the heat of battle rushing up and down them, clad in all their armour!
 

Now talk about a posed photo!  The spears look real enough in this picture but are, in fact,  just painted onto the wall.  Still, we wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of a real one, ouch!  Now, just got to negotiate those narrow castle spiral staircase steps back down now!  Hope no one's coming up!

Finally we looked around the interesting museum at Lewes Castle (included in the £4 price) and the audio-visual show which runs every half hour, it made us glad we live now and not hundreds of years ago!  We had a very enjoyable visit to Lewes and it shows what treasures there are to visit virtually on our own doorstep.

Looking through the archways at Lewes Castle down to the High Street beyond.  We had a lovely warm day for our visit in the late March sunshine.  Don't forget our links page for related links to the attractions we visit.