BERKELEY CASTLE 



This venerable pile, one of the oldest continuously-inhabited houses in 

 England, stands upon a knoll of rising ground at the southern end 

 of the tract of rich alluvial land known as the Vale of Berkeley, 

 that stretches aw^ay for ten miles or more north-eastward in the 

 direction of Gloucester. Within two miles to the west is the Severn, 

 already a mile across and rapidly widening to its estuary. On the 

 side of the higher ground the town creeps up to the shelter of the 

 Castle and the grand old church, on the lower is a level stretch of water- 

 meadow. 



Seen from the meadows some half-mile away it looks like some great 

 fortress roughly hewn out of natural rock. Nature would seem to have 

 taken back to herself the masses of stone reared by man seven and a half 

 centuries ago. 



The giant walls and mighty buttresses look as if they had been carved 

 by wind and weather out of some solid rock-mass, rather than as if 

 wrought by human handiwork. But when, in the middle of the twelfth 

 century, in the earliest days of the reign of Henry Plantagenet, the castle 

 was built by Robert, son of Harding, he built it with outer walls ten 

 to fifteen feet thick, without definite plan as it would seem, but, as the 

 work went on, suiting the building to the shape of the hillock and to the 

 existing demands of defensive warfare. 



When the day is coming to its close, and the light becomes a little 

 dim, and thin mist-films rise level from the meadows, it might be an 

 enchanted castle ; for in some tricks of evening light it cheats the eye 

 into the semblance of something ethereal — subUmate — without substance 



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