Windsor and Eton

Windsor town is a smallish town built around the enormous Windsor Castle. The castle was built by William, the conqueror more than a millennium ago. It belongs to the crown. I took some pictures of the interior, on the places were permitted (not many). I visited the castle in 2014. I am sure it did not change much. 

Windsor Castle is one of the royal residences till this days. Most tourists come without an appointment, so they see the place from the outside. But I had arranged for a visit. I wouldn't like to live there. It's old, the ceilings are high like in a hangar, it's humid and cold. The private rooms are more than probably modern and cozy.  

The Round Tower was finished in 1170.

"not my car" at the ceremonial entrance to the castle

the tourist entrance

view from the ramparts

The old moat garden, not bad...

Queen Mary's Dolls' House is the largest and most famous dolls' house in the world. Built between 1921 and 1924 for Queen Mary, consort of King George V, by the leading British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, it contains works from the finest artists, craftspeople and manufacturers of the early 20th century. The completed House was the product of 250 craftspeople and manufacturers, 60 artist-decorators, 700 artists, 600 writers and 500 donors

A picture from the Royal Collection Trust, just to show the proportion

The private entrance to the castle taken from...(see next picture)

The Long Walk Park is some 4 Km long and some 4  hundred years old

St. George Chapel

St. George Chapel

Order of the Garter dwellings. "Honi soit qui mal y pense", my translation from old French being "shame for the one with malevolent thinking"

"Windsor Royal Shopping" from the other side of the road

The Thames

Feeding the Royal birds

Eton College, a "Public School" (in UK it means it is private) were the future prime ministers of the UK learn. Very competitive, very expensive, very traditional. In the meantime, only for boys.

Eton

A cold and solitary garden at Eton

"Eton College Library And Hall South African War" at High St.

Another entrance, "Vincet amor patriae", Eton

A man with a very peculiar family name remembered in High Street, Eton. He was French and his real name was Antoine Pyron de Martre. 

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Michael Robinson Blogs 11 years ago commented:

In addition to writing the C18th standard treatise on English Heraldry, which was much reprinted, Porny was a very well known author of school books, French Grammars, Dictionaries etc. all of which went through numerous editions in the second half of the C18th.

Just a mailbox from the Victorian days

Stamps dispenser, regular delivery mailbox and old blue ones for "airmail" delivery

 Susan Thomas, 11 years ago commented:

I think the blue ones were short-lived as people would NOT learn to put the right letters in the right ones!!

I can remember buying stamps from a machine like that as a child with the old huge brown English pennies!

Me: all this postal paraphernalia is not in use and the openings are shuttered. I would say that only male dogs with some urgent drive use the boxes.

Last picture of this album is a tomb, the eternal rest place of a student, victim of the plague in year 1856 (as it is engraved in Latin on the gravestone) seen at the College Chapel graveyard. You see on the left a skull and two crossed femur bones, a sign it's the tomb of a plague victim. On the right an hourglass inscribed on the outline of a skull is a Memento Mori that remembers us that time will prevail over life. The Latin motto is: "Mors certa in hora incerta". To abound, also Shakespeare had is version: "Death, a necessary end / will come when it will come".

Some explanation about the plague:

from the "Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence": "first epidemic of Asiatic cholera in the British Isles, appearing in October 1931 when a ship from the North Sea port of Hamburg docked ar the town of Sunderland, Ireland, and other parts of Britain. Londoners awaited its arrival in a state of panic and on February 6 1832, observed a day of national fasting and penance in the hope it might be averted; a few days later London's first case of cholera was reported. Fatalities in London numbered about 5300 persons until autumn when the disease subsided...Mortality from cholera for the entire country for 1831 and 1832 was an estimated 31,000...Cholera emerged from India...in four devastating pandemics (1817-23, 1826-37, 1846-63, 1865-75)...The story of cholera in the Western world is inseparable from the problems of 19th-century urbanization, sewage control and public water supplies...resistance to the work of English physician John Snow, who traced cholera to contaminated water in the epidemic of 1832...resulted in slow adoption of truly effective prevention...would have saved many lives had these simple methods been promoted by the medical profession and the central and local boards of health... Robert Koch identified the cholera bacillus in 1884...

The End (just saying)