Stansted Mountfitchet

I took our two boys (three and one) on a trip to a castle yesterday. Stansted Mountfitchet castle is a rare thing - an original motte and bailey site, on which an entire Norman castle has been recreated. Simon Jenkins recently wrote in the Guardian about how we needed to lighten up in our treatment of ruins - let us build a roof over Stonehenge, that sort of thing. I suppose Stansted Mountfitchet is as good an example as any. In the promotional video shown in the cafe, there is a reference to years of struggles with the planning authorities to enable the thing to be 'restored', which doesn't suprise me at all. Not that the good people of Stansted itself followed such niceties - we were repeatedly reminded in the video that the reason a stone castle does not survive is because local people robbed out all the building stone after King John sacked the place in 1215 (Baron de Mountfitchet had been one of the 25 barons chosen to enforce Magna Carta).

So what was it like? The Castle opened as a visitor attraction in c.1985, and the whole thing was sort of 'Jorvic-lite'. It would be easy to be critical though. The fact is, I saw lots of people really enjoying themselves, whether learning about the history of domestic life in medieval England or interacting with the menagerie of animals that roam the compound freely. There were some quite gruesome tableaux in some of the reconstructed buildings - the dungeons were particularly dramatic, as these pictures show:

I wondered whether the waxwork dummy approach was the right one - a better resourced version would have costumed interpreters roaming the grounds, maybe practising some of the crafts that were depicted. But then the dummies have a certain charm of their own.

Anyway, the visit divided neatly into two different experiences for us - the castle first, and then, after lunch, the toy museum on the same site. I really enjoyed that - a museum stuffed full of the history of toys from the 1930s to c.1985. Oddly, they had Princess Diana's chopper bike. But the collection seemed hardly to have been updated since 1985 - hence, the tantalising beginnings of a display of home computer heritage ended with the ZX Spectrum 128k. Now that's what I call authentic.