Inside Lindisfarne Castle

Northumberland break 10

I wasn't really planning to go inside Lindisfarne Castle, but a particularly heavy squall of driving rain made it seem like a good idea! It is a National Trust property too, so it was free entry for me, as I'm a member. Inside it turned out to be fascinating... 

After the castle's use as a garrison became unnecessary, it was left as a coastguard lookout and became something of a Victorian visitor attraction. It was spotted by Edward Hudson, the owner of Country Life magazine, who bought it in 1901. He commissioned the famous designer Sir Edwin Lutyens to refurbish it as a holiday home in the Arts and Crafts style, and it is that incarnation which we now see today. The house is arranged as though in the middle of one of Hudson's house parties, just after WWI, when he would bring guests up from London, among them the cellist Guilhermina Suggia, to whom he was briefly engaged, and the writer Lytton Strachey. 

It feels as though the ghosts have barely left.... 

Rather improbably, across a field, lies a walled garden, originally the castle's vegetable patch but redesigned as a flower garden by Gertrude Jekyll, who often collaborated with her friend Lutyens on his projects.