Day 11. The Oubliette in the Bloody Chamber

Scott and I drove to Leap today, a surprisingly short distance away (about an hour and 15 minutes). It's a pretty amazing place. As usual with castle-spotting, there was the glorious moment when I saw Leap reveal itself in the distance - a bulky square that dominated the low, rolling hills around. Even the entrance is striking...

But that has nothing on the castle itself. After all the ruins I've been visiting, there's something warm and rather wonderful about visiting one that's occupied and really owned (the history as well as the present) by a resident family. When we arrived, Sean Ryan was seated by the open fire in his ground floor room, a massive boxy space dotted with esoteric objects, both ancient and modern, with a vine-wreathed back porch to the rear. The family live in a wing jutting off from this room.

Then we went up a stone staircase that was relatively fragile to the next large room, a kind of dining space with a minstrel's gallery, and from there up to the Bloody Chamber, where we saw the famous oubliette, leftover from Leaps medieval history.

Scott stayed behind on his own in the Bloody Chamber with the Zoom recorder to see if he could pick up any voices (we didn't). Then we descended back into the main hall, where Sean entertained us with stories of the ghosts of the castle that he and his family have encountered. He's never seen the famous Elemental allegedly conjured up by Mildren Derby's sceance (just as well, it's reputed to be the size of a sheep, with a rotting, dreadful face and to issue a vile stench). He hypothesised that it may have had more to do with the aristocracy's delight in fancying themselves as dabblers in the occult, and that it might have been the fancy of a lady, who, as he put it 'had nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it in.' I also asked him about the oubliette and the rumour that when it was rediscovered they found a sketelton with a wristwatch in it. His take was very interesting - he said they had found no evidence to support this story, so they thought it was quite possibly a folk rumour set up to discredit the landlord at the time and to indicate that he was as bad as the medieval barons who dropped living prisoners in the hole to die. If that's true, it would be a great addition to the amount of folk legends around the Big House that demonise the aristocracy.

He talked about how he, his wife and daughter continually encountered sounds and sights from other times in the castle - he said that a regular occurence was hearing voices talking, and doors opening, but that these would never correspond to contemporary spaces in the castle - the building itself has been much remodelled since it's medieval foundations were laid. Allegedly, there is a lady who pokes and pulls at visitors, a governess, two little girls, Charlotte and Emily who, as Sean put it "play in their own time", poor Emily's scream as she falls off the castle wall to her death, Charlotte saying "Emily" quietly and quickly ("never when you are ready to hear it"), figures that appear at the corner of your eye and shadows that come from no discernible source and shadows from no discerible source that flit across rooms. It seems like the castle holds within it echoes of earlier times, like episodes and emotions trapped in amber.

We left to Sean's musical farewell, piped on the tin whistle.

A really memorable visit.