The Tower of London

ROYALTY! MURDER! TORTURE! EXECUTION! AND SHINY THINGS!!! This is the Tower of London. Once a palace, then a prison, now a museum, this impressive compound is now open to the public and dripping with history!

Back in its day, the Tower of London was a prison for fancy convicts, not ordinary street criminals. Traitors, royalty, royal traitors, and so forth. Of course, it was still a prison. Rank doesn't mean much if your head's just been chopped off.

This is the gate through which new prisoners would be taken by boat. 

Inside the walls was a sort of citadel, which multiple buildings and even more tourists. 

The inside of the Traitor's Gate.

And of course, no tour of the Tower of London would be complete without those fancy hat guys!

This was in the armory exhibition. A robotic dragon made almost entirely out of Medieval weaponry. I don't know why it was there or where it came from, but I want one as a pet. Please, Mom? 

This is Perkin's Steam Gun. A steam-powered gun. Let that sink in for a minute. Epic, no?
It never caught on because of the whole little waiting-for-the-boiler thing, but it would make a pretty epic addition to a steampunky story, 

If I remember correctly, this is where the crown jewels are kept. I think. But then, that had a longer line. 

I totally thought this guy was a statue. And then he blinked.

A Few More Details of the Power Plant at Warwick Castle

I did a bit more digging after yesterday's post on Warwick Castle and I found a few good pictures of the water powered electric station:

Warwick Castle

My reaction to the consumerist, child-ridden mess
that was Warwick Castle. (Slight Exaggeration.)

Ever wanted to go to a medieval and run around pretending to be a knight or a princess or whatever? Well, Warwick Castle is the place to do so. Unfortunately, it's full of  annoying schoolkids doing just that. So many of them...

Okay, as much as the Grumpy Cat in me wanted to be disappointed, (I mean, really, compare it to the elegant decay that was Corfe Castle) but Warwick Castle is very well preserved, thanks in part to this annoying tourism, so it does in fact deserve some historical merit. Here's some of the cool stuff I found.



Lovely gardens:

This here is a "test your strength" device in one of the exhibits.
It has multiple strength levels, from "girl" (I'm not kidding. Some bastard actually included that)
to "knight." This is me pulling it all the way up to the "knight" level. Ha.

For some reason this wax sculpture of a horse looks very surprised.

This part here was pretty cool. It's the water-powered electric station for the castle, added in the early 1900's.  Full of gears, rust, panels, levers and dials. My kinda place:

Update: More pictures of that here.

Inside the castle:

CASTLEZ!

Day two of my epic journey! Today I time traveled back even farther than my usual Victorian destination and into the remnants of a Medieval castle! Corfe Castle was built by William the Conqueror in the 11th Century, and even ten hundred years later, it looks spectacular.

LET THE PICTURE SPAMMING BEGIN!

Up next, how I got a tan in England!