Whilst I was having a browse through my emails on Saturday morning, one from Wowcher popped up that caught my eye, 48% off Warwick Castle tickets - erm, don't mind if i do!
I haven't visited the castle for years! I went once as a child on the way back from Alton Towers to break up the journey down South and loved it, I'm a big history buff and have always particularly enjoyed the gruesome side of a medieval castle, those people were savage.
I snapped up two tickets and we headed up on Sunday. The vouchers from Wowcher were fantastic, instead of £30pp we paid just over £15pp which was a whopping discount and they were valid everyday from July until October 2019, including summer hols and weekends which is very rare for a discount ticket usually!
We arrived shortly after 11am and parking was a little way from the entrance, there is disabled parking much closer but the main overflow car park is around a 20 minute walk from entrance, fine for us as two adults but something to bear in mind if you have little ones in tow! The car park also costs £6, you can purchase a token at the entrance/exit or you can pay by card at the barrier.
Entry was super easy with our vouchers, we skipped all the ticket queues and went straight to the turnstiles and boom, we were in! Our first port of call was the get our bearings, we mooched for a bit before starting to explore the old ruins of the castle walls. There's a lot of fantastic information boards dotted around the castle walls but not too much to bore you - just enough to give you an idea of what happened and when!
The grizzly (no pun intended) tales began immediately with our first visit to the 'Bear Tower' and views from the top of 'Caeser's Tower' were incredible and we were lucky to have such lovely weather for our visit.
There's a lot of one-way systems at the castle which are great for crowd control and also help you make the most of your visit, once you leave one attraction you normally find yourself close to another one! We really enjoyed walking through the Kingmaker exhibit and also the show in the Time Tower attraction was super interesting and also answered a lot of questions we had about the history of the castle - one spoiler, it was all started way back when by a badass warrior princess called Ethel!
One thing on our list to see was the birds of prey show called 'The Falconer's Quest'. I love a birds of prey show and anything falconry related - we're actually doing a Falconry activity at Center Parc's next month so stay tuned for that! There isn't much seating outside by the river for the show but there's a hill just next to the seats which fits a lot more people and you can see perfectly well. The show was incredible and by far the highlight of the day, we spent a bit of time before the show started googling birds of prey and we were astounded to see a lot of the world's biggest eagles and birds of prey feature in the show, it was breathtaking!
Finally, our last stop on our visit was the visit the newly opened Warwick Castle Dungeons! I've never done London but have visited the Dungeons attraction in Amsterdam so I knew what to expect, the attraction differed slightly to Amsterdam but was fantastic nevertheless, the actors that take part are both terrifying and brilliant and it's just a good laugh all round. Its worth mentioning that this isn't included in your ticket price, the Dungeons attraction is £10.
Food & drink-wise there's a number of stands and stalls selling burgers, hot-dogs, waffles, ice-cream etc at the Castle, we did eat in the pizza/pasta buffet, it wasn't great value for money really but as we'd saved almost 50% on our tickets, we didn't mind so much. I'd probably recommend taking your own food/picnic next time as there are loads of great places to sit and eat around the Castle grounds.
We also popped into the Great Hall and subsequent rooms before we left, this is actually a wedding venue which kind of blew my mind a little as the property is absolutely stunning and erm, it's a freaking castle?! It's a very Downton Abbey-esque property in amongst a medieval castle so it's a little strange and feels a bit out of a place but an interesting visit nonetheless!
I'd totally recommend the Castle if you can find a discount voucher like we did, to be completely honest I wouldn't pay £30pp as on top of that the Dungeons are £10 and the parking is £6 so it soon racks up, unless you've got small children and can make the most of every attraction and activity there's probably not enough for a full day's worth but definitely worth a look if you can get there!
No comments:
Post a Comment