The Medieval Castle That Saw The Murder Of The King Of England | American Viscountess | Real Royalty

absolutely so I would have had um there are all the glass houses along this back wall yeah and you can almost see the remains down there so that's project number two um. There would have been one of the most important parts here, we want to recreate it, so this would have provided a lot of the food for the

castle

at one point, so we want to try to recreate that as much as we can to re-establish the historic plantation. fruit trees we will have peaches and apricots along the sunny walls uh we will have herb gardens and then we still have the vegetable garden down there which we will maintain and continue to work on so yeah fantastic note. because when I talked to Chris, your wonderful head gardener, he told me a little bit of the history that at one point you know a hundred years ago and like all these historic houses, they had 33 gardeners and they had this huge kitty kitchen garden. but that's what these gardens were used for, they were used to feed the

castle

and the surrounding community and obviously we have evolved a lot and now we open our houses to the public and we want the public to come in. but in a different way, exactly exactly we want to be able to grow things here that then the caterers can turn into something lovely, yeah, so that's the plan, how wonderful.

Isn't it great? But this is a radical change for Barkley, you know? It's a

real

ly big project that all historic home owners strive to impact for the long-term benefit and survival of the buildings and property, so I asked Charles if this is one of those Legacy projects to him at Barkley Castle. I think it's one of many things that I would like to see, you know people can look, people can look back and say this was in my day and just make the place you know better by adding to what's here. I'm not

real

ly someone who has. to make this great brand there are just a lot of things that will hopefully stand the test of time, well yeah, and the fact is happening now, I think it's the right thing to do, yeah, you're incredibly humble because I can tell you that I'm pretty sure that people will remember that you know and they will do it. uh, I decided, hey, let's do something different here.

I think it's very important and there is a need for something like this and I think it will be very good for the community and for visitors, and we have a lot of people within a few miles. hence maybe they haven't come here, we are offering something amazing which is for them to know the history of the barley and the farm, so I think that is really important, yes, it is really important from a very operational perspective, we have a brilliant team of really strong guides, but in terms of catering, people don't want a job for six months, we have to be very realistic, people want a full time or permanent job, and this way, hopefully, we can do which again gives we are sort of a link to the community because you know hopefully they can come and help us and work with us on it so it's really important it's really brilliant so let's talk about the timeline yeah , very quickly, because, of course, there is a lot of work behind it.

Now, where are you as far as the project is concerned? What stage are you in? I see you're also holding a clipboard, so, that's just the target floor plan for this building. Actually, this sounds horrible from one point of view. The architects point of view must be really boring, we don't want it to be the focus, the neighborhood, the garden is the focus, this sits quietly on a corner, um, so there has to be a lot of things, so this is just the design and us. Well, this is just the layout, yes, yes, so you can see the outside access to the bathrooms so that groups of trainers etc. can go there, the biggest kitchen we can have, but every chef always wants one bigger kitchen so we've had to be practical and then the bigger space and this one will have beautiful folding doors in the front so it's very much an inside out space.

You know you are in a beautiful garden. You are in a protected space from a financial point of view. You know this is it. It will be a long time coming, this building needs to work very hard, so it also needs to be as flexible as possible, and that is what we are trying to achieve. I mean, you know this and you're tal

king

to the yogi here and I think, gosh, you could do yoga classes here, you could do wellness days, you know, and that's something we've done at Mat pron, so we have a similar design on our stable block, it looks very similar to this one and it is ours.

Coffee too, but every Friday we have yoga, we just started this year and it's wor

king

tremendously well and then we have a lot of people asking to do different events and they're local artisans or they're crafts or they're exactly and I think. If we could really tie into the kind of food story, we have food production in the garden, then we have food production on our broader farm with our tenant farmers, you know there has to be some synergy there that we can really. bring that's what we're planning and that's where we can use it. I think here yes, I mean brilliant.

I will be back. I can not wait. I've already invited myself like three times. Any welcome anytime. Clear.