UK and Med Cruise - Day 34 - 8 October - Newark and Lincoln

We weren't quite sure how far we wanted to go today, so we started by buying a return to Newark.  This is a place I had never heard of before a week or so ago, but the attraction here was the relatively recently built National Civil War Centre.  It's a really interesting place, built around an old Tudor building which was more recently used as a school.  One floor is still an old dormitory level from the school:

The Civil War display was just outstanding; we could have spent hours more there just looking through the displays.  There was also an adjunct display about medicine and surgery at the time of the Civil War, plus other displays about the history of the area including an ancient torc found in the area a little over 10 years ago.

We also had a look at the outside of Newark Castle, but didn't go inside.

I'd really like to go back to Newark, it's an attractive place - there was a street market happening while we were there, and lots of interesting little stores and buildings.  In fact, I spent some time looking in the windows at Real Estate agents, coming to the surprising conclusion that we'd actually be able to afford to buy an apartment and live here for a while.  I doubt that we'll be up to making such an extreme move at our ages, but the place really did reach out to me in a place that few others have.

We decided that we still had enough energy to go on to Lincoln, so, back to the train station again.  When we got to the High Street to make our way to the Cathedral and Castle, we discovered that many many other people had the same idea; it was really crowded.

We found a little restaurant to have a surprisingly nice lunch, then headed off to find the Castle and Cathedral.  Then we discovered to our horror that really the only way to get there from where we were was by walking up the Steep Hill

They're not lying - what you're seeing here is the not so steep part:

However, we finally made it to the top, and it was really impressive.  We decided not to go into the Cathedral, but we did pay to go into the castle.
First we saw the old Victorian prison, and then the Magna Carta copy.  The last thing we did though was to walk around the castle walls.  This is about half a kilometer around, with an unfortunate number of steps up and down - at this stage we were hoping not to have too many more stairs!.  However, the views were just astounding.
This is the Cathedral as seen from the castle walls:

You can see from this just how high up and amazingly imposing the castle and cathedral would have appeared to everyone for miles around:

Remains of the old Norman Motte:

The old and the new - if you click to see the big version of the picture you can see and old windmill but also multiple modern power stations:

And, finally, again, Paul and a gun,outside the castle walls:

Once we left the Castle - it was about to close for the day - we staggered back down the Steep Hill and got the train back to Nottingham.  We were so tired that we caught a tram one whole stop from Nottingham Station to save ourselves from having to walk up the hill to get to our apartment!