Bolton Castle

This autumn, a Lincolnshire pastor and I called at Bolton Castle. This is located, not at south Lancashire’s more famous Bolton le Moors, nor our more local Bolton by Bowland, but the Wensleydale village of Castle Bolton. Much of it is ruinous, though the remaining rooms are sufficiently extensive to justify the fifteen pounds’ admission charge. Furthermore, one of the towers still admits visitors, and from its summit, fine views of Wensleydale were afforded the one willing to climb so many spiral stairs.

Constructed in the late 1300s, it was a rather late addition to the nation’s list of castles, for gunpowder was already rendering them somewhat obsolete in the development of warfare. Still, it would have proved useful just in time for the Roses Wars, and it provided a suitably grand confinement for that most haughty of royal prisoners, Mary, Queen of Scots. The old harpy lived here in 1568 enjoying the pleasures of regal pretence, with cloths of estate and hunting trips about the district. Her meetings with local Catholics aroused suspicions, and she was shipped off to somewhere more secure, Tutbury, in Staffordshire. Twenty years later, she was committed to execution, which delivered the ultimate cessation of her plotting and scheming.

Castles were usually designed to keep most people out and others in. Which child visitor does not take greatest delight in visiting an old castle’s dungeon? For Mary of Scotland, Bolton was a far nicer gaol than that enjoyed by most enemies of the state, but it was still a pen in which she was held, above.

Paradise comes from a Persian word which means ‘walled garden’. It both keeps goodness in and keeps evil out. Its denizens are shielded from devils, evils and fallen humanity. Says Revelation chapter 22 of New Jerusalem and its grateful inhabitants:

Blessed are they, that do his Commandments, that their right may be in the tree of Life, and may enter in through the gates into the City. For without shall be dogs and enchanters, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth or maketh lies. (vv14-15, Geneva Bible)