Berkeley Castle

We saw Pirates of the Caribbean last night and quite enjoyed it. It was perhaps a little long and I don't think Orlando Bloom can act to save himself, but still entertaining. Several of the audience - and remember Bristol is a student city - came dressed as pirates, so there was a lot of "aargghing" at various times.

The day started sunny but as the forecast promised rain we decided we'd better not hold off on going to the Civil War re-enactment at Berkeley Castle. We still didn't leave until 11am but we got there before the battles started so it worked out well. It was a colourful and noisy affair but I'm not really sure that it gives a great feel for the battles of the period (1644 in this case) because it's all so casual and small scale. We spoke to one chap who had retired 4 years early because he liked it so much, and had clocked up 23,000 miles going to various re-enactments. He now makes replica drums and his wife makes period costumes. J thought it was the kind of thing that Sharon from Kath & Kim would join, and there were certainly some generously proportioned people involved. I would like to be an artilleryman I thought. Apparently they were less likely to be massacred after a lost battle, as they had sought after skills. It might be a little hard on the ears though...

The castle itself was nice, and the hole in the defences had never been fully repaired, so were still quite obvious. Oddly enough the walls were breached by fire from besieging guns mounted on a church that was directly opposite. One would have thought that the defenders could have foreseen this eventuality. The re-enactments took place on a field round the other side of the castle anyway, so precisely which battle was being re-enacted is unclear, except that it wasn't the siege of Berkeley Castle!

I asked whether they had considered paintballs for their battles as it would be a relatively easy task to construct a muzzle loaded, canister fired, single shot 'musket'. It would be as accurate as the original (that is, not very - apparently only 2% of musket balls fired hit someone, and that may not have been who they were aimed at) and enactors would know when and where they were hit. Red paintballs would be quite useful. They said it had been considered. One downside would be the lack of smoke and noise I guess.

It started to rain as we left. We have a quiet weekend planned, perhaps watching any filming that might happen on the Casualty set.

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