Back in November 2010 I was on a road trip with my big sister, driving around the South West of England. One of the coolest places we went was a place called Corfe Castle.

Corfe Castle in Dorset appeared on my radar when a friend of mine, who lives in London, happened to post on Facebook that she was going for a visit. I had no idea what was there but when I researched and found out that it was a ruin, I really wanted to go. Convincing my sister wasn’t really that hard to be honest, so we incorporated it into our drive from Exeter to Christchurch (the UK one obviously).

It was well worth the visit…

I had never really seen anything like it before. We didn’t even get to go into the village because we had spent all our time that afternoon walking around the ruins of the castle, which date back to the 11th century. Some perspective – New Zealand hadn’t even been discovered in the 11th century. Our first settlers, the Maori, are thought to have arrived around two centuries later in the late 1200’s.

Walking around and trying to envision how the castle would have looked in it’s heyday was hard but it was still amazing to be walking amongst so much history. I always wonder in these places what the walls would say if they could talk – I imagine that the walls of Corfe Castle would have some interesting stories to tell.