Kendal Castle

This is really not one of the best - or even better shots - you'll see of Kendal Castle but I saw it as I came out of the cinema today and took this photo .

I suppose I could have zoomed in a bit more but I quite liked the sagging tiled rooftops in the foreground, which cap old buildings that would have looked out to pretty much the same view of the castle when they were brand new.

Kendal's a funny place in that it's not very good at promoting what's interesting about it. For example, everyone associates Kendal with Mint cake but, as my friend Neil pointed out to me a while back, you can go the length and breadth of Kendal without seeing or finding out anything about it. And similarly, I'd lived here a few years before I even realised that there was a castle.

It's completely open to the public and you can go up and wander around the ruins for free. On a sunny day, it's a lovely place to go for a picnic and the views are fantastic. It would be nice if there was a bit more information available up there; all I know of the top of my head was that it was built about eight hundred years ago and abandoned four hundred years later. Oh, and it's something to do with Catherine Parr's family, but she didn't live there.

As we peered from the top of the Brewery's stairs that go up the hillside it occurred to me that Dan and Abi might not have been up there but that's for another day: we were hungry and had a film to talk about.