Castle Crom/ Devenish Island/Castle Coole

So the weekend of the 10th in August  myself and a few friends went camping, it was a great trip.

First stop was Castle Coole; it's a truly beautiful with nice gardens and a canoe trail right by. Theres a shop/tearoom/bookshop and a tour round the castle. We were there pretty early and went into the tea rooms just for a second to get a coffee and then went of to the house to get a tour. There was a few others there and they provide booklets containing information for those who don't speak english.

Our tour guide was really great, and brought was round the place. We weren't allowed to take pictures inside due to all the artefacts not belonging to the national trust but still being privately owned. But this is one taken before we were told that. (sneaky). The tour in itself was good, we didn't get to see as many of the rooms upstairs that we'd hoped but were able to go down into the servants quarters and see the kitchens, which were still in a pretty good condition considering they haven't been used for quite a while.

This picture shows some of the staff that used to work in the house. Some were as young as 18!
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Next stop was Devenish Island. We went to a little pier where we got a speedboat across, I forget the price, something like £4 return for an hour which is plenty of time to look around the island.

Devenish island was cool, full of old ruins and there were plenty of information boards to tell visitors about what the ruins would of been used for back when the island was inhabited. It was so strange to think of the old community that used to live there considering we were walking all over their walls.

Visitors are allowed to climb up the tower that is still standing, but beware to get up involves climbing 4 ladders, then theres the 4 down again and there's not much space on each 'floor' and not a great view from the top from the tiny tiny windows. Worth the climb though.

My brother disappeared for a while then we found him up here, I then raced up to join. Considering he's not a climber we were all confused as to where he'd gone, good job Peter.


The whole island is truly beautiful and well worth the trip.

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Next stop our campsite!!!!

Castle Crom was nice, there was a number of other people camping, but in our field were was 2 families who knew each other so wasn't too noisy.
We cooked dinner (burgers) then went for a walk.

This was the old ruined castle, not much of it left but Eva found a room of ivy that she liked.

This is the ivy. I don't get it, but ivy's cool.

We also found 2 great trees to climb in, one was the 'good' tree and the other was the 'evil' tree.

There's a play park for the kids  in our field and also a campfire that anyone could go too, but we didn't. Instead our night was spent listening to a ghost story, freaky. It was more a murder mystery but was a pretty good story.

All in all it was a good trip, on the Sunday Morning we popped over to a quaint little church that we could see from the campsite, by boat it would have taken about 10 minutes to row across, by car 40 minutes. But we were welcomed into the church by the congregation. App it's the church Lord Earn goes too, I was hoping to meet/marry his son then be a lady like in Downtown Abbey, but that didn't happen.

Hip Horray for going camping!

Until next time

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