Childsplay

I think it needs to be said that I believe I was sorely deprived having been denied the ruins of castles as I was growing up.

Having woken up (late) on Saturday morning, and facing a day without plans or designs I decided that maybe it was time to do one of the things my Lonely Planet Guide to Britain suggests is a good thing to do when in Swansea. So I caught a bus to Mumbles, the little village just outside of town. The village's real name is Oystermouth (which is really a bastardisation of the Welsh name for the village which I have forgotten), but sometime in the village's history it was visited by some French Sailors who nicknamed the town "Mamelles" in reference to the two suggestive lumps of geography in the coastline. The English then misquoted that as "Mumbles" and it stuck. This little village therefore has the dubious honour of being named after French Boobies.

But anyway, I caught the bus to Mumbles and had a wander around this pleasant, touristy, little seaside place and eventually found my way up to the ruins of Oystermouth Castle. Here, I got to climb turrets and stroll around battlements and lurk in basement chambers, and as exciting as it is for me to do this now, I kept thinking of how much the ten-year-old, or eleven-year-old me would have loved this. How, if I lived in close proximity to a site like this, it would have become my haunt. I was a very daggy child (not too much has changed?) and totally oblivious to the social standing I would have been losing, I would have paraded around this place as if I were the Lady of the Castle. Dragging my two sisters along for the game, we would have imagined grand balls and banquets, and arranged for diplomatic missions of the utmost importance to be carried out. We would have organised the great household, wooed non-existent Princes and given birth to great Kings and dynasties. Or, if I could lure some of the local boys into my game of fantasy, we would have staged epic battles and sieges and I'd have brandished my sword beside them as a warrior Princess.

All these things were done, of course, for I had a wild imagination. But instead the backdrop was the Australian bushland, and we built out stately homes in the roots of the paperbark trees. And whilst I wouldn't change that for anything, wandering through the foundations of a building that has seen all that we imagined, I wished that I was ten or eleven years old again, just for a moment, so that I could stand in the ruins of the room above the gate and order the drawbridge to be drawn and the portcullis to be lowered and for my soldiers positioned around the battlements to let fly their arrows and cauldrons of boiling oil. Instead, I listened to a very enthusiastic man talk about its history and the families that had lived within its walls, and I tried to imagine it being built, structure by structure over the centuries, before its roofs crumbled and the windows were blown out and before grass lined the floor and creepers climbed its walls. I think castles are my favourite form of architectural sightseeing. Churches are often better preserved and splendid, but castles are somehow just more romantic.