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Yorkshire by Gordon Home
page 72 of 201 (35%)
keep, we come into the grassy space of over two acres, that is enclosed
by the ramparts. It is not known by what stages the keep reached its
present form, though there is every reason to believe that Conan, the
fifth Earl of Richmond, left the tower externally as we see it to-day.
This puts the date of the completion of the keep between 1146 and 1171.
The floors are now a store for the uniforms and accoutrements of the
soldiers quartered at Richmond, so that there is little to be seen as
we climb a staircase in the walls 11 feet thick, and reach the
battlemented turrets. Looking downwards, we gaze right into the
chimneys of the nearest houses, and we see the old roofs of the town
packed closely together in the shelter of the mighty tower. A few tiny
people are moving about in the market-place, and there is a thin web of
drifting smoke between us and them. Everything is peaceful and remote;
even the sound of the river is lost in the wind that blows freely upon
us from the great moorland wastes stretching away to the western
horizon. It is a romantic country that lies around us, and though the
cultivated area must be infinitely greater than in the fighting days
when these battlements were finished, yet I suppose the Vale of Mowbray
which we gaze upon to the east must have been green, and to some extent
fertile, when that Conan who was Duke of Brittany and also Earl of
Richmond looked out over the innumerable manors that were his Yorkshire
possessions. I can imagine his eye glancing down on a far more
thrilling scene than the green three-sided courtyard enclosed by a
crumbling grey wall, though to him the buildings, the men, and every
detail that filled the great space, were no doubt quite prosaic. It did
not thrill him to see a man-at-arms cleaning weapons, when the man and
his clothes, and even the sword, were as modern and everyday as the
soldier's wife and child that we can see ourselves, but how much would
we not give for a half-an-hour of his vision, or even a part of a
second, with a good camera in our hands?
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