History is (mostly) boring. This castle in England knows it
The year is 1471. Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick and the man who has earned a reputation as the power behind the throne during England’s increasingly complex Wars of the Roses, is preparing to leave his beloved castle. He will never return.
The tales of preparations for battle are told via the medium of waxworks inside the Kingmaker section of Warwick Castle. Blacksmiths make armour, fletchers make thousands of arrows and gunpowder is being carefully tended in the cannon room.
If that all sounds only moderately interesting, that’s because it is. The same applies elsewhere in the castle, where visitors can learn about its origins as a wooden Anglo-Saxon fort, its transformation in 1068 under William the Conqueror and its Victorian-era role as a high society party venue.
Warwick Castle’s stroke of genius, however, is realising that very few visitors have come to learn any of this. It’s a stoutly pompous building of soaring towers and vertiginous ramparts, yet its modern-day success comes from a canny humility.
Other visually impressive castles with fairly significant histories think that’s enough to keep visitors spellbound. Warwick Castle knows this is not the case – particularly when it comes to younger visitors.
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Children may not be especially interested in Richard Neville’s battle preparations, but they can happily throw themselves into knights and princesses, dragons and swordfights. And this is what Warwick Castle gives them in an often spectacular fashion.
The castle is currently operated by Merlin Entertainments, which runs numerous attractions and theme parks around the world, including the London Eye and Sydney Tower. It’s probably not too presumptuous to suggest that Merlin values the grounds more than the castle itself, for they have been transformed into a blizzard of entertainment.
A woodland theatre hosts a live adaptation of Julia Donaldson’s Zog. It’s a smart choice, as the trainee dragon is a character even older children remember fondly – my 11 and eight-year-olds found themselves laughing at the costumed dragons’ bum-wiggle dances and cheering on Princess Pearl.
Elsewhere, the intellectual property tie-ins bear fruit inside the Horrible Histories Maze, where the kids are drip-fed titbits of information from the past as they scramble through mock-World War I trenches and pose inside stocks.
Three ambitiously bold shows are what really set Warwick Castle apart, however. The Legend of the Trebuchet tells a heavily fictionalised tale using a purpose-built siege weapon. Men run inside a giant hamster wheel to power the 18-metre tall trebuchet’s throwing arm, launching projectiles 200 metres across an island in the River Avon.
This takes place near a jousting arena, where The War of the Roses Live has actors on horseback charging at each other. The story of the Houses of Lancaster and York coming to war is fairly irrelevant – this is all about trick riding and clashing lances.
Both of these shows have a brazen wow factor that children happily lap up, but Warwick Castle’s truly memorable trump card is The Falconer’s Quest.
The phrase “birds of prey show” can often evoke images of an old man wearing a glove and chuntering on about owls. Warwick’s take, thankfully, is several levels above.
The story, about a boy called Hobby who wanted to be the castle’s chief falconer, is ignorable fluff. The staging, however, is phenomenal. Enormous soaring eagles, darting hawks and lightning-fast peregrine falcons are flown across the arena between handlers, swooping just over the heads of the audience.
There’s both art and impeccable precision. An Andean condor’s wing narrowly skims above my eight-year-old’s hair, inducing a giddy, yabbering sense of enraptured wonder that takes days to simmer down.
The latest weapon in the quest to be the best kids’ castle on earth, however, is the Warwick Castle Hotel. Opened in 2024, it has a lightly medieval theme and family rooms that do that rarest of things and actually work for families. The kids are in bunk beds, and there’s a dividing wall allowing parents to stay up a bit later with the lights on.
More importantly, there’s a raised wooden walkway through the trees from the hotel to the Knight’s Village. Here, an admirable evening programme of kids’ entertainment takes place. My two enrol in Sword School, where they are taught how to handle a wooden sword, then get to run around, whacking the hell out of dummy knights on poles.
It’s not historic, it’s not authentic, but that’s not the point. In this most shamelessly entertaining castle, heritage gives way to happiness.
THE DETAILS
Visit
Warwick Castle is in Warwick, England, a 25 minute drive from Birmingham Airport. One day admission tickets cost from £26 ($54). See warwick-castle.com
Fly
Emirates offers one-stop flights to Birmingham Airport from both Melbourne and Sydney. See emirates.com
Stay
Family rooms, sleeping two adults and up to three children, cost from £139, including free breakfast and parking. See warwick-castle.com
More
Visitbirmingham.com, visitbritain.com
The writer travelled as a guest of the West Midlands Growth Company and Visit Britain.
David Whitley is a writer based in Sheffield, England, who has made it his mission to cover as much of Australia as possible. He has a taste for unusual experiences and oddities with a great story behind them. As far as David’s concerned, happiness is nosily ambling around a history-packed city or driving punishing distances through the middle of nowhere on a big road trip. He is also probably the only person to have been to Liechtenstein and the Cook Islands in the same week.