Black Country Ride No 2Dudley. "Yes, I remember Dudley / The name because one afternoon / Of heat the express-train drew up there / Unwontedly. It was late June..." No, I don't think Dudley has
quite the same ring as Edward Thomas's sublime "Adlestrop"... All the same I remember on a warm day in the early 1950s being hoisted onto my Dad's shoulders to see over the parapet of the railway bridge to where our visitors from Dawley were getting on a train at Dudley station. I've a sense, too, of the bridge being enveloped in steam and that unrecapturable smell of anthracite... This is running through my mind as I turn right at the bottom of Castle Hill on another warm day and into the seemingly limitless car park for Dudley Zoo. I can't help noticing parties of foot soldiers all dressed in a distinctive black uniform streaming past my car and out onto the bridge, men in leather jerkins, women in decorated tee-shirts and black jeans, all looking happy and relaxed... Loud music seems to be issuing from a large van with people perched on top of it. No doubt about it, I've arrived in the middle of a Heavy Metal convention, as the name Megadeth in large white Gothic script proclaims. Welcome to 2009.
I drive as far as you can - which is a long way - to find a parking place, out onto what was once the sidings and goods yard of the old railway station and (later) container port. No trace of any of it, just couples walking their children off into the distance along a green path. I trudge back to the impromptu concert area to buy a parking ticket and (what must be half a mile) back again to stick it on my car. Only attempt this in sensible shoes.
I eventually find my way in to the ticket office... There are several cunningly laid false trails, but the right one turns out to be hidden in the shrubbery next to the famous 1930s entrance by Lubetkin, the long one with the wiggly roof painted in what my father would call "back and kidney pills green". I pause to contemplate what's left of the two cinemas, neither of them picture houses any more, but still glaring at each other across Castle Hill, the Hippodrome on this side and the Art Deco Odeon on the other. I fall to remembering when I was nine and being briefly traumatized by a musical - not something that happens every day - which my Mum took me to see at the Odeon, It was the magnificently alien
The King and I with the terrifying Yul Brynner and the charming English governess Deborah Kerr whose only defence seems to be to dress in a range of large lampshades. Great songs, though...
Dudley Zoo (Tecton Entrance) ...
For full view click here Back to reality. My nose is assailed by sundry farmyard odours, where you buy your ticket you can also buy a range of comestibles to pamper the animals with. I'm invited to pay an additional something to keep the zoo going, which I'm happy to do. I head towards the yellow
trique waiting to whisk me up painlessly to the thing I've really come here for, the Castle. Nope, it appears to have been rusting away quietly for some years. I'm directed towards the red Disneyland-style train. One of those days, clearly - it has a notice saying it's for birthday groups only. No alternative but to shed a few pounds and begin the ascent.
The path takes you up a brisk gradient to a long set of steps and through a side gate in what is obviously a medieval outer curtain wall. Suddenly everything goes quiet. In the meerkat enclosure a sentry sitting up on a rock spots me. A man points to it and says to his little son: "Look - Simples!" (that compare.com advert again - it's just so catchy). Ahead is the fiendishly complicated arrangement around the main entrance to the castle to keep besiegers out - and there have been a few of those. I'm not a medievalist at all, Roman's more my thing, but I remember clambering over this place in about 1964 with Mick Aston, who was very enthusiastic about mottes and baileys - still is, I think. The length and depth of the entrance tunnel are amazing. I'd forgotten just how much of this ruin is still here, rather more in fact than of some Black Country towns I could mention...
Meerkat sentry....
For full view, click ....here Main Gate of CastleAs you emerge into the courtyard, you see what the Keep actually looked like once. The tower, much battered by Cromwell, is complete and round when seen from the side and behind, like the Keep at, say, Arundel. It looks absolutely formidable. From the town you get no impression at all, it merely resembles a couple of rounded cheese graters, with some anachronistic cannon from the Crimea. The other buildings facing it across the yard are so complete that you're surprised they weren't repaired after the 1750 fire. There's an Information Centre buried somewhere inside them, it has some good things, but the video screen is about the size of an Amstrad monitor and is mumbling away to itself at a frequency my ears can't register.
Main buildings of Castle, destroyed by fire in 1750OK, can't put it off any longer: it's the North Face of the Keep. The staircase, your standard-issue medieval with a devilishly smart change of direction in the spiral halfway up (to do with sword arms and defence, no doubt), leads onto a railed walk with unobstructed views that are - well, just awesome. In the distance the skyline of Birmingham with the Post Office tower about 8 miles away, then Kate's Hill and Rowley, the Clent Hills 5 or 6 miles away, the clump of woods around Netherton church. In the foreground Dudley market, which still appears to have the Woolworths I remember. We used to come on the Midland Red single decker "over the top" from Whiteheath fifty years ago, past the rather troubling Hangman's Tree in Oakham. Sometimes we'd take the trolleybus on through Sedgley to Wolverhampton. Behind is a dizzying drop to the courtyard with the crenellated Keep projected onto it by the bright sunshine and the suburbs of Wolverhampton far off in the distance.
View from Keep looking towards Birmingham and Rowley Dudley market area, Netherton church and Clent Hills seen from Keep of Dudley Castle Courtyard from the Keep .........................
For full view of Dudley Castle photos, click on the images in our Gallery here It's later than I thought and I need to move on to
West Bromwich. In no time at all I'm back at the entrance, but my eye is caught by a couple of flamingoes wading next to a tastefully contrived waterfall. I just love flamingoes, in the wild they look fantastic flying against a sunset. Odd shape though, Lewis Carroll certainly had a point: "The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo! - Time I was gone.
© Dennis Wood 2009
Flamingoes ........................
For full view, click on the image in our Gallery ...here