This weekend past, my friend K. and I hit Stronghold Olde English Faire. It’s always held the first full weekend in October, in Oregon, Illinois. I have to admit, the name of the town always manages to confuse me, but fortunately I’m not navigating. If I were, we might end up on the Pacific coast. That’s lovely, but not the faire site.
Of course, we went in costume. Our costumes, which are 11th century Saxon. It’s amazing how comfortable that is. That’s a good thing, because it is in the nature of a Faire to do a lot of walking. The weather was lovely; clear and warm without being either muggy or too hot. And as always, we had a fabulous time of it.
Stronghold Retreat center was originally the summer home of the Strong family, who built it in the late 1920′s. Mr. Strong had toured European castles, and he wanted one. Not only that, he wanted an accurate castle. So he arranged to do what he could to get the necessary effects. Old castles have wooden walls blackened by smoke from fires, so he had the workmen burn the surface of the wooden beams that made up the downstairs walls with blowtorches, then scrubbed them to get the effect of fire damage that had been cleaned up as much as possible. They also have secret passages and hidden rooms, so he put one in; a narrow hallway that opens behind a built in bookcase in the library and leads to a hidden chapel. No properly constituted castle is without a Lady’s Solar, a Great Hall, or a tower with a spiral stair, and so with this; it has all of it, and at the proper scale. (The tour guide didn’t recognize the Solar for what it was, but that’s ok – K. and I did.) It hasn’t as many rooms as the grand castles of Europe, but it has all the basic elements. It even has a guardroom with a floor of rough-hewn stone, and a flag hatch at the top of the tower, to fly a flag when the family was in residence. It would be amazing at any time, but to tour it when Queen Elizabeth I was in residence, with her Ladies and her Guard, was enough to make one feel like a true time-traveller. I have to admit, though, the hamburgers available at the castle exit for sustenance were a bit incongruous.
And of course, the crowd covered quite the range, from teens in Goth black to re-enactors in incredibly accurate 15th century Scots dress. There was a piper playing toward the end of the day on Saturday, and when I tried a few tentative steps a lady lifted her skirts just high enough not to step on them and danced a few steps in response. It was all I needed; I dropped my sewing bag, ran across the grass and started dancing with her. We kept it up until the piper ran out of breath, having the most marvelous time.
And that pretty well sums up the weekend. A most marvelous time.