Author(s): Paul Bahn and Vera B. Mutimer
This is the first comprehensive book about Chillingham in Northumberland with its unique wild cattle, historic castle, church and family associated with them since the twelfth century. Julius Caesar admired the cattle’s ancestors for their brute strength and Sir Walter Scott immortalised them. They were painted by Sir Edwin Landseer and Archibald Thorburn, and depicted at their best by Thomas Bewick, the master engraver. Charles Darwin studied and wrote about them in the Descent of Man. Historian Simon Schama described the Chillingham cattle as ‘…the great, perhaps the greatest icon of British natural history’.
The castle’s history is chequered and the nobles who lived there even more so. Incest, adultery, witchcraft, torture, kingmakers, traitors, a cricketer and a cowboy are all part of its history, resulting in its modern reputation for cruel and benign ghosts still regularly seen in the castle. Founded around 1184, the country church in its simplicity hides a fifteenth-century tomb described as ‘…one of the finest such monuments in the country outside a cathedral’.
Gloriously illustrated with 200 vibrant colour photographs, Chillingham: It’s Cattle, Castle and Church is edited by Paul G. Bahn and Vera B. Mutimer with a foreword by HRH Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.
BOOK ISBN | 9781781555224 |
FORMAT | 248 x 172 mm |
BINDING | Hardback |
PAGES | 224 pages |
PUBLICATION DATE | 15 April 2016 |
TERRITORY | World |
ILLUSTRATIONS | 200 colour photographs and illustrations |