3 Review(s)

The first comprehensive book about Chillingham in Northumberland-its unique wild cattle, its historic castle and church, and the family associated with them since the twelfth century. Julius Caesar admired the cattle's ancestors for their brute strength, 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. Darwin studied them and wrote about them in the 'Descent of Man'. The 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 and 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". Edited by Dr Paul G. Bahn and Vera Mutimer, with a foreword by HRH Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.