The floors throughout seem to have been of timber. There are no traces of a mural staircase leading from one floor to another, but there may have been such in the north-west or south-west angles. Neither is there any mural gallery surrounding the building.
It is in all respects unfortunate that Scarborough Castle is still regarded as a military post. Here, as at Dover, no one is allowed to sketch or measure within the area, although the force employed to see to the observance of this order renders it practically powerless. But the empty powder magazine is locked up, and effectually prevents a thorough examination of the keep; if this were removed, and the basement excavated, an absolutely correct plan of the keep might be obtained, which now is impracticable.
A county that contains within its borders the castles of York and Richmond may yet be proud of the possession of Scarborough, which, though not superior to those, claims with them equal rank. No doubt the circumstances of each are different. The position of Richmond on the Swale, its ancient Norman keep, early and curious chapel, and the considerable remains of its hall and other domestic buildings, no less than the rank and warlike character of its earlier lords, have invested it with a peculiar and unrivalled interest. At York, the castle, spacious in area, and strong, if not striking in position, played no inconsiderable part in the Norman Conquest; and while surrounded with the works of the Romans and Romanized Britons, claims an origin from those of our Teutonic ancestors whose name is embodied in that of England. The claims of Scarborough to rank and fame are of a different though scarcely inferior character. Its position above the Northern Ocean is wild and grand in the extreme. Its area, defined and protected by Nature, is calculated to contain, not a garrison, but an army; and its keep, in itself equal to Richmond or most other Norman structures, is here not a citadel but the mere gateway and key to what is really the fortress, and which rises from the seashore above and behind it.
SKENFRITH CASTLE.
AMONG the numerous strong places in Monmouthshire, which, from their character and position, seem to have been thrown up during the occupation of that border territory by the Mercians and the English during the eighth and following centuries, Skenfrith holds a conspicuous place. Its fortune, moreover, was, to be adopted, like Caerleon and Grosmount, by the Norman invaders, who placed a keep upon its ancient, though inconsiderable, mound, and girdled its elevated platform with walls and towers of considerable strength, so that it became of even greater importance in the twelfth and thirteenth than in the preceding centuries. It stands in the deep valley, and upon the bank of the Munnow, five miles below the castle of Grosmount, and six above that of Monmouth on the same river, besides which it forms the south-eastern point of the celebrated Monmouthshire trilateral, Grosmount and Whitecastle being the two others, so celebrated in Border warfare, and especially in the contest between Henry III. and the Mareschals, earls of Pembroke. Churchyard writes of them as,—
Three castles fayre, are in a goodly ground,
Grosmont is one, on hill it builded was;
Skenfrith the next, in valley it is found,
The soyle about for pleasure there doth pepe.