Having grown up in Switzerland, castles are an almost mythical concept to me. Sure, my town has a ‘castle’ but it’s not much more than a big house with a wall around it. Appealing for historical reasons, perhaps, but not for magical ones. It doesn’t lend itself to stories about princesses and dragons.
Swiss folklore doesn’t include a lot of princesses anyway since Switzerland never had an aristocracy. Instead, many of our myths are deeply Christian, painfully so to a recovering Catholic like me. You can’t turn around without spotting a devil or at least a witch in league with him. Other than that, there are a lot of dwarves or other little people, talking animals, heroic farmers, and some interestingly shaped dragons. But since Swiss German is not technically a written language – we use Germany’s German, or as we call it, High German instead – a lot of our literary canon comes from Germany. Goethe, author of Faust, Kafka, author of Metamorphosis; even Friedrich Schiller, arguably Switzerland’s most influential author, wrote in High German. For myths specifically, the Nibelungen Saga and the brothers Grimm are essential.
However, my cultural upbringing is not limited to Germanic influence. No language barrier could stop the spread of Hollywood or any other American or British money-making scheme. I was raised on Disney and DreamWorks, watched an embarrassing amount of Barbie movies, and devoured the Harry Potter books. Once I was old enough to navigate the internet, international influence only increased, and the better my English got, the more this intensified.
Additionally, I have been fortunate to have travelled a lot, especially in Europe. This has included visiting some castles, though they are still a commodity. The castle I remember most vividly is Castle Hallwyl, a moated castle on the Lake Hallwil. It carries a much more magical vibe as it’s more complex, consisting of various buildings, and it’s built on the water’s edge, which also carries its own magic.
But when I think about dragons in Switzerland, they aren’t connected to the castles at all. All the castles I can think of are in the flatter parts of Switzerland, while Swiss dragons dwell in the mountains, in the caves or lakes, hidden from civilisation. The closest they come is flying over mountain villages. If you want to encounter a dragon, you have to seek them out in the wilderness. Swiss dragons are the mountains – wild, beautiful, dangerous, mysterious, tempting, hidden away, majestically looming in the distance.
In contrast, there might be no better country for castles than the United Kingdom. With its long history of kings and conquest, castles feature heavily in British history and landscape. Wales especially is known for having the highest number of castles per area due to the English being unable to chill for even a century. I have had the opportunity to visit a few British castles while university scouting with my family and while studying in Liverpool. Every one of them is drenched in stories of battles and knights and considering the kind of fantasy I’ve grown up with, the dragons follow hot on their tails. The crumbling walls are just asking for a dragon’s claws to dig into them, the towers overlooking the land are perfect for spotting a dragon’s approach, and the cold winds make me beg for a dragon to breathe fire on me.
Then my mother came to visit me in Liverpool. Travelling with my mother again after having lived away from home for nearly three years was strange to say the least. I immediately fell back into old patterns of asking her whether I could buy something and relying on her to do the planning. At the same time, I had my own credit card – a UK one even as opposed to her Swiss one – and I was more familiar with the country, its people and language – something particularly rare as my mother speaks about eight languages. But she enjoys making travel plans, so once we agreed on what to do, she took care of the details. She suggested we spend a few days in Wales and visit Conwy Castle and I agreed without hesitation. It’s big and well preserved, making it a perfect destination for tourists and dragons looking to wreck shop.
On the way there, we found some red pandas and Roman ruins in Chester. Having spent a lot of summer holidays in Italy, amphitheatres and legionnaires are much more familiar to me. While Chester Zoo itself was a new experience, there is a zoo about an hour by train and tram from where I grew up, Zürich Zoo, and I had gone there with family, on school trips and with just my mother. In fact, this was the first place we visited after pandemic restrictions were lessened in the summer of 2020. As zoos are mostly outdoors, they were less risky, Zürich Zoo had recently added a Meerkat enclosure, which my mother was looking forward to, and I had recently discovered my love for red pandas and was excited to see some in person. We had a good time, and I snagged the last red panda stuffy in the gift shop, so it’s an experience I look back on fondly. Coming back to Chester, it really functioned as a doorway to the unfamiliar. I went from what is now my home, Liverpool, through the familiar Roman ruins and a zoo visit with my mom, to the unfamiliar and fantastical of proper castles and the Welsh language.
After Chester, we stayed in Deganwy, directly across the river from Conwy and its imposing castle. We caught our first glimpse of it from the train and my first thought was ‘neat! Looks like a real castle’. We decided to walk to the castle, fully savouring the whole experience. It was early afternoon, it wasn’t raining but there were still dark clouds in the sky to remind us that we were, in fact, in Britain, and the shore across the river was pleasant to walk along. The castle was an imposing presence looming over the water and I could see why castles were used to establish a hold over conquered territory. Once we reached the bridge, the medieval vibes from the castles were just a bit thrown off by the cars rushing past, but what else can you expect? Finding the entrance to the castle was a challenge but that only added to the adventure.
Once we were inside, we entered the North-West Tower and looked up, spotting the Welsh flag fluttering in the wind. Boom, there’s a dragon. You have to love the Welsh flag. Painful to draw by hand – especially compared to the one I grew up with – but awesome, nonetheless. When I climbed the stairs to the top of the tower, I remembered a friend telling me they were constructed to allow defenders coming down from the top to easily swing their swords. Later, she mentioned this wasn’t very effective in Wales, as while the English preferred swords, the Welsh fought with spears, so only the English were limited by which way the stairs turned.
I wrote my first notes at the top of the tower, as the crenelation openings made for an excellent place to sit. Looking out over the tower walls, I spotted a few silhouettes flying in the distance that may have been birds or far off dragons. The cloud cover had started breaking open in some places as if giant wings had cut through them, letting through the rarely seen sunbeams. Looking out over the river, a hill covered up where the river merges with the sea. What might come out from behind that hill? A friendly ship? A ship full of Vikings? Or a sea serpent?
Looking back on the notes I took while walking between towers and climbing their uneven and very annoying stairs, they’re not the most coherent. I can guess what I was trying to tell my future self, but only just. For example, why did I write down “gothic arches”? Wow, astute observation, the part of this castle that used to be a church has gothic arches. Impressive. Some other notes include: “Pidgeon coos amplified by tower echoes, sounds like a massive beast”, “big to confuse intruders”, “towers inside towers”, “massive windows for dragons to poke their head out”, “far off trains look like toys”, “skeletons of floors and fireplaces”, and “it’s fucking wimdy”. The last one is a reference to a meme, a fox standing in a field being blasted in the face by strong winds with the caption “it’s fucking wimdy”. The discussion about why millennials and Gen Z find misspellings so amusing is for another time, but one I’d love to engage with.
I also took note of the fact that due to the thick stone walls, it’s difficult to hear people on other floors. I could hear people talking or possibly singing but I couldn’t tell whether it was English, Welsh, another language or whether they were speaking in tongues.
“Standing atop the castle tower, wind in my hair, looking down onto the people below, I almost feel like I’m the dragon. As if I could spread my wings, catch the currents and swoop down upon the unsuspecting.” There is a term in French called l’appel du vide, literally the call of the void, referring to the desire to jump when looking down from a height. I have felt this often and it makes me quite scared of heights, as I would prefer not to go splat against the ground, please. But I am yet to jump, so my self-control must be somewhat decent. “My mother waves to me from a different tower and I just want to hop across, but I have to do as people do and take the stairs.”
“As I write this, a train drives through the bridge below, producing a rumble. Could be thunder, could spell disaster or could be a dragon. Or just a train but shhh, let me dream.”
“I have a good sense of direction but with so many stairs, all of the spirals, I lose my inner compass.”
“There were no stairs but there was a half-crumbled wall. So if they hadn’t wanted me to climb them, they shouldn’t have made them look like stairs. Verdict? Not much harder to climb than the usual stairs.”
“I’m in a tower with lots of pigeons roosting. One just poked its head out of the hole next to me. It was very shy at first but must have gotten fed up with waiting for me to stop writing because it just flew past me.”
One of the towers held what I can only assume was an art installation of metal swords, shields and helmets with a crow hanging from the sword at the top. It reminded me that I like them way more in fiction than reality. I avoid all types of actual conflict; I only enjoy it when it’s happening to people I know aren’t real.
There was a set of stairs that looked like the entrance to a crypt to me and I wrote, “but it leads to empty space so only the fence stops it from becoming your crypt”. Emo much? As I was sitting there, writing my emo notes, I heard two other Swiss people talking. It wasn’t as disconcerting as hearing my mother tongue on the university campus, but still weird. It was amusing to respond to them in Swiss German as they also weren’t expecting it. Luckily, my mother was elsewhere taking pictures, or she might have started long conversations with strangers again, which I had had enough of growing up. One thing she certainly didn’t pass on to me was her extraversion.
I only noticed while reading my notes before writing this that they are entirely in English even though I was talking to my mother in Swiss German. While Swiss German isn’t officially a written language, it’s still written in informal settings, like text messages and notes, especially by people my age. I have taken notes before that were a mess of languages but not this time. It might have been because I’ve been in England and English mode for a long time now, or that I was thinking of how to write this piece or for some other reason, but it was surprising to discover.
My favourite encounter in Conwy castle was in the Bakehouse tower. As I entered it, I noticed the plaque denoting it as such and thus identified the big opening in the wall as the oven. It was large enough for a person, so I took the only reasonable action and sat at its edge. Shortly after that, a person with two kids walked in, commenting on the oven and me sitting in it. This, of course, sparked in them the desire to climb into the oven, the younger one short enough to stand inside of it. As Hansel and Gretel was a story I often heard in my formative years, I reacted by pretending to be a witch who had succeeded in tricking them into getting into my clutches and was now going to eat them. The younger one, obviously a hero in the making, was wearing a shirt with firefighters on it and heroically put out the (pretend) fire in the oven and defeated me by turning the water hose on me. This encounter reminded me that although I don’t like kids much, it can be fun to play along with them.
Since I knew before going that I was going to write this piece, I went looking for dragons. However, my association of dragons with British castles was present at the other British castles I visited and the ease with which I was able to make connections to dragons at Conwy Castle proves my point. Additionally, the presence of dragons in the flags and in the gift store show that I am not the only one making those connections. The Welsh love their dragons and have taken ownership of their castles, so of course, the two would overlap.
In conclusion, castles are cool, dragons are cool and together, they make a dream team. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to visit some ‘real’ castles, despite my home country’s lack of them.
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