A few years ago toasted cheese sandwiches became a thing. A tea room in Tamworth has discovered that there are other things that you can put on toast besides cheese.

Marmite, marmalade, chocolate, butter, the possibilities are endless. Any year now someone will come up with the idea of putting butter AND marmalade on toast. Of course, that sort of decadence is usually sign that a massive social collapse is about to happen, so you can think of Tamworth as the Weimar Berlin of South East Staffordshire.

Tamworth is no stranger to taking a pivotal position in international politics. It was the capital of Mercia, the largest of the seven kingdoms of Anglo Saxon England. It had the oldest watermill found in England and the millstones were a gift from Charlemagne, in exchange for some English woolen cloaks, which he complained were too short. Most likely his nasty continental legs were too long.

Actually it was Tamworth Castle I wanted to see. I lived in Tamworth briefly right before I moved to America in 1979, and I remembered the castle as being the best thing in town. These days Tamworth is much nicer than I remembered, though. The old town center (a fifteen minute bike ride from the canal) has been pedestrianized, and the statue of Robert Peel has been given a polish.

Robert Peel was MP for Tamworth, Prime Minister from time to time, and the guy who invented the police force, hence the terms bobby and peeler.

Here’s the castle with a statue of Æthelflæd, Queen of Mercia.

She is said to have built the first fortification on this site, in 913. A military genius, she revolutionized the use of dragons in making toast… oh, wait, different seven kingdoms. Never mind. She was a successful military tactician and ruled Mercia for seven years.

Æthelflæd’s wooden fortification was rebuilt in stone in 1080 after the Norman Conquest, and it was lived in by various families until the late Victorian period. It reminds me of Pratchett’s line about the architect who had heard of Gormenghast but didn’t have the budget.

We toured the rooms by a circuitous path with many stairways and strange passages, dodging school parties as we went. The rooms were decorated in various period styles. Here’s the Victorian withdrawing room, decorated with baronial crests because the tenants were social climbers.

We pottered on in the boat and are moored near the remains of Alvecote Priory.

When Henry VIII dissolved a monastery, it stayed dissolved.