It was Castle Day in P2, and the children arrived in splendid fashion dressed in their medieval costumes. The day started with a Ceilidh dance called “The Swedish masquerade” performed under the watchful eye of their dance teacher, Mrs Brockbank. Our magnificently dressed Lords and Ladies held their heads high as they marched in the opening section of the dance. They became the castle ghosts in the waltz section and then, in the polka section, became frogs jumping in the moat!

Inspired by a medieval jester performing some tricky juggling tricks we then had a go juggling ourselves using some colourful scarves. We even did some acrobatics by balancing on top of each other in a pyramid shape. Carrying on the jester theme, we then made our own jester hats out of coloured card.

Meanwhile the cooks were busy in the castle kitchen preparing a scrumptious banquet for us to eat in the Great Hall. We ate some hot vegetable broth then a variety of cold meats including ‘wild boar’, ‘pheasant’ drumsticks, ‘venison pie’ and some ‘quails’ eggs. We ate vegetables grown in the castle gardens and drank ‘wine’ crushed from the grapes. Dessert followed with delicious strawberry tarts and jellied fruits. We ate off slices of stale bread called ‘trenchers’ and ate with our fingers. There were no forks in medieval times! During our feast we welcomed Lord Taylor of Cargilfield who had just returned from a morning of hunting in the forest, and we entertained him with our hilarious jester jokes.

The afternoon saw us training to be knights and performing various challenges. Each required strength, accuracy and bravery and a lot of perseverance! We threw spears at increasing distances and practiced our jousting skills by aiming our lances through rings while charging on our hobby horses. We concluded the afternoon with a highly spirited game trying to capture the flag from each other's castles.

A huge thank you to all of you for helping to make our P2 Medieval Castle Day such a memorable one.