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Inland Revenue: Account of the succession of personal property, dated 1893
![henry pope art view at chepstow castle 1890 henry pope art view at chepstow castle 1890](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/515Hojcaj3L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg)
In bold typeface underneath the outbound times, people were advised: ‘N.B.-For times of returning and other particulars, see Official announcements of the Companies.’ In the 1900s, was railway travel a common enough occurrence that most people would have been familiar with the timetable and its conventions? In addition, note that the poster gave train times only to Chepstow for details of the return journey would-be passengers had to find the information elsewhere. These codes include the use of darker typefaces for ‘significant’ stations (such as Wolverhampton, Dudley, Birmingham or Kidderminster in the first column) or dots to lead the eye from the station to the departure time (except where there are quote marks, signifying ‘ditto’, in the second column in the stations underneath Treherbert). This information was shrouded in conventions – barely tolerable if you understood them, and almost certainly impenetrable if you were not familiar with the codes. Before readers could claim the promised excursion they had to navigate their ways through the densely-packed information detailing the train times. There is a great contrast between the simplicity and clarity of the message in the poster’s top half and the complexity of its bottom half. The display typeface used for ‘Chepstow Castle,’ with its two-colour printing, is an example of the ways in which printers could attract the eye without the use of pictures. Access to transport in these ways expanded people’s worlds and it helped to transform what might once have been small-scale local events into larger-scale regional, if not national, events. Indirectly it casts light on the social lives of people in the past: the day off work, here Whit Tuesday, offered the possibility of an excursion beyond the confines of the locality. This poster would have been displayed at railway stations, for people to consult it is probable that at least one copy of the poster would have been displayed at the stations listed. The River Wye and Chepstow Castle were ‘far-famed’ indeed: as well as South Wales and Birmingham, which would perhaps be expected, people could come from Liverpool, London and Manchester. The lower half of the poster gives us a list of stations from which trains could be caught. In the first decade of the twentieth century the Great Western Railway produced this poster to advertise services to an event at Chepstow Castle, ‘on the banks of the far-famed River Wye.’ At some point in its life the poster was trimmed to fit in the confines of a book, and the details of the event – its twelfth annual occurrence – were removed, so we do not know what it was. Printed by R Quinton, Chepstow, letterpress, 430 x 280mm (Collection of Mike Esbester) Scroll down for a colouful tour of some of Wales' finest fortifications.Great Western Railway timetable poster, c.1903-1914. The colour postcards were produced using a method called photochrom, which enabled colourised photographs to be produced from black and white negatives before the invention of colour photos. Thanks to costly and ongoing restoration work, the fort remains in good shape some 2,000 years on.
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However, the astonishing beauty of Cardiff castle in the Welsh capital takes centre stage, with its majestic main building pictured. A lone, partly-demolished tower stands at Dolbadarn castle in Llanberis while the sites in Aberystwyth and Denbigh don't fare much better. Other shots show the castle ruins that were beginning to spread across the country by 1890. One of the vintage postcards shows Caernarforn castle with the surrounding marina and ships bathed in an orange glow as the sun sets, while Penrhyn castle in Bangor and Kidwelly castle in Carmarthen are displayed in all their glory. The rugged country is often called the 'land of castles' with more than 600 ancient forts scattered across the rolling valleys - more than any other country in Europe.
#Henry pope art view at chepstow castle 1890 series
The spectacular Norman castles of Wales have been revealed in a series of intricate colour postcards from the 1890s, with turrets, arrow slits and tumbled down brickwork rife.