Bannerman Castle

We planned a trip to the state of old New York, which I had seen very little of.  My camerado wanted to do some camping, and I had a deep desire to visit the home of Washington Irving again. Our guide at the Irving house was a focused and well-prepared woman in a hoop skirt, named, I think, Lorraine. A pro.

We also planned a day to see the Eleanor and FDR sites, with a tacky Vanderbilt site thrown in. Learning about Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the highlights of the trip.

The most photogenic site we visited was Bannerman Castle. The camerado insisted we see this. "You love castles," he said. True! The castle itself was a warehouse for Francis Bannerman's military surplus mail order catalog. I liked that Bannerman manipulated the angles of his castle so it would look vastly larger when approached from the water.



Bannerman was very thrifty, and, according to our guide, used the cheapest materials for his castle. This, along with a series of mishaps--explosions, fires, and vandalism--contributed to the structure's decline.



That's the house the Bannerman family lived in, with a garden lovingly maintained by the volunteers of the Bannerman Castle Trust.



The interior is unsafe for visitors, so some ingenious person had this painting installed in the window, to give a sense of it.



Here is the view the Bannermans' had from their front lawn.



Bannerman's Scottish heritage was very meaningful to him, so there are cute Scottish labels all over the island. 



The night before we saw the castle, we stayed in an inn, in this appropriately named room. I liked the brownies the innkeeper made; my camerado was excited to find an old VHS of Hitchcock's Notorious, dubbed from TCM; I hadn't known he loved this movie. That it was a dubbed VHS made it somehow better.