Lumley Castle, Chester-le-street

Lumley Castle has been used as a 59 bedroomed hotel since 1976. It overlooks the town of Chester-le street on the banks of the River Wear. The nearby Riverside stadium is home to Durham County Cricket club and is one of England's newest test cricket venues. Famous world cricketers use this hotel when playing against the England team.

Lumley Castle is a 14th century castle named after Ralph Lumley who transformed his Manor into a castle. Despite staying in the family hands for a while, ownership was transferred to the Bishop of Durham during the 19th century and was a temporary home to some Durham University students. The Castle was eventually sold during the 1960s to fund student accommodation that was nearer to Durham City. There are stories that some of the West Indian cricket team moved to other accommodation as they thought it was haunted....probably Lady Lily of Lumley !!

Apart from the recent pictures that you saw of Newcastle Central Station, this is the closest post to home that I have done. Amazingly, I have never been in the building before as it is so expensive.

On the 7th November, I attended an Art exhibition for about 1 hour to help out a friend of a friend. The Artist was David Welsh and this was an opportunity that I was not going to miss with the camera for a photographic post here..

courtyard accommodation

(This has been a week of change... firstly the snow has finally finished off everything about Autumn rather quickly and harshly.
It has affected my travel plans for today and also for the whole of last week for work when I had to share a very small space on the bus, metro train with at times, long peaceful walks in the snow !! I have never known the buses so busy.
Secondly, I have added a more versatile camera to my collection this week with a test photograph of my three rubbish bins taken today below. I'll probably talk about it in the new year as I am still using other photographic material up.

Lastly, we all make errors of judgement ......Autumn can be a time for clearing out the rubbish and it is time for disposing of things that cause unnecessary mess.  Lets hope I can manage to put mine in the bin for the binman ... !! )

11th April 2019 - I am currently reloading all my photos again in chronological order thanks to a photo storage issue with another website.

As a postscript, back in 2010, I couldn't have imagined the possibility of staying here when then these photographs were taken but things often take a twist ... 

RAW photo by Mike, edits by me !!

... and I ended up having my wedding reception here in 2016.  

It is unfortunate that you can't take your own wedding photographs so we hired a work colleague of a family member the time called Mike (seriously can't remember his surname). We agreed that Mike would take the images in RAW form and I would add all edit such as sharpening, saturation, highlights, lightening, un_shadowing and colour popping. Apologies to Mike for watermarking it for security issues but I did do some work on it as well.