Rich Victorian House

On Monday, The Archive service came to our school, and told us about The Victorians. One aspect that they told us about was Margam Castle and they showed us a plan of it. Take a look at it below:-

Today we are drawing our own little version of a rich Victorian house, that is almost the same as Margam Castle. There are different rooms for every place, but they are in completely different places. 

We had to make sure that it was between 1400 and 1600m2. There were lots of important rooms that we had to include such as: the library; an orangery; a drawing room; an entrance hall. The scale we decided to use was 1cm:2m.

I think it was hard, but my friend here who is also writing, thinks it was pretty easy. When I have completed my plan, I will post it here.

The next lesson we listened to a poem called 'The Listeners' by Walter De Le Mare. It was quite scary. Take a look for yourself:-

The Listeners

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champ’d the grasses
    Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
    Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
    ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
    No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Lean’d over and look’d into his grey eyes,
    Where he stood perplex’d and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
    That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
    To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
    That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirr’d and shaken
    By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
    Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
    ’Neath the starr’d and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
    Louder, and lifted his head:--
’Tell them I came, and no one answer’d,
    ’That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
    Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
    From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
    And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
    When the plunging hoofs were gone.

After we listened to the poem we thought about our scary house that we had just designed. We wrote scary stories about our houses. When we have finished them we are going to have a big book with our halloween stories in it. Keep your eyes open on this website for them!