Dunedin Day 2 18/9/13
We got up fairly late and had coffee got ourselves up. It was a fairly nice day so we looked through our list of things to do and decided to go and visit Larnach Castle New Zealands only castle.
The drive was pretty nice out onto the Otago peninsular with some winding roads up into the hills and up to the castle. The site of the castle was chosen for it’s great view and it shows from the castle grounds you can see the out into the bay and all around. They used to watch for ships and communicating via flags with ships Larnach owned.
The grounds have a nice set of gardens with great views they have a stables which the seem to have converted into rooms they rent out.
We went into the house which was built in 1871 by politician and banker William Larnach for his beloved first wife Eliza. The man himself was a banker with The bank of new south wales his family were from Australia and his father was in charge of inmates there. The story of the family was not a very happy one his first wife died suddenly at only 38 years old then he married her sister and due to fearing bankruptcy put all his holdings in her name which annoyed his children who worried they wouldn’t inherit. So not wanting to annoy the children the second wife Mary left all the estates to them. She wasn’t very happy she was unpopular with the children and also with the staff due to her drinking which was so extreme she had to be forcibly confined to her room to sober up.
She died from blood poisoning due to an operation she had and as a result William Larnach lost control of all his holdings as his children got them all he had to force them to sign some legal document to get them to give control back to him. He had a third wife who was a lot younger 35 to his 55 and again the inheritance was an issue there were also rumors that his oldest son Donald was having an affair with his step mother. In the end William Larnach killed himself in the New Zealand Parliament building.
The Castle had been abandoned falling down graffiti riddled place till a family bought it and restored it to it’s former glory.
We wandered the rooms the lower levels were festooned with detail fine carvings on the wood work and fine ceiling detail and detailed tiled floors. The basement had a nice little museum on the history of the castle and the family. It also had a nice video on the restoration. As you went up it got less fancy the second floor held the main bedrooms as well as an odd display on dresses of the period.
On the third floor the children lived and they also had a marble bath tub which weighed over a ton. There was also a small viewing room that looked out over the grounds. The star feature was up a winding precarious spiral stair case up onto the tower. The view was really incredible you could see out over the whole area.
After that we went to the tea room where I had a bacon and egg pannini a jaffer slice and a ginger beer. Byrnie had a salmon quiche, a rocky road slice, and another ginger beer. It was a welcome snack to keep us going.
For the trip back we put on the time lapse rig to see if we could capture the fantastic view. We got back and had a bit of rest then headed out for dinner. We decided to try the hotel restaurant which was called Jimmy Cook’s Kiwi Kitchen. We ordered a couple of beers Speights golden lager which took a while to turn up the drinks guy seemed to have trouble working out where orders were sent to he offered our beers to the table next to us first and then a short while later a coke to the same table that was also wrong.
We decided to have starters I had a half dozen sauteed scallops and Byrnie had seafood chowder. Then for main I had herb crusted lamb and byrnie had surf and turf. The food was pretty good really tasty and we both felt nice and full we declined any desert and headed back to the room where we watched an odd thing called american horror asylum then the three musketeers (the most recent version complete with fleets of airships) and round it off with a terrible hallmark channel movie called Goodnight Justice which was about a cowboy circuit judge played by luke perry and then turned in for the night.
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