Modern Times
The castle is the oldest continuously-occupied castle in England after the royal fortresses of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle, and the oldest to be continuously owned and occupied by the same family. The Berkeley family divide their time between the Castle and their other home, Spetchley Park, just outside Worcester, which has been in the family's ownership since 1606.
With most areas open to the public since 1997, the private apartments occupy about 15% of the building and the rest is managed by the Berkeley Castle Charitable Trust. A restoration appeal was launched in 2006 to raise £5.5 million needed to renovate and restore the Norman building.
Two ships of the Royal Navy have been named Berkeley Castle after the castle, as has a Great Western locomotive.
The castle was used for many scenes for the hit BBC children's television series The Ghost Hunter and the first televised version of The Other Boleyn Girl.
Read more about this topic: Berkeley Castle
Famous quotes containing the words modern and/or times:
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“The people of coming days will know
About the casting out of my net,
And how you have leaped times out of mind
Over the little silver cords,
And think that you were hard and unkind....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)