This week we are joining in with Royal Mail, whose next set of Commemorative stamps, to be issued on the 21st of May, feature castles. However we are going off on a tangent for the first three and looking for other things that bear the same name as the castle (something which may well continue all week).
The stamps, as usual, are all for First Class Postage. The standard ones are photographs, of Dunluce Castle, Dundrum Castle, Raglan Castle, Pembroke Castle, Urquhart Castle, Stirling Castle, Warwick Castle, and Bamburgh Castle - then there is a Miniature Sheet, using art drawn images, of Caernarfon Castle, WIndsor Castle, Balmoral Castle and Dover Castle
Our first clue, on Saturday the 16th of May, gives us "Urquhart", and it also shows that football takes many forms, this being Australian Football. There is actually a Scottish connection though because a man called William Swan Urquhart went from there to Australia as a surveyor and planned the streets of Ballarat in 1852. He seems to have no connection with the castle - though the truth is that no one by the name of Urquhart ever lived there, the name is not a title, it is from the Irish, "aird", which means a promontory, and the Welsh, where "carrden" means a wooded area.
Our second card, on Sunday the 17th of May, gives us another man, a military man called "Stirling", who, so the card tells us, was injured at Tientsin, during the Boxer Rebellion. Now we don`t think he has any connection to the castle either, and again it is not named for a family, but for the stone it sits upon, known as Stirling Sill, and which was once part of a glacier.
And lastly on Monday the 18th of April, we brought you a ship, erroneously named as S.S. Balmoral Castle rather than her correct R.M.S. It turns out that Balmoral is again not named after a family, and I expect the Royal family would be rather shocked to learn that in a mixture of Gaelic and Pictish it means a hut in a clearing. However that does tie in rather well with Queen Victoria, who said openly that she much preferred it to any other palace, because it was private and ordinary.
On which note, as always, and especially this week, if anyone else would like to send us any information or scans from their collection which relates in any way to our theme of the week, please do - simply email us at webmaster@card-world.co.uk - and this is the same for any corrections, or for general cartophilic correspondence and chat.