Castle Howard

A couple of weekends ago my girlfriend and I visited Castle Howard, a few miles outside York. Neither of us had been before. It was an amazing building and the grounds and gardens were beautiful. Obviously, the location has been used for both the TV and film versions of Brideshead Revisited. Inside great reference was made to these productions. Also worth mentioning was a painted mural done for the film which had two awesome winged skeletons as angels of death. As a huge Stanley Kubrick fan it was, however, disappointing that no reference was made to the exteriors being used for Barry Lyndon. Curious. Another thing worth seeing were some of the children's books on display which had illustrations by Arthur Rackham. This was interesting as Guillermo Del Toro has mentioned Rackham in interviews and you can see some stylistic influences between the illustrations and images in Del Toro's films.