SSSI. No access, but feel free to have a look around on the interactive view below and ponder what might have been.
Guy's Cliffe House, which stands on a steep slope overlooking the River Avon is also worthy of mention. Very much a ruin, this once magnificent house was reputed to have been the place where the legendary Guy of Warwick resided as a hermit.
- Warwick Through Time, J. Cameron (2009)
At length to Warwick I did come,
Like Pilgrim, poor, and was not knowne;
And there I lived a hermit's life,
A mile and more out of the towne,
Where with my hands I hewed a house
Out of a craggy rock of stone;
And lived like a palmer poor,
Within that cave myself alone.
- The Legend of Sir Guy, Anon
Reprinted in Thomas Percy (1839)
Reprinted in Thomas Percy (1839)
Leland calls Guy's Cliff "the abode of pleasure, a place meet for the Muses;" Camden , "the very seat of pleasantness;" and Sir William Dugdale remarked that it is "a place this of so great delight, in respect to the river gliding below the rock, the dry and whole some situation, and the fair grove of lofty elms over shadowing it, that to one who desireth a retired life , either for his devotions or study, the like is hardly to be found."
- Black's Guide to Warwickshire, A. and C. Black (1874)
The sandstone rock is all hallowed out into caverns, the work, it is said, of those devout "hermites;" caverns which make one wish to be a child again, to experience the delightsome terror of hide-and-seek in such a place.
- In Arden, R. G. Kingsley (1885)