John F.
Yelp
Had been wanting to see this and got here over the weekend.
This is not really a castle, but actually a stately home belonging to Allan McNab, a colonial premier of Canada and ancestor of the current Duchess of York (AKA "The Rottweiler'). It has been a museum since 1900 but they are stll doing restoration - the main hall was about to have new wallpaper based on the original.
It is interesting as a house museum as it has a lot of original pieces and generally careful restoration, with the tour spending almost as must time on the servants quarters as upstairs. The guide was knowledgeable but geared her scripted spiel more to the children in attendance.
For its mid-nineteenth century time, the house combined some fairly sophisiticated features (early gasification, running water and a flush toilet) with some rather corner cutting finishing touches (stucco painted with lines over brick instead of real sandstone for the exterior wall, trompe l'oeuil marble inside instead of the real thing, and bare plank floors upstairs - in the Eastern US or England at this time I think they would have been covered by "Turkey carpets.")
The grounds include a pretty dovecote (visible prominently from York Boulevard), a rather boring gift shop, a military museum of somewhat moderate interest, an strange little building used for cockfighting (!), and the most interesting, a lovely heirloom garden with an excellent interpreter.
The tour plus the museum and garden take about 90 minutes to see. I felt the $11 price tag was worth it and suited to the scale of the property. I learned some interesting tidbits of Canadian history, and the house, despite some of the cost-cutting of the orginal inhabitants, is quite lovely and has some truly unique touches.
Well worth a trip to Hamilton. Remember to leave early as the QEW traffic on a summer weekend will add another hour to the trip.
