[8 of 10.] On our drive home we stopped by a folk art attraction that Martha had scoped out online before the trip, Bishop’s Castle. Her last name is Bishop and it’s supposed to be a doozy so we went. It’s located in the middle of the nowhere mountains maybe 30 miles SW of Pueblo, CO.
Sure enough, it was really something.
Jim Bishop is building the world’s largest one-man physical project. It’s a huge castle that he’s building stone by stone. The stones are cemented in place but they’re also held by baskets of welded rebar, from what I saw. He also has welded a webwork of stairs and walkways throughout the place.
The tallest towers right now seem to be about 100 feet tall. He’s going for 250-foot corner towers. He keeps building.
It’s a donation-only tourist attraction, but I think it’s also his actual Keep and Sanctuary.
The castle is truly scary. The ironwork seems as thin as it could be and still support you. Safety isn’t first here. It’s more like rock-climbing. Pay attention!
His signs remind me in a way of Rev. Howard Finster’s signs and probably many other folk artists—that is, artists who aren’t aligned with any university-type art program or pedigree—that is, the signs state that he’s building as a testament to what poor people can do, and he’s building for “all people,” and he’s building with the help of God. And he’s building in resistant to The Establishment. (You don’t see many trained MFA careerist grants-based artists who declare that their work covers all those bases.)
Ol’ Jimbo also tosses in a big heap of Libertarianism, which he’ll gladly explain to you and all tourists present at the top of his lungs, if you get him started. He admits that he’s a nut. The gov’t has tried to stop him. He admits he likes a good fight. But he says they haven’t gotten their way and that he has a good time. (You can easily find some good castle movies and Jim rants on YouTube.)
I suspect that the gov’t mostly wants a sales tax cut of his donations. He mentioned that they want an official turngate installed at his entrance but he says NO (rather loudly). After that they simply want zoning jurisdiction, safety, which is to say “say so,” or just plain power over Jim Bishop. He don’t play that.
Here’s a short vid of Lucy climbing the stairs down from the tower. It gives a bit of the sense of things:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZYUncCeZTc
Here are some pics…
This front view shows a flying bridge toward the rear that crosses over to nothing at this point. There’s a support but the bridge moves a fair bit.
Jim…
How you enter the castle… There are handrails on the stair but it’s steep and it goes about 30 feet up. I’d think that the stair alone culls most hesitaters…
Lucy went nuts to get to the top. M and H scurried back down at the halfway point. I kept L from climbing the antenna after we got to the top of the tallest tower. My knees were darn weak. We did NOT take those stairs out to that skinny chimney shown in the lower right of the pic. So here we are, looking down…
Coming down. At the top we had to turn around and use the stairs like a ladder, each tread one shoe-wide. Beware the big, sometimes open windows…
Cute sign. Classic folk art.
More signs…
