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[Jock]

Not quite like my friend Simon, Big Sexy, but I tried!  Love ya brother.      

[Jock]

Down we go…

[Jock]

To the North Pole to see…..SANTA!   

[screaminCVO]

Great job Jock! Looks like your enjoying yourself........... keep it coming!

[Jock]

Our next visit was truly an amazing story…Bishop’s Castle located near Rye, CO.  What an interesting story here.

The Early Years

Let's talk about being Inspired. Young Jim Bishop in 1959 at the ripe old age of 15 paid four hundred and fifty dollars for a two and a half acre parcel of land enclosed on three sides by the majestic San Isabel National Forest in southern Colorado. It was money saved from mowing lawns, throwing newspapers, and working with his father Willard in the family ornamental iron works. Jim had dropped out of high school that year over an argument from his English teacher who yelled at him "You'll never amount to anything Jim Bishop!" Ever since he was a boy, Jim was powerfully drawn up towards the mountains visible to the west from Pueblo, and having found a small 2-1/2 acre parcel one weekend on a bicycle journey with some friends, convinced his parents to buy it for him with his money. So Willard and ma Polly signed for the land deal which Jim wasn't even old enough to do himself, and the family now had a heavily forested two and a half acres at 9000 feet. Jim and his dad spent the next ten summers camping out on the land and doing the groundwork for a family cabin on the site. Setting the stage for what was to come, Jim soon learned that he really enjoyed swinging an axe and wielding a shovel or pick in building their clearing with a drive up to it, which is now the court-yard between the family cabin and the castle itself with it's driveway. It was in 1967 that Jim and Phoebe got married, a union they still enjoy to this day, and in 1969 at the age of twenty-five, Jim decided it was time to start building a cabin in the mountains they so loved. Since rocks were plentiful, everywhere, and free, he chose to start building a one room stone cottage...

[Jock]

The entrance gate






You can climb to the top of the entrance building

[Jock]

Down towards the moat

[Jock]

It Just Keeps On Growing!

As the castle grew, so did word of the guy up in the mountains who was pursuing the American Dream ~ to be King of your own Castle! People came to visit more and more often, and Jim would often be asked if he wanted help building his castle. For the first eight years, the answer was always Sure! And in those eight years, not a single person ever kept their word and showed up to help. In a fit of cynical frustration, Jim vowed that "By God, I've gotten this far by myself. If you're going to do something right, do it yourself!" (and probably another thing or two that really shouldn't be printed) So like the castle itself, the idea of the castle being a one man project was born in the process of the doing and was not an original intention or a childhood dream like many people think. And he kept building. And building. And the Bishop Castle grew...

[Jock]

Feats of Strength

In order to pursue the totality of what he could visualize, Jim employed anything and everything that was available to him. He had apprenticed and then mastered with his father in the family's Bishop Ornamental Iron shop welding and scroll bending and learning how things fit together for most of his life. Jim did everything ~ hauling rock from the state highway ditches, felling timber and then milling it into lumber, building railroad ties into forms for his arches, (he's used the same form over and over), building scaffolding as he went. He hand dug holes up to 12 feet deep for the foundations, mixed all his own mortar, carried it, usually up, to wherever he was working, created and rigged complex systems of pulleys and come-alongs to hoist such things as tree trunks for the floor supports, and stone by stone his dreams were being made manifest. Jim handles each and every stone in the castle on average of SIX TIMES !!!before it rests in it's final configuration in this massive re-organizing of the scattered granite in the Rocky Mountains into the form of the Bishop Castle.

[Jock]

Enter The Dragon

In the mid 1980's, a friend of Jim's was driving a truck full of discarded stainless steel warming plates from the Pueblo County Hospital to the landfill. He decided that Jim could probably put this motherload of expensive stainless steel to better use than the dump could, so dropped it off at the Bishop Ornamental Iron Shop instead. Jim spent the winter building a chimney out of the steel, riveting thousands of hammered "scales" that he had cut out of the plates together around a steel frame. The dragon was completed in the spring and Jim hauled it up the mountain to tackle the daunting task of raising and installing this incredible sculpture to where it rests today perched off of the front of the Grand Ballroom eighty feet in the air! Later on came the addition of a burner from a hot air balloon (that was donated!) which Jim put in the back of the dragons throat, making it a true Fire Breathing Dragon! The dragon usually gets fired up weekends through the summer.

[Jock]

Structural Ornaments

The beginning of the square tower on the south side of the main keep saw the first massive use of ironwork in the construction. Up until then Jim had incorporated his ironwork as window frames, stairs, and the purely ornamental. Now his use of iron and steel became structural, with a core frame for the tower starting from it's foundations. The rock work formed around this base and created such strength that Jim had no fear contemplating the heights that the tower might one day climb to. Wooden forms soon gave way to ornamental iron forms in the arches of the second floor, some of the most incredible examples of precision geometry found in the castle. And the most magnificent feature of all, the inner roof support trusses and the main central arch which are so detailed yet so massively functional that they boggle the mind that this is the work of one pair of hands. Everywhere one looks something will boggle the mind, such as the fact that the hand railing going up the S.W. corner, named Roy's Tower, with all of it's bizarre twists and turns, was hammered cold into it's highly custom shape!




 

[Jock]

Unimaginable Heights Reached

Jim is often told that he must not be afraid of heights! The way he figures it, he began at the bedrock base of the earth and has been gradually building up, so gradual that as the height grew, he was as comfortable with it as with being on the ground. The feeling has to be a lot like the difference between seeing a child growing up every day and not seeing them for a year at a time. One is hardly noticeable and the other striking in it's effect. Jim's experience with the castle has been so intimate, (he's held EVERY SINGLE STONE IN THERE ON AN AVERAGE OF SIX TIMES), that he's grown stone by stone as well and doesn't mind the heights at all. In 1994 Jim reached a point with the square Andreatta tower, named after the family that donated the old school bells that hang in it, where he felt satisfied that it was high enough. That didn't last long, as in 1995 he built and installed a thirty foot tall steel steeple on top of the masonry, taking the total height to roughly One-Hundred and Sixty Feet! That's about the size of a 16 story building! Jim has remained satisfied with the overall height of his castle to the present, though he's recently been threatening to build one of the corner outer wall towers to 250 feet because a local zoning official told him he couldn't build over 25 and he just added a zero.

[Jock]

You can climb anything in this place!  But beware!  There are no rails!         

[Jock]

Opps!

[Jock]

So you have read part of the story now I will introduce you to the signs on the property…