A 500-year-old warning not to trust people in authority can be found in the carvings of dolphins, horses, boar, salmon, and George and the dragon.
The carvings at Carlisle Castle are being restored to save them from the elements and allow them to be seen more clearly.
They are from the 15th century and have always been a mystery. The most likely explanation is that they were made by bored prison guards.
Mark Douglas, an English Heritage property curator, said that they are a nice snapshot of what was in people's minds in the 15th century.
The restoration project involves the removal of hundreds of years of water damage without the use of industrial equipment or chemicals.
I am enjoying it because the walls have problems. I like working out how I can stop the problems from getting worse. The days are quick.
One of the main jobs has been removing salt from the skin. Black marks on some stones seem to be the result of hundreds of years of people touching them.
It has been a challenge, but I think of the people who did the carving. They would have had a completely different mindset in a different time. I think it would have been miserable here.
Some of the carvings are of animals that were emblems of families of status in the area.
Juliet Fellow-Smith, property manager at the castle, said that whoever the carvers were, they were likely to have been loyal to some of the most powerful lords in the north.
The satire on the clergy is likely to have come from the fox preaching to chickens.
One of the carvings that the restoration has exposed is a deer-hunting scene with a knight in profile.
He was a bit lost until Alex started working.
The castle's roof and walls are being repaired to make them waterproof.
The most besieged site in the British isles is the castle. David I of Scotland died there. Mary Queen of Scots spent the first two months of her captivity there. In the English civil war, it was prominently featured and in the 18th century it was fought over by the Jacobite troops.
She has known the carvings since she was a girl. I remember them vividly because I did a project on them when I was 11.
I can bring my own imagination to what they mean because someone carved these images on the wall and I stood in front of them. Anyone can stand in front of these carvings and get a sense of what it was like hundreds of years ago.
When I was a school child, it was amazing to see someone make their mark on a monument.
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