The great pretender: You can smell the waxwork horses at the new Warwick Castle. Edmund Bealby-Wright travels through Fantasy England

When you go up the leafy approach to Warwick Castle a sign warns 'Drive Carefully Peacocks Crossing'. What it really means is 'You are entering Fantasy England'. All the things that the tourist associates with our country are represented here: stately homes, the aristocracy, Winston Churchill, medieval castles full of armour, and gardens landscaped by Capability Brown. These ingredients are put together by that master of verisimilitude, Madame Tussaud's. At Easter, it opened 'Kingmaker - A Preparation for Battle', which is said to have cost pounds 4m. It is Tussaud's latest effort to entice visitors away from theme parks to experience some of the real England. But how real is it?

As you enter the exhibition you come up against the back-end of a horse. Not a real horse of course, a waxwork horse, in full armour. Its metallic head turns towards you, glinting in a shaft of halogen light. More startling than this vision is the horsy smell emanating from it. Not a real horsy smell, of course, but a synthetic one. Men perspire, horses sweat, and waxwork horses have A117063. Farther on, the Earl of Warwick, known as 'Kingmaker', calls his men to arms in the voice of actor John Rye, coming over on a discrete PA system.

Modern technology is combined with an exhaustive amount of historical research to create the illusion of reality. The design team consulted medievalists, archaeologists, archivists and a dentist (actually, a dental technician who has spent all his spare time finding out how to stick feathers on to arrows until at last he discovered bluebell glue). Wheelwrights, potters and furniture makers went to work assiduously avoiding any advances in their crafts made after 1471, and as you walk through the exhibition you see the result: stoneware jugs, wooden utensils and reproduction furniture arranged in artful disarray.

In spite of all their efforts, I found that I was picking up more interior design tips than medieval history, and I left the exhibition thinking that if Laura Ashley had been the curator of the British Museum, the collections would have been much more attractively presented, with pot-pourri in the Attic vases and scatter cushions on the throne of Ramases III. Of course, no one would do that with real treasures. Luckily, there are no real treasures left at Warwick Castle, as I found when I went round the State Rooms, where all but one of the Van Dykes are 'pupil of', the Rubens is 'studios of', and the Holbein is 'follower of'. With commendable modesty, Tussaud's has roped off the rooms so that we can't get near enough to see these flawed paintings.

Before Tussaud's bought the castle, the biggest attraction was the 'Warwick Vase', an enormous marble chalice found at Hadrian's Wall. It can be seen in the conservatory. Not the real vase of course - that was sold to the Burrell Collection - but a copy made from resin and stone dust.

Tussaud's is famous for making copies, not of Roman sculpture but of people, and there are plenty more in the Private Apartments. One weekend in 1898, the Earl and Countess had Lord Curzon, Clara Butt, young Winston Churchill and the future King Edward VII down to stay. Thanks to the wonders of wax, a hundred years later they are still there - we've all had guests like that. More purple ropes prevent us getting close enough to indulge in the secret pleasure of waxworks, counting the follicles of the famous, but there are sepia photos to identify the figures from afar. Not real photos of the real people, of course, but photos of the wax models made to look old.

By this time I'm thinking, 'What's so good about reality anyway? So long as the public are entertained, who cares if it's as real as all-in wrestling?' Besides, by repackaging the castle, Tussaud's is continuing a long tradition: in the 18th century the towers inspired Sanderson Miller to invent a new kind of building - the sham castle - and Capability Brown made Warwick Castle itself into a sham by laying turf and planting ornamental trees, thereby turning what had been defensive fortifications into a picturesque idea of a castle. So making Fantasy England is one of our oldest traditions, and, you've got to admit, Madame Tussaud's does it very well.

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(Photograph omitted)