Fortified place · Medieval
Huntly Castle
Aberdeenshire
Four successive castles rose on this one riverside site, each rebuilt by the Gordons after fire, siege or royal demolition: a single ruin holding f…
- Easy path
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Hillforts, brochs, duns, Roman forts and castles: the defended places, from Iron Age ramparts to medieval stone.
Page 1 of 21. Browsing 100 of 4619 — searching looks across all of them.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Donnington Castle
Berkshire
Its lone three-storey gatehouse survived only because Parliament's 1646 demolition order stopped short, the price of an 18-month Royalist siege tha…
- Near Newbury
- 250 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Castle (Kilmallock)
County Limerick
A fifteenth-century tower house whose name borrows the prestige of Limerick's grander castle, now pierced clean through by a single large Gothic arch.
- Near Kilmallock
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Norman's Law Hillfort
Fife
Two concentric stone ramparts enclosing roughly four hectares mark this as a hillfort (an upland enclosure defended by earthen banks) community of…
- Near St Andrews
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberdour Castle and Gardens
Fife
Aberdour Castle and Gardens combine one of Scotland’s oldest datable standing castles with a 400-year architectural sequence and terraced gardens t…
- Near Aberdour
- 46 metres from car park
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Fortified place · Roman
Antonine Wall: Rough Castle
Falkirk
Rough Castle is one of the best-preserved forts on the Antonine Wall, retaining the defensive landscape of Rome’s short-lived northern frontier and…
- Near Bonnybridge
- 15 min walk from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Bearsden Roman Bath House
East Dunbartonshire
The Romans built a stone-and-turf fortification, the Antonine Wall, between the Firth of Clyde and the Firth of Forth between AD 142 and 144 under…
- Near Bearsden
- 3 min walk from car park
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Broch of Mousa
Shetland Islands
The only broch - a drystone tower, round and hollow-walled, built in the Iron Age, from about 800 BC until the Romans came - still standing nearly…
- Near Sandwick
- 3.2 km from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Burghead Fort
Moray
At roughly three times the size of any other early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) enclosed site in Scotland, th…
- Near Burghead
- 30 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Cademuir Hill Fort
Scottish Borders
Two Iron Age forts crown the Cademuir ridge. The larger, Cademuir I, on the summit, enclosed about 2.25 ha within a single 3 m thick stone wall and…
- Near Peebles
- 4.4 km from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cambuskenneth Abbey
Stirling
Cambuskenneth Abbey, a provostry of canons regular on land enclosed by a meander of the River Forth near Stirling, was founded by order of King Dav…
- Near Stirling
- 263 metres from car park
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Law, Dumyat
Stirling
A hillfort of the Maeatae with a thousand-year gap in its occupation: and a Jubilee beacon on the summit now filled with other people's wishes.
- Near Blairlogie
- 947 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Sween
Argyll and Bute
Castle Sween, on the eastern shore of Loch Sween in Knapdale, Argyll, is thought to be one of the earliest stone castles built in Scotland: and is…
- Near Achnamara
- 466 metres from car park
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumbarton Castle and Dumbarton Rock
West Dunbartonshire
The longest recorded history of any stronghold in Scotland: capital of Strathclyde, taken by Vikings in 871 after its water failed.
- Near Dumbarton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dunadd Fort
Argyll and Bute
Dunadd is a hillfort in Argyll and Bute, occupied from the Iron Age and into the early medieval period, and believed to have been the capital of th…
- Near Kilmartin
- 237 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunnottar Castle
Aberdeenshire
The Annals of Ulster record two sieges of 'Dún Foither' in 681 and 694, possibly the earliest written references to the site; the 681 attack has be…
- Near Stonehaven
- 8 min walk from car park
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Edin's Hall Broch
Scottish Borders
The hilltop on the northeast slope of Cockburn Law was first fortified in the pre-Roman Iron Age, when double ramparts and ditches enclosed an oval…
- Near Duns
- 1.8 km from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Eildon Hill North Hillfort
Scottish Borders
Excavation has shown the hillfort: a defended settlement on high ground: was occupied by 1000 BC, in the Bronze Age, roughly 2500–800 BC, when meta…
- Near Melrose
- 1.7 km from car park
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Smailholm Tower
Scottish Borders
Smailholm Tower is a peel tower (a small border stronghold, built as a refuge against raiders) atop the crag of Lady Hill, around five miles west o…
- Near Smailholm
- 1 min walk from car park
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Abbotsbury Castle
Dorset
Earth banks look out from Wears Hill toward the English Channel, above the village and coast at Abbotsbury. Abbotsbury Castle is an Iron Age (rough…
- Near Abbotsbury
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberdyfi Castle
Ceredigion
In 1216 this mound hosted the assembly at which Llywelyn the Great secured the submission of south Wales's rulers, a diplomatic turning point rathe…
- Near Glandyfi
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberedw Castle
Powys
The last place Llywelyn ap Gruffydd sheltered before his death in 1282: most of it later quarried away to make foundations for a railway.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Abergavenny Castle
Monmouthshire
Abergavenny Castle is a major Marcher ruin, shaped by the 1175 killing of Welsh leaders, Glyndŵr’s revolt and a long afterlife as civic gardens and…
- Near Abergavenny
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Abernethy Round Tower
Perth and Kinross
One of only two Irish-style round towers in Scotland, the other at Brechin Cathedral.
- Near Abernethy
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberpergwm House
Neath Port Talbot
Aberpergwm House is a ruined Welsh country house tied to a long-lived Welsh-speaking gentry family, nineteenth-century historicist remodelling, war…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberysgir Castle
Powys
A Norman motte, the earthen mound a castle was raised on, without its bailey, the walled yard below the castle mound,, in the borderland counties t…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberystwyth Castle
Ceredigion
A diamond-shaped Edwardian fortress that changed hands between Welsh princes and the English crown, then struck its own silver coinage for Charles…
- Near Aberystwyth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Abinger Castle
Surrey
Excavation here recovered the actual postholes of the vanished timber tower and the bridge linking it to its bailey (the enclosed courtyard where t…
- Near Abinger Common
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Aconbury Camp
Herefordshire
Earthworks on Aconbury Hill still mark a long enclosure above the country south of Hereford. Aconbury Camp is a defended hilltop enclosure with lat…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Acton Burnell Castle
Shropshire
Red sandstone walls still rise beside Acton Burnell's church and the great barn linked with Edward I's parliament. Acton Burnell Castle is a fortif…
- Near Acton Burnell
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Affeton Castle
Devon
A medieval gatehouse is all that survived when Civil War forces levelled the Stucley family's fortified manor - and it went on to become their fami…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Affleck Castle
Angus
Its interior has scarcely been touched since the 1700s: spy-hole, private chapel and mural bedrooms all still in place, making it one of the most c…
- Near Monifieth
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aghalard Castle
County Mayo
A gallowglass stronghold that changed hands twice within months in 1596, its fate decided not by siege but by the rumour of Hugh Roe O'Donnell's ap…
- Near Westport
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Alberbury Castle
Shropshire
Red sandstone fragments and earthworks sit close to the Welsh border, where the Severn routes once mattered intensely. Alberbury Castle was a medie…
- Near Alberbury
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Fortified place · Medieval
Albrighton Moat
Shropshire
A medieval moat that had silted up and been filled with rubble, refilled in 1992 by a BBC television programme and now an angling centre for disabl…
- Near Donington
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aldford Castle
Cheshire
A scheduled Norman stronghold whose founder and true age are still disputed, remembered locally not by name but as Blobb Hill.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Allesley Castle
West Midlands
A single earthen mound and ditch: never excavated: is all that survives of a castle whose builder and century remain disputed, now listed on Englan…
- Near Coventry
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Allington Castle
Kent
Allington Castle is a layered Medway fortress whose unauthorised 12th-century origin, Tudor long gallery, Wyatt rebellion, long ruin and sensitive…
- Near Maidstone
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Fortified place · Medieval
Alloa Tower
Clackmannanshire
Alloa Tower is one of Scotland’s earliest and largest tower houses, retaining its timber roof and battlements from a long Erskine family residence.
- Near Alloa
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Allt yr Esgair
Powys
A ridge above the Usk carrying an Iron Age hillfort on its summit and a Roman road along its crest: two military uses of the same high ground, cent…
- Near Bwlch
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Alnwick Castle
Northumberland
Alnwick Castle guards a crossing of the River Aln in Northumberland, its battlements crowned with carved stone figures: sentinels that have watched…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Alton Castle
Staffordshire
A Gothic Revival castle above the Churnet Valley, on ground fortified in timber since Saxon times.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Amberley Castle
West Sussex
Amberley shows how a bishops’ medieval summer palace was turned into a formidable south-coast fortress in 1377, while its gatehouse, high curtain w…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ambresbury Banks
Essex
Ambresbury Banks is a five-hectare defended settlement in Epping Forest dating from from about 800 BC until the Romans came. Its archaeology, conse…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
An Dun
Highland
A drystone tower on a tidal islet, reachable only by a boulder causeway at low water: and still argued over as broch, a round, hollow-walled tower…
- Near Ardvar
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Anstey Castle
Hertfordshire
Its own defenders were ordered to tear it down in 1218, and the stone went to repair the parish church next door, where the castle's crest still su…
- Near Hertford
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Fortified place · Roman
Antonine Wall
East Dunbartonshire
The Antonine Wall was Rome’s short-lived northern frontier, joining nineteen forts to carved distance slabs whose paint, imagery and military messa…
- Near Kirkintilloch
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Fortified place · Medieval
Apley Castle
Shropshire
A fortified manor of 1327 that became an Elizabethan mansion, was sacked in the Civil War, and ended up as the stable block of a house that has its…
- Near Hadley
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Fortified place · Medieval
Appleby Castle
Cumbria
Four centuries under one family, then a rare-breeds farm run by an industrialist, and now a private house on the open market for millions: its owne…
- Near Appleby
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Arbury Banks, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
One of only six known hillforts strung along the northern Chilterns, and a serious contender for the battle where a small Roman force destroyed Bou…
- Near Hertford
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Arbury Hill
Northamptonshire
A square Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in st…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Archcliffe Fort
Kent
Archcliffe Fort is a surviving Dover coastal defence whose ramparts span Tudor invasion fears, Stuart rebuilding, railway and road losses, and a pr…
- Near Dover
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ardamullivan Castle
County Galway
Ardamullivan Castle is a restored six-storey O'Shaughnessy tower house whose surviving defensive features conceal rare late-medieval wall paintings…
- Near Portumna
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ardee Castle
County Louth
At four storeys it is reckoned the largest fortified tower house surviving in Ireland or Britain, and it stayed in daily public use: as prison, the…
- Near Ardee
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ardfinnan Castle
County Tipperary
Built in 1185 by Prince John alongside its sister fortress at Lismore, Ardfinnan is among the very first castles the English Crown ever raised on I…
- Near Clonmel
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ardley Castle
Oxfordshire
Raised without the king's licence during the Anarchy, it stood as an illegal fortress until a peace treaty condemned it by name to demolition.
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Fortified place · Roman
Ardoch Roman Fort
Perth and Kinross
Five ditches deep on two sides, and among the best-preserved Roman earthworks anywhere in the Empire.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ardvreck Castle
Highland
A broken keep on a spit of rock in Loch Assynt where a fugitive royalist commander was handed to his enemies in 1650, under circumstances still dis…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Arkin's Castle
County Galway
Arkin's Castle records the remaking of an Inishmore fortress from an O'Brien thirteenth-century structure into a Cromwellian garrison, now reduced…
- Near Athenry
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Armadale Castle
Highland
A Tudor-Gothic mock-castle built purely for show now stands roofless and abandoned, and in 2025 its entire estate went up for private sale.
- Near Armadale
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Fortified place · Medieval
Armathwaite Castle
Cumbria
A 15th-century pele tower built by the Skeltons to watch the River Eden for Scottish raiders, later refaced into a classical mansion that still hid…
- Near Armathwaite
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Fortified place · Medieval
Arnside Tower
Cumbria
A Scottish-style twin-height pele tower on English soil, raised against Border Reivers and now slowly falling to a collapsed wall and a century of…
- Near Arnside
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Arundel Castle
West Sussex
A medieval castle established by Roger de Montgomery in the eleventh century, damaged in the Civil War and remodelled twice over afterwards.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ascot d'Oilly Castle
Oxfordshire
Excavation here proved the mound was built around an already-standing tower, not the tower onto a ready-made mound: a rare, deliberately reversed m…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ascott Earl Castle
Oxfordshire
A castle of timber tower, artificial mound and walled yard in the village of Ascott Earl.
- Near Ascott Earl
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ashby de la Zouch Castle
Leicestershire
A late medieval tower house whose owner was executed before it was finished, then deliberately wrecked with gunpowder two centuries later: and whos…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ashford Castle
County Galway
A stronghold built onto the edge of a monastic site in 1228 has been rebuilt by three ruling families into a five-star hotel that has hosted a king…
- Near Cong
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ashley Castle
Hampshire
A castle knocked down by royal order in 1155 and rebuilt in stone half a century later under one of King John's most powerful (and most notorious)…
- Near Stockbridge
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ashton Keynes Castle
Wiltshire
Locals call it The Battlefield, and nothing in the record says what battle: a ringwork, a castle enclosure ringed by a bank and built without a mot…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Askerton Castle
Cumbria
Its two crenellated towers were raised for comfort, not war: a rare case where a border stronghold's battlements were really about extra bedrooms.
- Near Askerton
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aslockton Castle
Nottinghamshire
Aslockton Castle’s adapted castle mound and waterworks show how a Norman stronghold was recycled into a manor, fishponds and formal gardens over ce…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Astwell Castle
Northamptonshire
A single embattled gatehouse tower, its spiral stair still climbing to a castellated roof, is almost all that survives of a forty-room courtyard ma…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Athcarne Castle
County Meath
Its tower house was signed away into the future King James II's own name after Cromwell seized it, and locals themselves gutted it for salvage in 1…
- Near Dunshaughlin
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Fortified place · Medieval
Athenry Castle
County Galway
A squat 1230s keep was raised into a soaring tower house within a generation: carved in a local style found nowhere else, at a ford the Bermingham…
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Athlone Castle
County Westmeath
A squat, much-rebuilt riverside stronghold that has guarded the Shannon crossing at Athlone for over eight centuries, from Gaelic timber fort to Na…
- Near Athlone
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Athlumney Castle
County Meath
A tower house and its Tudor mansion were burned not by an attacking army but by their own defenders, twice, rather than surrender the site intact.
- Near Navan
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Auchendavy
East Dunbartonshire
Auchendavy was an Antonine Wall fort with an exceptional concentration of inscriptions, altars and military finds, despite severe damage from the F…
- Near Kirkintilloch
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Auchinhove
Moray
Auchinhove is a large Roman marching camp east of Keith, discovered from the air in 1949 and preserving evidence of Roman military movement in Moray.
- Near Keith
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Auckland Castle
County Durham
Twelve canvases of Jacob and his sons by Francisco de Zurbarán have hung in the Long Dining Room since 1756, and its converted great hall is rated…
- Near Bishop Auckland
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aughnanure Castle
County Galway
The only medieval castle in Connemara still intact enough to walk through, with a rare double bawn, a round watchtower, and carved grapevines in it…
- Near Oughterard
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Augill Castle
Cumbria
A Victorian fantasy of medieval architecture, Augill Castle passed through half a dozen owners in barely fifty years before finding its true callin…
- Near Brough
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aydon Castle
Northumberland
Aydon Castle is a rare fortified manor whose merchant-built stone house survived Scottish raids, capture, farming reuse, and later heritage protect…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ayton Castle, North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
A rare surviving pele tower in northern England, raised to guard a river crossing against Scottish raiders: and still holding a largely intact vaul…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bach Camp
Herefordshire
A single defensive bank still rises over five metres around four hectares of hilltop above the Whyle Brook, yet no spade has ever tested what lies…
- Near Leominster
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Baconsthorpe Castle
Norfolk
Baconsthorpe Castle is a rare fortified manor whose gatehouses, moat, wool-processing range and gardens show how the Heydons turned status, sheep f…
- Near Baconsthorpe
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Badbury Hill
Oxfordshire
A near-circular Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) enclosure whose name once drew comparison with Arthur's greatest vi…
- Near Great Coxwell
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Badbury Rings
Dorset
Badbury Rings preserves early burial mounds, a large defended settlement, Roman activity and later reuse on a chalk ridge above the Stour valley.
- Near Shapwick
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Badminton House
Gloucestershire
A private ducal seat whose Great Hall gave a global sport its name, while four centuries of rebuilding by Kent, Gibbs and the Somerset family layer…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Roman
Aberford Dykes
West Yorkshire
Becca Banks runs straight across a Roman road, and nobody knows which came first: whether the bank was raised against Rome, or the road driven thro…
- Easy path
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Settlement · Medieval
Aghaherrish
County Fermanagh
Aghaherrish combines a documented Plantation-era naming record with Boho’s water landscape and a scheduled rath with a counterscarp: the outer slop…
- Near Belcoo
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Settlement · Medieval
Aghahoorin
County Fermanagh
Aghahoorin preserves Boho’s layered place-name history alongside a scheduled bivallate rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth b…
- Near Belcoo
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Settlement · Medieval
Aghalislone
County Antrim
Aghalislone contains both a protected rath, a farmstead enclosed by a circular bank and ditch, and barrow, a burial mound, with nearby finds reveal…
- Near Ballycastle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aldborough Castle
North Yorkshire
A circular mound called Studforth Hill marks a medieval bank-and-ditch site inside an older Roman townscape. Aldborough Castle was probably a timbe…
- Easy path
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Fortified place
Altinaghree Castle
County Tyrone
Altinaghree Castle is a striking but derelict 1860s Tyrone estate house whose short-lived luxury and early abandonment shaped its enduring ruin.
- Near Dungannon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Antrim Castle
County Antrim
Antrim Castle charts four centuries of settler power, Jacobite raiding, Georgian rebuilding and twentieth-century destruction; its surviving garden…
- Near Antrim
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ardglass Castle
County Down
Ardglass Castle preserves a fifteenth-century fortified merchant warehouse range within a later country house and golf clubhouse, making harbour co…
- Near Ardglass
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ashleys Copse
Wiltshire
The earthworks at Ashley's Copse sit not on the crown of their hill but slightly to its eastern side, below the 166-metre summit, on ground that le…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Audley's Castle
County Down
Audley’s Castle is a compact late-medieval tower house whose rooms, bawn and County Down turret form reveal how lesser gentry combined storage, hos…
- Near Strangford
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Backwell Hillfort
Somerset
Once defended by a ditch and bank, this Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) fort was nearly erased by quarrying after its discovery,…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bagenal's Castle
Down
A sixteenth-century Newry fortified house hidden within a bakery for generations, rediscovered in 1996 and restored as a public museum.
- Near Newry
- Easy path
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