Fortified place · Medieval
Eastcotts Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) thrown up on the Greensand Ridge to watch the Ouse valley below, now reduced…
- Near Cardington
- Rough ground
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 10 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eastington Manor Tower
Pembrokeshire
A medieval fortified house built against the threat of pirates now stands as the last survival of a village largely swallowed by an oil refinery.
- Near Rhoscrowther
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eastnor Castle
Herefordshire
A Regency fantasy of a medieval border stronghold, built by the architect of the British Museum and still the private home of the family that commi…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eaton Socon Castle
Cambridgeshire
A hastily raised civil-war stronghold whose earthworks still trace a Norman ringwork: a castle enclosure ringed by a bank, built without a motte: b…
- Near Eaton Socon
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ebsbury
Wiltshire
A hillside enclosure that yielded two buried Roman coin hoards, a Neolithic (the late Stone Age, about 4000–2500 BC in Britain) mace-head and six s…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eccleshall Castle
Staffordshire
A bishop's castle taken in 1643 to find its defenders drunk or in the taverns and the bishop dead of a heart attack.
- Near Eccleshall
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Edburton Castle Ring
West Sussex
A protected castle site on Edburton Hill, with earthworks dating from soon after 1066.
- Near Edburton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Eddisbury hill fort
Cheshire
The largest and most elaborately defended of Cheshire's seven hill forts, rebuilt, deliberately slighted by Rome, then reoccupied by settlers centu…
- Near Chester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Edinburgh Castle
City of Edinburgh
One of Scotland's most important strongholds and a seat of royal power for centuries, Edinburgh Castle claims to be the most besieged place in Grea…
- Near Edinburgh
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Edlingham Castle
Northumberland
Edlingham Castle is a compact fortified manor guarding a western approach to Alnwick, where a cracked but substantial solar tower preserves the cha…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Edmond Castle
Cumbria
A country house reshaped twice by the Smirke architects, then pressed into service sheltering Czech wartime refugees and holding delinquent boys as…
- Near Penrith
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Fortified place · Medieval
Edzell Castle and Garden
Angus
Its walled garden is carved with the only known Scottish set of relief panels depicting planetary deities and the liberal arts, a Renaissance survi…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Egremont Castle
Cumbria
Its market tolls are said to have funded the founding of St Bees Priory - a castle whose revenue helped build one of Cumbria's great religious houses.
- Near Egremont
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Eildon Hill
Scottish Borders
Nearly 300 house platforms cut into a volcanic hilltop make this one of the largest hillforts known in Scotland: later crowned by a Roman signal to…
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Eilean Donan Castle
Highland
The castle photographed on countless shortbread tins is barely a century old: a 1930s recreation of a stronghold the Royal Navy blew apart in 1719.
- Near Inverness
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Fortified place · Medieval
Elcho Castle
Perth and Kinross
Nearly burned in 1773 by a crowd who found it full of grain being held back for export during a famine.
- Near Rhynd
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Fortified place · Roman
Elginhaugh
Midlothian
Elginhaugh is the Roman Empire’s most completely excavated timber-built auxiliary fort, offering rare evidence for a short Flavian occupation, mixe…
- Near Dalkeith
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Elibank Castle
Scottish Borders
A 1511 royal charter tied one family's right to farmland to a promise to build in stone, and the Italianate terraced gardens later raised here rank…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ellesmere Castle
Shropshire
A Norman motte, the earthen mound a castle was raised on, that passed between English kings and Welsh princes for sixty years: and now has a bowlin…
- Near Ellesmere
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Elmley Castle (castle)
Worcestershire
A Norman stronghold whose ownership passed by marriage into the Earls of Warwick, on ground that may already have carried a defended hilltop settle…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Elsdon Castle
Northumberland
Elsdon Castle is Northumberland’s best-preserved medieval castle site, retaining a large mound and enclosed yard on a natural hill spur despite aba…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Elvaston Castle
Derbyshire
A Gothic Revival mansion remodelled by James Wyatt now stands empty on England's at-risk register, its 20-year romantic garden once hailed as a 'Go…
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Elworthy Barrows
Somerset
An unfinished defended settlement of the pre-Roman centuries, despite a name suggesting burial mounds.
- Near Wiveliscombe
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ely Castle
Cambridgeshire
A grassy mound beside the cathedral is all that survives of the stronghold William the Conqueror threw up to break the last English resistance hold…
- Near Ely
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
English Bicknor Castle
Gloucestershire
Held by one of the Anarchy's most powerful magnates, this castle escaped the destruction that levelled many others in that civil war: a survivor wi…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Enniscorthy Castle
County Wexford
A Norman keep at the head of the River Slaney that changed hands between Norman lords, a Gaelic dynasty, Elizabethan planters, Cromwellian troops a…
- Near Enniscorthy
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eshott Hall
Northumberland
Eshott Hall layers a little-known moated medieval manor beneath a later Palladian house, linking fortified residence, Northumberland estate history…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Eston Nab
North Yorkshire
A sandstone summit carrying three layers of human use at once: Bronze Age burial, an Iron Age hillfort, and a beacon tower: bought back into commun…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Etal Castle
Northumberland
Etal Castle is a strategically placed medieval border fortress whose capture by James IV in 1513 and surviving tower show the costs of the Anglo-Sc…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ethie Castle
Angus
A working seat still lived in by a clan chief, Ethie carries the Trafalgar arms of an admiral earl and the murdered cardinal who once held it.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ewloe Castle
Flintshire
Built not by an English king but by Welsh princes, its D-shaped keep sits on a rock outcrop rather than projecting from a wall: a design choice wit…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ewyas Harold Castle
Herefordshire
A castle raised before the Norman Conquest itself: one of only a handful of pre-1066 fortifications built in England, on a site later remade three…
- Near Ewyas Harold
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eye Castle
Suffolk
A Norman castle on its mound at Eye, sacked and largely destroyed in 1265.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eynsford Castle
Kent
Eynsford Castle preserves an unusually early Norman stone enclosure built over an Anglo-Saxon elite residence, with later hall, curtain wall and mo…
- Near Canterbury
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eyrecourt Castle
County Galway
Its carved baroque staircase, one of the most exuberant pieces of 17th-century woodwork to survive, was sold in 1927 and now stands in a Detroit mu…
- Near Eyrecourt
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Falkland Palace
Fife
Falkland Palace is a major Scottish royal residence where a medieval hunting castle became a French Renaissance court, retaining the world’s oldest…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Faringdon Castle
Oxfordshire
A Norman castle outside the market town, raised by Robert, Earl of Gloucester.
- Near Faringdon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Farleigh Hungerford Castle
Somerset
A wife strangled her first husband and burned his body in the castle oven; a later lord starved his own wife in one of the towers. Both stories are…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Farnham Castle
Surrey
A bishop's stronghold occupied almost continuously for 800 years, from a Norman motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) throu…
- Near Farnham
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fast Castle
Scottish Borders
Once known as Fause (False) Castle for the lights its defenders hung to lure ships onto the rocks below, this stronghold made deception part of its…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fatlips Castle
Scottish Borders
A reivers' watchtower above the Teviot whose unlikely name is said to record an indecorous greeting for visitors, later reborn as a Lorimer-designe…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Feartagar Castle
County Galway
Feartagar Castle is a compact five-storey Burke tower house whose defensive details and intact internal stairs preserve the working form of a late-…
- Near Oughterard
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Featherstone Castle
Northumberland
Featherstone Castle combines a fourteenth-century pele tower with a large Gothic country house, tracing a border manor’s adaptation through estate,…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fenny Castle
Somerset
A castle on the only high ground for miles, whose builder is unknown: and where quarrymen once found twenty skeletons older than the castle itself.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ffridd Faldwyn, Montgomery
Powys
One of the largest hillforts in Wales, excavated to modern standards in the 1930s: and yielding a single sherd of pottery of the Iron Age, roughly…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fiddaun Castle
County Galway
Fiddaun is a mid-sixteenth-century O'Shaughnessy tower house whose notably intact inner bawn wall preserves the relationship between a defensive to…
- Near Gort
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Finavon Castle
Angus
Finavon Castle combines the ruins of a 17th-century L-plan tower-house with excavated evidence of a larger medieval predecessor, preserving a long-…
- Near Finavon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fincharn Castle
Argyll and Bute
Known by three names and fought over twice in a single generation, its ruin marks a stronghold that changed hands between Scottish, English and Heb…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Findlater Castle
Aberdeenshire
Besieged by Norwegian invaders in the 1260s and by Mary, Queen of Scots' own army in 1562, after a family plot to imprison and displace its own lai…
- Near Cullen
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
FitzHarris Castle
Oxfordshire
One of Oxfordshire's earliest Norman earthworks, raised within a generation of the Conquest and now watched over as ground at risk from the very vi…
- Near Abingdon-on-Thames
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Flamborough Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
Flamborough Castle’s Danish Tower preserves the small but evocative remains of a medieval Constable family manor, later reduced to a farm building…
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Fortified place · Roman
Fleam Dyke
Cambridgeshire
Radiocarbon dating shows the bank was built, abandoned and refortified across three separate phases: a frontier fought over repeatedly, not raised…
- Near Fulbourn
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Flint Castle
Flintshire
The first stone raised in Edward I's Iron Ring, its isolated corner keep is a design unmatched anywhere else the king built in Britain.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Flitwick Castle
Bedfordshire
A Norman lord's timber stronghold, raised over a dispossessed Saxon estate, now survives only as a grass-covered mound on a village green.
- Near Flitwick
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Floors Castle
Scottish Borders
A family record stretching from medieval Reiver land to French tapestries brought from a New York estate: one house rebuilt twice over three centur…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Flower's Barrow
Dorset
The coastal defended settlement dates from the centuries before Rome arrived, with visible ramparts and hut circles. More than half of the original…
- Near Tyneham
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Foel Drygarn
Pembrokeshire
Two hundred and twenty-seven hut platforms spread beneath three summit cairns, a rare record of settlement under a defended hilltop.
- Near Crymych
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Foel Fenlli
Denbighshire
Legend remembers its summit as a tyrant king's stronghold destroyed by fire from heaven, but excavation shows a real community occupying the rampar…
- Near Denbigh
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Folkestone Castle
Kent
Folkestone Castle’s surviving Norman banks were investigated by Augustus Pitt Rivers in 1878, in work claimed as Britain’s first scientific excavat…
- Near Canterbury
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Fortified place · Medieval
Folkingham Castle
Lincolnshire
Folkingham Castle was the administrative centre of a Norman barony, retaining a castle mound-and-yard form later reshaped by the Beaumont family.
- Near Folkingham
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fonmon Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A castle whose thickest wall faces the side hardest to attack: and whose early history has had to be read out of its masonry rather than its docume…
- Near Fonmon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ford Castle
Northumberland
Ford Castle occupies a shallow River Till crossing where repeated Anglo-Scottish conflict turned a Heron fortress into a rebuilt Gothic mansion and…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Fort George
Highland
Completed in 1769 at more than double its original budget, it is one of the most sophisticated artillery fortifications ever built in Europe: and i…
- Near Ardersier
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Fortified place
Fort Hubberstone
Pembrokeshire
Eleven guns behind bomb-proof stone, built to cover the dockyard approach with a fort on the opposite shore - and left to fall down since 1918.
- Near Milford Haven
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fort Paull
East Riding of Yorkshire
A pentagonal Palmerston Fort rearmed across four centuries of coastal defence, from Tudor guns to an Arctic convoy magazine to a museum that housed…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Fosbury Camp
Wiltshire
Defended on three sides by the slope alone. To the west the ground keeps rising, towards the summit the fort does not occupy.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fotheringhay Castle
Northamptonshire
A royal birth and a queen's execution happened within the same walls: Richard III was born here in 1452, and Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded here…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Framlingham Castle
Suffolk
A Norman castle destroyed by Henry II after the revolt of 1173, then rebuilt by the Bigods.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Frankenbury Camp
Hampshire
A lone Durotrigian silver coin turned up in a nearby garden, hinting at trade contacts reaching west into Dorset from this quiet Avon-side promontory.
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Frodsham Castle
Cheshire
A castle so thoroughly erased that its walls now form the cellars of the house that replaced it: a stronghold known more through inheritance disput…
- Near Chester
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Funzie Girt
Shetland Islands
A stone wall over four kilometres long once ran the full north-south length of Fetlar, splitting the Shetland island into two almost equal halves.…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fyvie Castle
Aberdeenshire
Four towers raised by five different families across six centuries turn one facade into a physical timeline - a royal courtroom, a Civil War battle…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Gaer hillfort, Trellech
Monmouthshire
Gaer hillfort, a defended Iron Age: the centuries before Rome arrived: settlement on high ground, is a registered Celtic monument near Trellech, re…
- Near Trellech
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gallarus Castle
County Kerry
A mural stairway rises through the thickness of the east wall of Gallarus Castle, climbing to vaulted ceilings on the third and fourth floors of th…
- Near Dingle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gannocks Castle
Bedfordshire
Its name promises a castle but hides a Norman fortified manor house, possibly raised over a Viking stronghold tied to a ninth-century battle for Te…
- Near Tempsford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Garbally Castle
County Galway
A tower house razed within five years of its completion, then re-inhabited three centuries later by an evicted family with nowhere else to shelter.
- Near Ballinasloe
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Garn Boduan
Gwynedd
Garn Boduan is a major Llŷn Iron Age hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age: where evidence for more than 170 roundhouses and perh…
- Near Nefyn
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Gatcombe, Somerset
Somerset
A house at Ashton Watering in the parish of Long Ashton, protected by law for its architecture.
- Near Long Ashton
- Some walking
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Fortified place
Gatherley Castle
North Yorkshire
Nothing of the house itself survives but a coat of arms on a Darlington street, yet its brief life traces a country estate's whole arc: built, sold…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Giant's Castle, Isles of Scilly
Cornwall
Giant's Castle uses sea cliffs and a triple line of earthworks to defend a small Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) promontory on S…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gidleigh Castle
Devon
Gidleigh Castle is a rare fortified manor on Dartmoor’s edge, combining a fourteenth-century Prouz residence with later collapse, conservation and…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gilling Castle
North Yorkshire
Its Elizabethan Great Chamber was stripped for shipment to a Hollywood mogul's castle in 1930, then spent decades in storage before returning intac…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glamis Castle
Angus
One family, the Lyons, has held this Strathmore estate since the 1370s, and its rooms have hosted a murdered king, a woman burned for witchcraft, a…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glandyfi Castle
Ceredigion
Ceredigion's only castellated Georgian country house, built as a Gothic Revival fantasy for a family whose fortunes came from local industry.
- Near Glandyfi
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Glastonbury Lake Village
Somerset
Timber and a thousand tonnes of imported clay, laid on a swamp to make solid ground for up to 200 people. The wood is still down there, reburied to…
- Some walking
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Eggardon Hill
Dorset
Eggardon Hill is a major Dorset landscape from before any written account of Britain existed, where a 21-hectare defended enclosure, burial mounds…
- Near Askerswell
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Embury Beacon
Devon
Embury Beacon makes coastal change visible: an Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) fort has been drastically reduced by erosion,…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Enfield Old Park
Greater London
Enfield Old Park preserves one of Middlesex’s rare Domesday deer parks, combining an Iron Age, from the centuries before Rome arrived, hillfort, a…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Enniskillen Castle
County Fermanagh
Enniskillen Castle preserves a Maguire stronghold remade through siege, Plantation rebuilding and military use into the town’s layered Fermanagh he…
- Near Enniskillen
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Etonbury Castle
Bedfordshire
A railway cutting was driven straight through this Danish-attributed stronghold, leaving cropmarks and fragments of earthwork: earth moved and shap…
- Near Arlesey
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fanning's Castle
County Limerick
Off Creagh Lane and Mary Street on King's Island, opposite the old tholsel, the roughly squared limestone walls of Fanning's Castle rise four store…
- Near Askeaton
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fathom Castle
County Down
Fathom Castle records a strategically placed but vanished stronghold, moving from possible De Lacy-era occupation to O’Neill power and canal-era de…
- Near Newry
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fillongley Castle
Warwickshire
Two castles, two scheduled monuments, and a herbicide spraying in about 2012 that cleared the ruins and took the biodiversity with it.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Fin Cop
Derbyshire
A 2011 dig found a mass grave of only women and children in its ditch: the earliest known segregated burial of its kind in Iron Age (roughly 800 BC…
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Folly Hill
oxfordshire
A tower with a sign warning that members of the public committing suicide from it did so at their own risk. It stands on an ancient ditched ring th…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fort Williamsburg
Gwynedd
Fort Williamsburg stands half a mile south-east of Glynllifon Hall in Llandwrog, Gwynedd, on ground that Cadw has called a location "without releva…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Furzey Island
Dorset
Furzey Island combines a concealed modern oil-field installation with evidence that the wider former island landscape supported Iron Age (the centu…
- Near Corfe Castle
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Gaer (Black Mountains)
Monmouthshire
At 427 metres above sea level, the summit of Gaer sits inside the earthwork (a bank or ditch dug and heaped from the ground itself, with no masonry…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Gaer Fawr, Llanilar
Ceredigion
One of only around 300 Welsh hillforts formally protected by Cadw, out of an estimated 570 that survive across the country.
- Near Llanilar
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gaer Penrhôs
Ceredigion
A ringwork: a castle enclosure ringed by a bank, built without a motte: on a steep Ceredigion hill whose timber defences repeatedly changed hands i…
- Near Llanrhystud
- Rough ground
No places match those filters.