Fortified place · Medieval
Helmsley Castle
North Yorkshire
Helmsley Castle reveals nearly five centuries of adaptation: a Norman timber stronghold rebuilt in stone, reshaped into a Tudor mansion, damaged in…
- Some walking
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 12 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Helsby hill fort
Cheshire
Helsby’s defended hilltop, occupied in the centuries before Rome arrived, uses sheer sandstone cliffs and double ramparts to command the Cheshire P…
- Near Helsby
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hembury Castle, Buckfast
Devon
Hembury Castle combines an Iron Age hillfort: a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts: with a later medieval castle mound on a Dartmoor-edge p…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hembury Castle, Tythecott
Devon
Hembury Castle near Tythecott preserves an Iron Age hillfort: a defended enclosure on high ground, ringed with banks and ditches: on elevated Devon…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hemyock Castle
Devon
Hemyock Castle preserves the remains of a late medieval quadrangular castle whose short working life, Civil War use and later rebuilding make its d…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hen Domen
Powys
The first Montgomery Castle, abandoned when its replacement was built a mile away: which is why its timber buildings could be excavated at all.
- Near Hendomen
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hen Gaer
Ceredigion
Hen Gaer’s small fortified enclosure uses a massive defensive bank and rock-cut ditch to command the narrow valley where the Afon Clarach begins.
- Near Bow Street
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hen Gwrt Moated Site
Monmouthshire
A moat built with no defensive purpose at all now guards nothing but empty grass: every trace of the bishops' manor and the Herberts' hunting lodge…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Henderskelfe Castle
North Yorkshire
A four-towered medieval castle that vanished so completely beneath a stately home's gardens that its exact plan was only recovered by television ar…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hereford Castle
Herefordshire
A royal stronghold besieged and recaptured across three centuries of English and Welsh conflict, reduced now to a park lawn crossed by a Nelson mon…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hermitage Castle
Scottish Borders
A single Border stronghold ties together a witchcraft forfeiture, Mary Queen of Scots' most reckless ride, and generations of Douglas and Hepburn p…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Herstmonceux Castle
East Sussex
Herstmonceux is one of England’s earliest major brick castles, repeatedly transformed from fifteenth-century display residence to ruined shell, obs…
- Near Hastings
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hertford Castle
Hertfordshire
A working Tudor gatehouse still stands over a site that held two kings as prisoners and sheltered a queen who died within its walls.
- Near Hertford
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hethpool House
Northumberland
Hethpool House combines an Edwardian country house on Admiral Lord Collingwood’s former seat with the remains of a fourteenth-century pele tower in…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hever Castle
Kent
Hever Castle combines medieval defences with the Boleyn family story, including Anne Boleyn’s early life and Henry VIII’s later ownership.
- Near Hever
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hewelsfield Motte
Gloucestershire
No masonry survives here at all: only earth and a buried ditch mark a Norman stronghold raised over an emptied, then resettled, village.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
High Head Castle
Cumbria
A medieval pele tower rebuilt as a Georgian mansion in the 1740s, gutted by fire in 1956, and now being reroofed wing by wing in a slow private eff…
- Near Ivegill
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Highbury Hill, Clutton
Somerset
Three hectares of earthwork - a bank or ditch dug and heaped from the ground itself, with no masonry - at the end of a narrow ridge, under woodland…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Highclere Castle
Hampshire
A Victorian remodelling by the architect of the Houses of Parliament sits over a working estate where Howard Carter's patron once lived, and where…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Highdown Hill
West Sussex
A Late Bronze Age enclosure replaced by a fort of the Iron Age, roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest: and the hill where a miller built his own…
- Near Worthing
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hillsborough Castle
County Down
Hillsborough Castle is Northern Ireland’s official royal and government residence, where a Georgian country house became a setting for constitution…
- Near Hillsborough
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hinton Waldrist Castle
Oxfordshire
A modest Thames-valley motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower raised on a mound with a walled court beside it) where Mary de Bohun…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hobs Moat
West Midlands
A fortified manor house reduced to bare earthworks, its true age still argued over: traditionally 12th century, yet the pottery and stonework found…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hoddom Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Hoddom Castle is a large Annandale tower house whose Marian-era sieges, later courtyard expansion and surviving watchtower show how Border fortific…
- Near Ecclefechan
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Fortified place · Medieval
Holdgate Castle
Shropshire
A Domesday castle that housed a college of clergy for over a century: and whose one surviving tower is now part of a farmhouse.
- Near Holdgate
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Fortified place · Medieval
Holland House
Greater London
Holland House is a rare London ruin where a Jacobean country estate, a 19th-century Whig intellectual salon and the destructive legacy of the Blitz…
- Near Kensington
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hollingbury Castle
East Sussex
Hollingbury preserves a substantial defended settlement dating from from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest on Brighton’s edge, where later exc…
- Near Brighton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Holmbury Hill
Surrey
Its double ramparts were cut not just to defend the summit but to announce control over the trade routes through the Weald below.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Holne Chase Castle
Devon
Holne Chase Castle preserves a defended hilltop position above the River Dart on the northern slopes of Holne Chase in Devon.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Holt Castle
Wrexham
Barely a fragment of its sandstone base survives, yet Holt once formed a five-towered, moat-ringed pentagon on the Dee: fierce enough in appearance…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hope Castle
County Monaghan
A Georgian mansion that passed from a Welsh baron to a diamond-owning banking dynasty to a royal duke, only to be gutted by an arson attack after d…
- Near Monaghan
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hopton Castle
Shropshire
A castle midway between Knighton and Craven Arms, a ruin since the early eighteenth century and since partly repaired.
- Near Hopton Castle
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hornby Castle, Lancashire
Lancashire
A single peer's forgotten warning about the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 links this Lune Valley house directly to the most notorious conspiracy in Englis…
- Near Hornby
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hornby Castle, North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
A Yorkshire seat passed by marriage through five families in six centuries, from the St Quintins to the Dukes of Leeds, before three-quarters of th…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Horse Pool Camp
Somerset
An oval hillfort twice as long as it is wide, on the Devon border: and almost nothing else is recorded about it.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Horsford Castle
Norfolk
Horsford Castle is a low but significant castle mound and enclosed yard whose post-Conquest foundation, deliberate placement in pastureland, linked…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Horston Castle
Derbyshire
A royal stone castle reduced to a single overgrown keep by centuries of quarrying: and now formally listed among England's heritage most at risk of…
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Roman
Huckhoe Settlement
Northumberland
Huckhoe Settlement records at least four occupation phases across more than a millennium, from one of the region’s earliest defended enclosures to…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hull Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
An entire Tudor artillery fortress, built partly with stone stripped from dissolved monasteries, has vanished beneath a working dockyard, leaving o…
- Near Beverley
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hunsbury Hill
Northamptonshire
Its inner ramparts were burned so fiercely that timber-laced stone fused together: vitrification almost never found on an English hillfort (a defen…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hunter's Tor, Lustleigh Cleave
Devon
Hunter’s Tor combines a granite Dartmoor viewpoint with an Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) hillfort (a hilltop enclosure rin…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Huntingdon Castle
Cambridgeshire
A royal stronghold once held by the kings of Scotland themselves, deliberately torn down on Henry II's orders after a rebellion: leaving only its m…
- Near Huntingdon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Huntington Castle
Herefordshire
A Marcher stronghold that changed hands by conquest, marriage and royal seizure for two centuries, ending as a ruin still listed at risk today.
- Near Huntington
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Huntingtower Castle
Perth and Kinross
The Ruthven name was suppressed by Act of Parliament in 1600, and the castle had to be renamed. It had been Ruthven Castle for centuries.
- Near Perth
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Huntsham Castle
Devon
Huntsham Castle is a well-defined hillfort, a hilltop enclosure from the Iron Age, the centuries before Rome arrived, above the Lowman tributary va…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hurst Castle
Hampshire
A single shingle spit carries four centuries of continuous coastal defence, from Henry VIII's Device Fort to Victorian rifled monster guns to Secon…
- Near Milford-on-Sea
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hylton Castle
Tyne and Wear
A castle datable only by the coats of arms carved along its west front.
- Near Sunderland
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Inch Castle
County Donegal
Built by a son-in-law for his own father-in-law, the ruin sealed a marriage alliance between two of Gaelic Ulster's most powerful clans: and is sti…
- Near Inch
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Roman
Inchtuthil
Perth and Kinross
The only legionary fortress in the Roman empire whose complete plan survives: abandoned after four years, with 875,400 nails buried in a pit so the…
- Near Dunkeld
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Inchtuthil / Castra Pinnata
Moray
A Roman fortress whose longest day Ptolemy recorded as 18.5 hours, one of only four such observations he held from Britain.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Inkberrow Castle
Worcestershire
A castle raised sometime under the Angevin kings and pulled down within a lifetime: its true walls now reduced to a moat whose very origin is dispu…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Innes Chonnel Castle
Argyll and Bute
A rival Highland clan once held this island fortress against Robert the Bruce himself, and a captive heir to the Lordship of the Isles later spent…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Inshlampie Broch
Highland
A drystone tower mound perched between two ravines above the river Naver, ringed by cairns, hut circles and settlement traces that together form on…
- Near Bettyhill
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Inveraray Castle
Argyll and Bute
One of the first Gothic Revival buildings anywhere, raised by a Highland clan chief to replace a medieval stronghold rather than restore it.
- Near Inveraray
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Inveravon
Falkirk
Inveravon is one of the Antonine Wall’s most uncertain fort sites, where limited excavation, geophysics and aerial photography reveal faint foundat…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Inveresk Roman Fort
East Lothian
Inveresk is a large Antonine-period fort with a civilian settlement, cavalry evidence and Britain’s earliest dated Mithraeum, making it one of Scot…
- Near Dunbar
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Inverlochy Castle
Highland
A 13th-century stone quadrangle that has kept the same four corner towers and curtain wall since it was built, having hosted two battles without ev…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Inverness Castle
Highland
The red sandstone towers standing today are the third castle on this cliff: successor to a fortress whose 1428 parley ended with fifty Highland chi…
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Fortified place · Roman
Inverquharity
Angus
One of the smallest Roman installations in Scotland, grouped by archaeologists with Cargill II as the pair's most modest members rather than a majo…
- Near Kirriemuir
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Irthington Castle
Cumbria
For over a century and a half an earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) near Irthington served as the admin…
- Near Irthington
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Fortified place · Roman
Isca Augusta
Newport
Isca Augusta was the headquarters of the II Augusta legion at Caerleon, a rare largely undisturbed permanent Roman fortress whose name, successive…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Isert Kelly Castle
County Galway
A 21-metre tower house that survived a burning, a Cromwellian confiscation and centuries of weather largely intact, its 1604 fireplace still bearin…
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ivinghoe Beacon
Buckinghamshire
A chalk summit used as a beacon and modern film set, crossed by a route first walked between roughly 2500 and 800 BC.
- Near Ivinghoe
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ivinghoe Hills
Buckinghamshire
An Iron Age hillfort (an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground) and a prehistoric (from the era before writing arrived i…
- Near Ivinghoe
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ivington Camp
Herefordshire
A defended Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) hilltop guarding the approach to Leominster from the south, its earthwork (a mound or…
- Near Brierley
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Jigginstown Castle
County Kildare
Jigginstown is Thomas Wentworth’s unfinished red-brick royal house for Charles I, its surviving lower floors recording ambition halted by execution…
- Near Naas
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
John O'Gaunt's Castle
North Yorkshire
Buried footings and a ditched platform preserve the plan of a royal hunting lodge later granted to John of Gaunt, one of the most powerful men in f…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Johnstown Castle
County Wexford
A Norman tower house rebuilt as a Gothic Revival fantasy, then handed to the State by its last family in place of death duties and turned into a wo…
- Near Wexford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Jordan's Castle, Wellow
Nottinghamshire
Jordan’s Castle is a modest arrangement of banks and ditches with a royal story: Henry III repeatedly stayed at the manor before it received a lice…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kellie Castle
Fife
Kellie Castle brings together a 14th-century Fife tower house and an exceptional Arts and Crafts revival, preserving Lorimer family art, interiors…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kelly Rounds
Cornwall
Kelly Rounds is a large Iron Age hillfort: an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground, from the centuries before Rome arri…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kelsborrow Castle
Cheshire
One of only seven known hillforts in Cheshire, its single bank and ditch mark it as a short-lived, one-phase Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Rom…
- Near Kelsall
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kelsey Head
Cornwall
Ramparts thrown across the neck of a headland that flint flakes show people had already been using for thousands of years before anyone thought to…
- Near Newquay
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kemeys Inferior Motte
Newport
Kemeys Inferior Motte is a scheduled medieval earthwork (a bank or ditch dug and heaped from the ground itself, with no masonry) above the Usk whos…
- Near Langstone
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kendal Castle
Cumbria
The presumed birthplace of a Tudor queen turned out to be a myth, yet the roofless drumlin-top ruin still holds the story of the family that produc…
- Near Kendal
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kenfig Castle
Bridgend
A once-elegant Norman keep sacked by the Welsh at least six times now lies almost entirely swallowed by sand dunes, with only its tower's crown bre…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kenilworth Castle
Warwickshire
Kenilworth’s surviving keep, lake defences and palace ruins tell an exceptional story of a Norman fortress repeatedly remade for royal war, courtly…
- Near Kenilworth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kentisbury Down
Devon
Kentisbury Down is a recorded Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) round near Blackmore Gate, marking prehistoric (before any written…
- Near Exeter
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kenwalch's Castle
Somerset
An Iron Age fort possibly turned Roman fortress, on the county line, with a modern road running through what were probably its gates.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kidwelly Castle
Carmarthenshire
A square inner bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) of four round towers within a semi-circular outer wall, fought over by Welsh princes…
- Near Kidwelly
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilbolane Castle
County Cork
A moated Norman-style stronghold built centuries after the Normans themselves arrived, tying a Cloyne bishop's estate to Cromwellian destruction an…
- Near Kilworth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcash Castle
County Tipperary
A ruined tower house beside a wrecked church and a Butler mausoleum, made famous not by battle but by an eighteenth-century Irish lament still sung…
- Near Clonmel
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilchurn Castle
Argyll and Bute
On a rocky peninsula at the north-eastern end of Loch Awe, the ruined shell of Kilchurn Castle rises around a five-storey tower house first raised…
- Near Dalmally
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcoe Castle
County Cork
A West Cork tower house that fell last in Munster after Kinsale, then rose again under an actor's six-year restoration in ochre limewash.
- Near Schull
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcolman Castle
County Cork
A ruined tower house in the Cork countryside where a refugee English poet spent ten years writing the epic that shaped English literature, before w…
- Near Clonakilty
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcrea Castle
County Cork
A fifteenth-century MacCarthy stronghold whose moat was later cut through by a Victorian railway line, its ruins now standing on a working cattle f…
- Near Cork
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kildrummy Castle
Aberdeenshire
A shield-shaped fortress whose sieges shaped a kingdom: from the capture and execution of Robert the Bruce's brother in 1306 to a countess's defian…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilgobbin Castle (Dublin)
County Dublin
A tower house built for a ten-pound bounty on the edge of the Pale, sacked within a generation, and left standing on only two of its four walls.
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Helston Castle
Cornwall
Helston Castle is a vanished late-thirteenth-century Cornish stronghold known chiefly through sparse medieval references and the surviving topograp…
- Near Helston
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
High Peak, Devon
Devon
High Peak is an eroding coastal hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement dating from the Iron Age, roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest: above th…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Higham Gobion Castle
bedfordshire
The earthworks at Higham Gobion were once called a castle, but later research identifies them as a fishery with a breeding island.
- Near Higham Gobion
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hillsborough, Devon
Devon
Hillsborough preserves a large, partly eroded Iron Age promontory fort: a headland cut off by ramparts to make a defensible enclosure: within an Il…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Holbury, Holbeton
Devon
Holbury records an Iron Age hillfort: an upland enclosure defended by earthen banks: overlooking the Erme Estuary, preserving a strategically place…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Hollybush Hill
Herefordshire
One hillfort spans two summits: its earthworks run unbroken from Hollybush Hill onto neighbouring Midsummer Hill, binding the pair into a single de…
- Near Hollybush
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Huntington Castle, Clonegal
County Carlow
Huntington Castle layers a fifteenth-century Irish tower house, seventeenth-century plantation history and a later country-house landscape into one…
- Near Clonegal
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Jordan's Castle
County Down
Jordan’s Castle is one of Ardglass’s clustered harbour tower houses, remembered for Simon Jordan’s prolonged defence during the Tyrone rebellion an…
- Near Ardglass
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilclief Castle
County Down
Kilclief Castle is Lecale’s earliest tower house, where unusual service turrets, machicolation (an opening in a parapet floor for dropping missiles…
- Near Kilclief
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kildare Castle
County Kildare
A single stone tower is all that still stands of the stronghold Strongbow raised over Kildare town in the twelfth century, at the start of the Angl…
- Near Kildare
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kildonan Dun
argyll-and-bute
Most duns are round. This one is D-shaped, and its double stair up the rampart and a round wall niche both survive intact.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilkenny Castle
County Kilkenny
Kilkenny Castle is the defining Norman and Butler landmark of the city: a thirteenth-century defensive stronghold repeatedly remade as a chateau, p…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
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