Fortified place · Medieval
Killahara Castle
County Tipperary
A single tower house carries the whole arc of Tipperary's post-medieval story: clan lordship, Cromwellian dispossession, famine eviction and a 1920…
- Near Thurles
- Easy path
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 13 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place
Killeavy Castle
County Armagh
Killeavy is a nineteenth-century reinvention: George Papworth transformed a modest Foxall farmhouse into a towered Tudor-style country castle delib…
- Near Newry
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killeen Castle, Castlegar
County Galway
A working tower house of the Blakes, one of Galway's fourteen merchant tribes, still standing as a private home while the grander mansion built bes…
- Near Galway
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killeen Castle, Dunsany
County Meath
One family, Cusack then Plunkett by marriage, held this site for almost 800 years, from a Norman tower to the golf course that brought the Solheim…
- Near Dunsany
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killiney Castle
County Dublin
Five names in three centuries: Mount Malpas, Roxborough, Loftus Hill, Killiney Castle, Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel: track one building's slow slide fr…
- Near Killiney
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killua Castle
County Westmeath
A tower added on a whim of fashion in the 1820s still stands over an estate that once stretched to 9,000 acres, and a stone obelisk nearby claims t…
- Near Clonmellon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killyleagh Castle
Down
Killyleagh unites a Strangford Lough stronghold with four centuries of Hamilton occupation, Civil War damage and Lanyon’s deliberately Loire-like n…
- Near Killyleagh
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilmahew Castle
Argyll and Bute
A roofless tower house north of Cardross that gave its name to eighteen generations of Napiers, among them the shipbuilding dynasty that built the…
- Near Cardross
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilmory Castle, Bute
Argyll and Bute
Its nickname, Crowner's Castle, preserves the memory of a hereditary legal office: coroner of Bute: held by one family for generations.
- Near Meikle Kilmory
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kiltartan Castle
County Galway
Kiltartan Castle preserves a late-thirteenth-century riverside tower house, its partial medieval fabric shaped by ruin during the Cromwellian conqu…
- Near Gort
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilton Castle
North Yorkshire
Rebuilt in stone around 1190 without a keep, Kilton may be the first castle in northern England built that way: a design choice, not a deficiency,…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kimbolton Castle
Cambridgeshire
A Norman stronghold turned ducal palace, remodelled by Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, whose fenland damp is said to have hastened the death of a discarded…
- Near Kimbolton
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kimsbury hill fort
Gloucestershire
Its Old English name preserves the memory of a person, Cynemær, otherwise lost to record: a fortress whose ramparts still outline the hilltop despi…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kindlestown Castle
County Wicklow
A late hall house whose ownership swung between Anglo-Norman knights, Gaelic raiders and an earl across three centuries, its ruined shell still tra…
- Near Wicklow
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Castle (Carlingford)
County Louth
A D-shaped stronghold whose east and west wings were raised two generations apart, yet still reads as a single act of control over Carlingford's ha…
- Near Carlingford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Castle (Limerick)
County Limerick
Beneath the Norman stonework lie the remains of a Viking stronghold founded in 922 and unearthed in 1900: a thousand years of contest for the Shann…
- Near Limerick
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
King John's Hill
Hampshire
A small Iron Age hillfort, a defended hilltop settlement from the centuries before Rome arrived, quarried on one side yet still carrying two crisp…
- Near Winchester
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Palace, Southampton
Hampshire
A merchant's wine store became a fortress by royal order, and its blocked archways may hold Britain's earliest surviving gunports.
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
King's Castle, Ardglass
Down
King’s Castle is Ardglass’s largest medieval stronghold, its nineteenth-century reconstruction still serving a daily purpose as a nursing home afte…
- Near Ardglass
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
King's Castle, Wells
Somerset
Possibly the settlement that Wells grew out of: an enclosed hilltop site of the Iron Age, roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest, of two or three…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
King's Castle, Wiveliscombe
Somerset
Arrowheads from the Neolithic, the first farming age, roughly 4000-2500 BC, and a hoard of 1,139 coins have come off this hilltop.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingerby Castle
Lincolnshire
A motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) and bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) castle burnt on King John's or…
- Near Kingerby
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kings Langley Palace
Hertfordshire
A vanished royal residence of the Plantagenet kings survives only underground, its walls entirely gone but its footprint still protected in law.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kings Weston Hill
Bristol
At its eastern tip survives a scheduled Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillfort (an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and d…
- Near Lawrence Weston
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kingsdown Camp
Somerset
A drystone wall possibly four metres high and two and a half thick, around an enclosure of only a third of an acre.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingsgate Castle
Kent
Built as a stable block in the 1760s, Kingsgate Castle’s rapid ruin and conversion into 32 flats expose the fragility of fashionable Gothic display.
- Near Broadstairs
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingsgate, Winchester
Hampshire
One of only two medieval gates left standing in Winchester, it carries a working parish church built into its own fabric: a gateway and a place of…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingsley Castle
Cheshire
Kingsley Castle is a compact scheduled medieval motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) whose artificial black-soil mound sur…
- Near Kingsley
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingswear Castle
Devon
Kingswear Castle is one of Britain’s earliest purpose-built artillery forts, guarding Dartmouth harbour across the Dart and later adapted from mili…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kington Castle
Herefordshire
A border stronghold fought over by three of Herefordshire's most powerful families before King John razed it in a single act of vengeance in 1215.
- Near Hereford
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kinlough Castle
County Mayo
A Burke tower house whose slit loops and drawbar-slotted door still speak to the priorities of its builders, deepened rather than replaced by a 157…
- Near Ballina
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kinnersley Castle
Herefordshire
An Elizabethan skin conceals a Marcher castle begun under Henry I, and inside survives a solar ceiling of gilded green men and serpent hounds among…
- Near Kinnersley
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kinnitty Castle
County Offaly
A working hotel built on ground rebuilt or replaced at least four times since 1213, its present owners include a founding member of the Wolfe Tones.
- Near Kinnitty
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kinver Edge Hillfort
Staffordshire
A fort with a massive rampart on two sides and nothing built on the other two: because the escarpment already did the job.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirby Knowle Castle
North Yorkshire
Behind its Elizabethan stonework lies a real fugitive story: in 1597 a government searcher combed the house's vaults and secret passages and captur…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirby Muxloe Castle
Leicestershire
Kirby Muxloe is a rare, well-documented unfinished late-medieval castle whose decorative brick gatehouse and water-filled moat reveal elite ambitio…
- Near Kirby Muxloe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirkoswald Castle
Cumbria
A licensed medieval stronghold whose finest fittings were stripped out and carried off wholesale to another castle, leaving only the moat and a lon…
- Near Kirkoswald
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirtling Tower
Cambridgeshire
A brick Tudor gatehouse is all that survives of a house that was once the largest in Cambridgeshire and a likely wellspring for both Spenser's poet…
- Near Kirtling
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kisimul Castle
Outer Hebrides
In 2001 the chief of Clan MacNeil leased Kisimul Castle to Historic Scotland for 1000 years, for an annual rent of £1 and a bottle of whisky. The a…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Knaresborough Castle
North Yorkshire
A queen gave birth within its walls assisted by a relic said to be the Virgin's girdle, and a royal mistress later inherited the ruins outright.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Knepp Castle
West Sussex
A motte castle: the earthen mound a castle was raised on: probably founded by William de Braose, still hosting reigning monarchs in the fourteenth…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Knockin Castle
Shropshire
Knockin Castle preserves the earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks and ditches rather than built up in stone) memory of a level-ground forti…
- Near Knockin
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Knoll Camp
Hampshire
A single quiet ditch here is shadowed only fifty metres away by a separate cross-ridge dyke, with the ancient boundary of Grim's Ditch running thro…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Knook Castle
Wiltshire
Interpreters still disagree on whether this was an Iron Age hillfort, a Roman summer camp, or a cattle enclosure: and the surrounding downs hide tw…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Knowle Hill Castle
Devon
Knowle Hill Castle is a compact example of an Iron Age (the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest) hillfort (a hilltop enclosure ringed…
- Some walking
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Fortified place
Knowles Battery
Devon
Knowles Battery is a surviving Palmerston-era defence of Plymouth’s landward approaches, later transformed from artillery position into a scheduled…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lackeen Castle
County Tipperary
A modest tower house in a quiet Tipperary townland turns out to be the hiding place of one of Ireland's oldest surviving illuminated manuscripts, t…
- Near Borrisoleigh
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ladle Hill
Hampshire
Begun in the Iron Age and abandoned mid-build, its bank and ditch still show the uneven work of several separate labour gangs: a rare freeze-frame…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Lambert's Castle
Devon
Lambert’s Castle unites a hillfort, a defended hilltop settlement from the Iron Age, the period before the Roman conquest, with a rare protected mo…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lambton Castle
County Durham
A Victorian-era vision of a Norman stronghold, built by a future governor-general of Canada and still the private seat of an earldom nearly two cen…
- Near Chester-le-Street
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lampeter Castle
Ceredigion
A Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) beside a key Welsh trade route, whose surviving mound records a frontier castle fiercely…
- Near Lampeter
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Lanark Castle
South Lanarkshire
A royal castle that gave Lanark its shape and then vanished entirely: leaving a hill, a name and a town plan.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lancaster Castle
Lancashire
One office held courtroom, garrison and gaol together for eight centuries, trying the Pendle witches in 1612 and sending some 265 people to the gal…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Landguard Fort
Suffolk
A fort at the mouth of the Orwell outside Felixstowe, built to guard the river entrance.
- Near Felixstowe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Langdale Broch
Highland
The rock knoll the tower crowns may itself be an older monument: quite possibly the buried remains of a chambered burial mound built around a stone…
- Near Altnaharra
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Langley Castle
Northumberland
Langley Castle is a restored fourteenth-century upper-floor hall house whose fire-damaged ruin, twentieth-century rescue, and remarkable garderobes…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Largin Castle
Cornwall
A compact Iron Age hillfort: an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground, the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Laugharne Castle
Carmarthenshire
A single stronghold at Laugharne hosted a royal peace treaty, a rebel's costly defeat, and the writers who shaped modern Welsh literature.
- Near Laugharne
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Launceston Castle
Cornwall
Cornwall's Norman administrative castle, whose high tower, deer park and long prison afterlife make it a record of power, display and confinement.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lavendon Castle
Buckinghamshire
A pipe roll of 1192–3 is the only documentary trace of this vanished stronghold: its motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle)…
- Near Lavendon
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Laxton Castle
Nottinghamshire
Laxton preserves two unusually complete Norman castle courts, making its earthworks a rare long-term archaeological laboratory rather than a merely…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lea Castle
County Laois
Lea Castle’s river-crossing stronghold held Richard de Burgh prisoner in 1294–95, making its powerful four-storey tower a witness to medieval Irish…
- Near Portarlington
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Leafield Castle
Oxfordshire
An 1828 dig into the mound turned up ancient coins, giving this quiet earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone…
- Near Leafield
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Leap Castle
County Offaly
Restored from a 1922 burning by two generations of private owners, the castle stands on ground in continuous use since the Iron Age: long before th…
- Near Clonmel
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Leckie Broch
Stirling
An Iron Age broch: a drystone tower unique to Iron Age Scotland: that rhododendrons closed off entirely until they were cleared in 2020.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Leeds Castle
Kent
Leeds Castle’s island setting contains more than a millennium of Kent history, from a Saxon stronghold to royal residence and public charitable trust.
- Near Leeds
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Fortified place · Medieval
Leicester Castle
Leicestershire
A working Great Hall, a mound, a ruined gatehouse and a chapel together trace nine centuries of continuous use, from Norman stronghold to Crown Cou…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Leighlinbridge Castle
County Carlow
Leighlinbridge Castle records eight centuries of defence beside the Barrow, a river whose name also survives in prehistoric burial mounds: from pre…
- Near Leighlinbridge
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Lescudjack Hill Fort
Cornwall
Lescudjack Hill Fort preserves a three-acre Iron Age enclosure: dating from roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest: within Penzance, where a survi…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Lesingey Round
Cornwall
Lesingey Round is a scheduled Cornish ringfort whose substantial bank and ditch preserve a late Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conque…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lewes Castle
East Sussex
Two earthen mounds rise on either side of its bailey, a doubled-mound plan shared with only one other castle in England: Lincoln.
- Near Lewes
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lews Castle
Outer Hebrides
A private retreat built on an opium-trade fortune ended up given whole to the town it once stood apart from: a rare reversal for a Highland laird's…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Leybourne Castle
Kent
Leybourne Castle preserves a rare thirteenth-century twin-towered gatehouse, absorbed into a later farmhouse but still legible as a fortified entra…
- Near Leybourne
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Fortified place · Medieval
Liddel Strength
Cumbria
A minor border castle whose fall in 1346 ended in the strangling of two sons before their father's eyes, on earthworks some believe are far older t…
- Near Longtown
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Liddington Castle
Wiltshire
Excavation dated first occupation to the 7th century BC, making this one of the earliest hillforts built anywhere in Britain.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lidgate Castle
Suffolk
An unusual quadrangular design, probably raised about 1143 as part of Stephen's campaign against the rebel baron Geoffrey de Mandeville.
- Near Lidgate
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lincoln Castle
Lincolnshire
Lincoln Castle uniquely combines a Norman two-motte fortress on a Roman fort, civil-war siege history, a preserved separate-system prison and one o…
- Near Lincoln
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lindisfarne Castle
Northumberland
Lindisfarne Castle preserves a Tudor gun fort on Holy Island, later transformed by Edwin Lutyens into an Arts and Crafts house within a deeply laye…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lisheen Castle
County Tipperary
A plain Palladian country house dressed up decades later as a castle, gutted by fire in the War of Independence and left roofless for eighty years…
- Near Cashel
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Liskeard Castle
Cornwall
Liskeard Castle was a short-lived medieval motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongsi…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lismore Castle
County Waterford
A working ducal seat still owned by the family that gave it its Gothic silhouette in the 1850s, sheltering a chimney-piece another English house re…
- Near Lismore
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Listowel Castle
County Kerry
Two of an original four towers still stand at Listowel Castle, joined by a heavy curtain wall and pierced by the unusual feature of an arch set bel…
- Near Listowel
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Littledean Camp
Gloucestershire
Its motte, the mound built for a lookout tower and keep, is knitted into the ring of outer earthworks rather than placed at the castle's centre: a…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Llandough Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A fourteenth-century tower house built as a fortified residence rather than a military work, and remodelled in the nineteenth century by its tenants.
- Near Llandough
- 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 · Medieval
Killowen Castle
County Londonderry
Killowen Castle preserves evidence for a lost medieval fortress on the Bann and the changing names of a Derry riverside district.
- Near Coleraine
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killymoon Castle
County Tyrone
Killymoon Castle is a Regency Gothic rebuilding by John Nash, set above the Ballinderry River in a designed woodland and parkland landscape.
- Near Cookstown
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Kilpatrick Dun
North Ayrshire
Kilpatrick Dun is a substantial later Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) fortified residence on Arran, with an eight-m…
- Near Blackwaterfoot
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kiltinan Castle
County Tipperary
Kiltinan Castle is one of Ireland’s oldest inhabited castles, a thirteenth-century Butler stronghold later remodelled and repurposed as a prominent…
- Near Clonmel
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kinbane Castle
Antrim
Kinbane Castle is a largely ruined sixteenth-century MacDonnell coastal castle whose narrow limestone headland, English siege damage and long MacAl…
- Near Ballycastle
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirkistown Castle
County Down
Kirkistown preserves a 1622 Plantation-era tower house and bawn, where rebuilding after about 1500 stands above a landscape associated with a lost…
- Near Kirkistown
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Fortified place · Medieval
Knappogue Castle
County Clare
Knappogue Castle is a restored late medieval tower house whose MacNamara, Cromwellian, aristocratic and modern tourism phases preserve a remarkably…
- Near Quin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Leamaneh Castle
County Clare
Leamaneh combines a late-medieval O'Brien tower house with the ruined shell of a seventeenth-century mansion, making its changing fabric a record o…
- Near Kilfenora
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Lee Wood
Devon
Lee Wood is an unexcavated Devon hill-slope enclosure where finds and a partly exposed hearth point to activity across several early periods.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Lewesdon Hill
Dorset
Lewesdon Hill is Dorset’s highest point, pairing wide landscape views with a disputed hillfort, an Armada beacon site and a remembered Second World…
- Near Broadwindsor
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Limavady Castle
County Londonderry
Limavady Castle preserves an O’Cahan stronghold attacked in 1542 by local rivals and English forces, anchoring its ruin in sixteenth-century conflict.
- Near Limavady
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Fortified place · Medieval
Liscarroll Castle
County Cork
Liscarroll Castle is a 13th-century Hiberno-Norman fortress whose later seizures, recapture and use as a military outpost trace changing power in n…
- Near Liscarroll
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Liskincon
County Tyrone
Liskincon is a small Tyrone townland whose Scheduled rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth bank) preserves an ancient fort wit…
- Near Omagh
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Fortified place · Medieval
Lisnagade
County Down
Lisnagade is a large protected multivallate ringfort whose three massive banks and deep ditches preserve an early historic enclosure, with finds su…
- Near Downpatrick
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Fortified place · Medieval
Liverpool Castle
Merseyside
Liverpool Castle guarded King John’s new port for five centuries; its removal in 1726 marks the transformation of a fortified medieval harbour into…
- Near Liverpool
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Fortified place · Medieval
Llandaff Castle
cardiff
A twin-towered gatehouse is all that visibly remains of the fortified medieval residence built for the bishops of Llandaff beside their cathedral.
- Near Llandaff
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