Fortified place · Medieval
Mold Castle
Flintshire
A Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) raised in 1072 to hold a river crossing was fought over by Welsh princes and Cromwell's m…
- Easy path
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 15 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
-
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mongavlin Castle
County Donegal
The seat of Ineen Dubh, mother of Red Hugh O'Donnell, whose Scottish bodyguard's descendants: the Crawfords: still live in the district her strongh…
- Near Lifford
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monivea Castle
County Galway
A tower house rebuilt into a family seat conceals, in its own woods, a granite mausoleum with a marble effigy carved by an Italian sculptor and win…
- Near Monivea
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monmouth Castle
Monmouthshire
Monmouth Castle is a major Welsh Marches stronghold and Henry V’s birthplace, whose ruins reveal Norman expansion, Civil War destruction and enduri…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monnow Bridge
Monmouthshire
Monnow Bridge is Britain’s only surviving fortified river bridge with its gate tower standing on the bridge, a Grade I monument that shaped Monmout…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Montacute Castle
Somerset
A Norman castle site on a hill above Montacute, built by Robert of Mortain after 1066.
- Near Montacute
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Montfichet's Tower
City of London
One of two Norman castles guarding the mouth of the Fleet, this vanished tower was pulled down by King John in 1213 and its stones later helped rai…
- Near London
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Montgomery Castle
Powys
A castle rebuilt in stone in five unbroken years, host to the largest battle fought in Wales, and pulled down by Parliament in 1649 as a matter of…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moor End Castle
Northamptonshire
Moor End Castle is a vanished royal residence whose altered moat and wooded island preserve the clearest trace of its fourteenth-century power and…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moorstown Castle
County Tipperary
A circular tower house: a shape almost never used in Ireland, where nearly every other tower is built square.
- Near Thurles
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moreton Corbet Castle
Shropshire
Moreton Corbet preserves a rare physical conversation between a medieval stronghold and an Elizabethan manor: Corbet builders filled the old bailey…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morganstown Castle Mound
Cardiff
One of a trio of Norman motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) castles raised across the ridges of north Cardiff, its earthw…
- Near Morganstown
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morgraig Castle
Caerphilly
A castle built almost to completion on a contested Welsh-English border, then apparently walked away from before a single roof went on: and histori…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morlais Castle
Merthyr Tydfil
Morlais Castle preserves the remains of an unfinished thirteenth-century stronghold whose construction triggered a baronial war and royal intervent…
- Near Merthyr Tydfil
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morpeth Castle
Northumberland
Morpeth’s altered gatehouse preserves a castle whose unlikely story runs from Margaret Tudor’s refuge to a 1644 siege held against five-to-one odds.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morris Castle
Swansea
Not a castle. A block of twenty-four workers' flats built between 1768 and 1775: one of the earliest tenement buildings anywhere.
- Near Treboeth
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mortimer's Castle
County Westmeath
A ruined Anglo-Norman stronghold whose very name is disputed between two Earls of March: and whose cellar is said to still hide a fortune in gold.
- Near Athlone
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morton Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Morton combines a fortified Nith Valley promontory with the comforts of a later hunting lodge, now dramatically isolated by an eighteenth-century a…
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Mote of Mark
Dumfries and Galloway
The Mote of Mark was a high-status sixth- and seventh-century fortified workshop in Rheged, with imported goods and evidence for skilled metalworking.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Motte of Urr
Dumfries and Galloway
The Motte of Urr preserves the earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks and ditches rather than built up in stone) of a twelfth-century baronia…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moulton Castle
Lincolnshire
Moulton Castle is a scheduled medieval earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) whose D-shaped moat preserves…
- Near Moulton
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Mounsey Castle
Somerset
A triangular bank and ditch of the pre-Roman centuries, north-west of Dulverton.
- Near Dulverton
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Mount Caburn
East Sussex
Mount Caburn is a repeatedly excavated enclosure above Lewes, dating from the centuries before Rome arrived, where structured deposits challenge th…
- Near Lewes
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mow Cop Castle
Cheshire
Mow Cop Castle is a 1754 mock ruin on a remarkable boundary ridge, layered with quarrying, Methodist and literary history.
- Near Mow Cop
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Mowsbury Hill
Bedfordshire
A hillfort: a defended enclosure on high ground, ringed with banks and ditches: was later refounded as a moated medieval manor. Its earthworks are…
- Near Bedford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moy Castle
Argyll and Bute
Its walls still stand almost to the parapet, with a working well surviving on the ground floor and a Powell and Pressburger film crew's footprints…
- Near Lochbuie
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moycarkey Castle
County Tipperary
A double murder-hole still guards the entrance passage: a rare doubled defence for a tower-house whose owners, the Cantwells, married into the Butl…
- Near Thurles
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Much Marcle Castle
Herefordshire
A near-vanished stronghold of the Mortimers survives only as earthworks: its very stones were carried off to rebuild the parish church beside it.
- Near Much Marcle
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Roman
Muiryfold
Moray
A Roman marching camp of over 41 hectares, hidden until aerial photography found its ditches from the air in 1959: physical proof that Severus's le…
- Near Keith
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mulgrave Castle
North Yorkshire
Three successive castles on one ridge trace nine centuries of the same family line, from a Norman baron's stronghold to a duchess's country mansion.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Roman
Mumrills
Falkirk
Mumrills was the largest Roman fort on the Antonine Wall, with excavated defences and a rich group of altars, funerary evidence and everyday finds…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Muncaster Castle
Cumbria
A Venetian glass bowl said to have been given by a fugitive king in 1464 is held to bind the Pennington family's fortunes to Muncaster for as long…
- Near $2
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Muness Castle
Shetland Islands
The most northerly fortified house in the British Isles: burnt by privateers in 1627 after less than thirty years of use, and its top floor later b…
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Musbury Castle
Devon
Musbury Castle is a recorded hillfort, a hilltop site enclosed by ramparts of earth from the Iron Age, the centuries before the Roman conquest, abo…
- Near Musbury
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Mynydd Carningli
Pembrokeshire
A 347-metre mountain in the Preselis above Newport, its summit carrying remains from before the written record.
- Near Newport
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Mynydd Illtud
Powys
A plateau carrying an Iron Age fort, a Roman road, Georgian rabbit warrens: and peat holding ten thousand years of climate history.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nantcribba Castle
Powys
A castle on a natural outcrop of igneous rock, identified with the Gwyddgrug of medieval documents and taken by a Welsh prince in 1263.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nantwich Castle
Cheshire
Not a stone survives above ground, yet the castle's ghost still shapes Nantwich: the curve of the modern High Street is believed to trace its outer…
- Near Nantwich
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Narberth Castle
Pembrokeshire
A ruined Norman fortress, a castle here recorded as attacked and destroyed by Gruffydd ap Rhys.
- Near Narberth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Naworth Castle
Cumbria
A working border stronghold whose Great Hall carries the largest fireplace of its kind in the north of England, later reshaped by the Pre-Raphaelit…
- Near $2
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Neath Castle
Neath Port Talbot
Neath Castle charts the transfer of a Norman lordship across the river, repeated conflict with Welsh and English opponents, and the survival of a m…
- Near Neath
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Necarne
Fermanagh
Necarne traces the evolution of a seventeenth-century planter castle into a Victorian Gothic house and, most recently, a long-running public equine…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Neidpath Castle
Scottish Borders
A single L-plan tower rebuilt almost nowhere else in its 750-year life, whose carved archway still names both families that shaped it: the Hays' go…
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Ness of Burgi fort
Shetland Islands
A narrow finger of land reaches south from Scat Ness into the sea at the southern extremity of Shetland Mainland, and near its end, on a rocky spur…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
New Ditch
Somerset
An earthwork that might be Iron Age defence or a medieval park boundary: and the evidence supports both readings equally.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
New Slains Castle
Aberdeenshire
Seat of the Hay Earls of Erroll for over three centuries, its ruined halls hosted Jacobite plots, Samuel Johnson's uneasy night, and the octagonal…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newark Castle, Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire
Newark Castle controlled the River Trent and Fosse Way junction, a bishop’s stronghold whose Civil War slighting still shapes its riverside ruin.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newark Castle, Port Glasgow
Inverclyde
Newark exposes the transformation of a defensive Maxwell tower into a Renaissance mansion, then into the harbour-side landmark around which Port Gl…
- Near Port Glasgow
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newbury Castle
Berkshire
The castle stamped proudly on Newbury's coat of arms never stood in the town at all: its true remains are three earthen mottes hidden four miles aw…
- Near Hamstead Marshall
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle Castle, Bridgend
Bridgend
Within little more than a century its ownership passed from Norman knights to a Welsh rebel leader to a king's own wife: a small hilltop stronghold…
- Near Bridgend
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle Emlyn Castle
Carmarthenshire
One of the few stone castles in west Wales raised by a Welsh lord rather than an English one, and the place where a prince's revolt against the cro…
- Near Newcastle Emlyn
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle town wall
Tyne and Wear
A medieval defensive wall raised in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to protect the town from attack.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle-under-Lyme Castle
Staffordshire
A cholera inspection in the nineteenth century found the castle moat full of sewage. It was drained, and an iron foundry cut back the mound.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newport Castle
Newport
Newport Castle’s surviving river façade shows how a fourteenth-century Marcher stronghold controlled the Usk crossing, collected dues and served a…
- Near Newport
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newport Castle, Pembrokeshire
Pembrokeshire
A castle first raised in the thirteenth century, with a later house built into the surviving fabric.
- Near Newport
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newton St Loe Castle
Somerset
A fortified manor said to have held King John under arrest: with an early gunport in its gatehouse and a university in its grounds.
-
Fortified place · Pictish & early medieval
Nico Ditch
Greater Manchester
Nico Ditch is a six-mile early-medieval earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) crossing Greater Manchester…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Noltland Castle
Orkney Islands
A castle of the later sixteenth century near Pierowall on Westray, never fully completed.
- Near Pierowall
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Nordy Bank
Shropshire
A single bank rings ground on Brown Clee Hill near Clee St Margaret, enclosing a settlement defended between about 800 BC and the Roman conquest. I…
- Near Ludlow
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Norham Castle
Northumberland
Norham’s keep stands where the Tweed itself became a border, a bishops’ fortress repeatedly taken, rebuilt and later immortalised by Turner.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Norsebury Ring
Hampshire
Its name sounds Norse but has nothing to do with Vikings, and its buried inner enclosure may echo the shrine once dug up at nearby Danebury.
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
North Elmham Castle
Norfolk
North Elmham Castle is a rare bishop’s fortified church site where an Anglo-Saxon cathedral tradition, an eleventh-century Norman church, Henry le…
- Near North Elmham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Northallerton Castle
North Yorkshire
Seized by a Scottish claimant in the 1140s and rebuilt by a rebel bishop, this timber stronghold was destroyed on a king's direct order: and the ra…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Northampton Castle
Northamptonshire
A stage for a state trial of Thomas Becket and two baronial wars, obliterated so completely by a Victorian railway that only a gatehouse and some e…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Northburgh Castle
County Donegal
Its design deliberately echoes Edward I's conquest castles in Wales: a calculated political statement in stone by the Anglo-Norman earl who built it.
- Near Carndonagh
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Northshield Rings
Scottish Borders
A hillfort whose outer defences are stronger than its inner ones: and an eight-metre gap that shows which were built first.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Norton Camp
Somerset
A defended hilltop at Norton Fitzwarren near Taunton, raised in the age of the first metalworkers.
- Near Norton Fitzwarren
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Norwich Castle
Norfolk
Norwich Castle is a richly ornamented Norman royal keep whose long afterlife: from Conquest stronghold and refuge amid anti-Jewish violence to coun…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nottingham Castle
Nottinghamshire
Nottingham Castle layers William’s 1068 conquest stronghold, Civil War destruction and a Restoration mansion above the city’s defining sandstone rock.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nunney Castle
Somerset
A castle that escaped deliberate demolition after the Civil War because the besiegers' cannon had already wrecked it.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
O'Brien's Castle (Inisheer)
County Galway
A carved human face still watches from a stone bracket projecting from the tower wall, while the ground beneath the castle's main tower hides a muc…
- Near Inis Oirr
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
O'Rourke's Castle
County Leitrim
A survivor of the doomed March to Leitrim died within its walls' shadow: this small tower house witnessed the last act of Gaelic Ulster's resistanc…
- Near Dromahair
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Oakmere hill fort
Cheshire
One of only seven Iron Age hill forts in Cheshire, and the only one built low beside water rather than on a hilltop: its ramparts once met the shor…
- Near Oakmere
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Roman
Oakwood Roman Fort and Camp
Scottish Borders
A cohort fort and the builders' camp that put it up, both found from the air in 1949: and abandoned because of a war on the Danube.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Odiham Castle
Hampshire
One of only three castles King John built himself, and the probable departure point for his ride to seal Magna Carta in 1215.
- Near Winchester
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Offa's Dyke
Powys
An earthwork whose ditch faces Wales along its whole length: and whose radiocarbon dates now run from three centuries before Offa to two centuries…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ogle Castle
Northumberland
Ogle Castle shows why a Northumbrian manor needed crenellations: a captured Scottish king was held here, and its earthworks still surround a Grade…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ogmore Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A butler held it against the Welsh in 1116 while its lord was away, and was knighted and given a castle of his own for it.
- Near Ogmore-by-Sea
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Okehampton Castle
Devon
Okehampton Castle charts the transformation of a Norman stronghold guarding a Devon crossing into a luxurious Courtenay hunting lodge, followed by…
- Near Okehampton
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Old Beaupre Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
Windows and fireplaces were blocked up here, most likely to reduce the tax owed on them. Water still flows along the drain the privies emptied into.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Old Castle Lachlan
Argyll and Bute
A clan stronghold bombarded into ruin by government order after Culloden: its fall traces the collapse of Jacobite Cowal in a single act of naval g…
- Near Strathlachlan
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Old Oswestry
Shropshire
Old Oswestry is one of Britain’s best-preserved Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) hillforts, where four defensive phases and later…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Old Sarum Castle
Wiltshire
A Norman castle with a timber tower on an earth mound and a walled yard, raised inside a defended hilltop settlement dating from 400 BC, it once he…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Old Warden Castle
Bedfordshire
Nobody has ever settled whether the earthwork on Quince Hill was a motte (a castle mound) or a ringwork: a rare case where the basic identity of a…
- Near Old Warden
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Old Winchester Hill
Hampshire
A hillfort (a defended enclosure on high ground, ringed with banks and ditches) and older Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first s…
- Some walking
_-_geograph.org.uk_-_37167.jpg?width=800)
More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Moel y Gest
Gwynedd
Moel y Gest is a prominent hill west of Porthmadog whose summit hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement: uses natural cliffs, looped walls and a ci…
- Near Porthmadog
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monea castle
Fermanagh
Monea Castle is a Plantation-era fortress built over an earlier Maguire site, where a surviving crannog (a dwelling built on an artificial island i…
- Near Monea
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monellan Castle
County Donegal
Its disappearance is a quiet case study in how Ireland's landed estates ended in the 20th century: not by ruin or war, but by state land redistribu…
- Near Ramelton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Mount Sandel Fort
County Londonderry
Mount Sandel Fort places an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) stronghold and John de Courcy’s medieval residence besi…
- Near Coleraine
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mountjoy Castle
County Tyrone
Mountjoy Castle is a protected Tyrone fortification overlooking Lough Neagh, remembered for its capture during the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
- Near Omagh
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moyry Castle
County Armagh
Moyry Castle is a compact 1601 pass fort built during the Nine Years’ War, preserving a strategic route through the Gap of the North.
- Near Jonesborough
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Muntober
County Tyrone
Muntober pairs a substantial Tyrone townland with the protected Black Fort rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth bank) and a r…
- Near Omagh
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Myrtlebury
Devon
Myrtlebury preserves an Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillside enclosure above the East Lyn valley, making prehistoric (before…
- Near Exeter
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Narrow Water Castle
County Down
Narrow Water Castle preserves a sixteenth-century tower house at the mouth of the Newry River, built on the site of a Norman keep.
- Near Newry
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Newberry Castle
Devon
Newberry Castle turns a misleading name into a lesson: low earthworks rather than masonry preserve an unexcavated enclosure from the centuries befo…
- Near Exeter
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newnham Castle
Kent
Newnham Castle is a compact Anarchy-period motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongsi…
- Near Newnham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newtown Castle
County Clare
Newtown Castle is uniquely shaped among Irish tower houses: a cylindrical tower rising from a square pyramidal base, now restored as part of the Bu…
- Near Ennis
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Norman's Law
Fife
Norman’s Law pairs a scheduled defended settlement dating from from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest with commanding views over Fife, the Tay…
- Near St Andrews
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
O'Dea Castle
County Clare
O’Dea Castle is the restored tower-house centre of a County Clare clan stronghold whose history runs from medieval victory through Cromwellian dama…
- Near Crusheen
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Old Scatness
Shetland Islands
Construction of a perimeter road for Sumburgh Airport in the late 1970s sliced into a grassy mound at the southern tip of Shetland Mainland, exposi…
- Some walking
No places match those filters.