Fortified place
Quintin Castle
County Down
Quintin Castle’s story is one of repeated rescue: inheritance, nineteenth-century restoration, modern refurbishment, and adaptation as a private ev…
- Near Portaferry
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 17 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Raby Castle
County Durham
Nine towers ring a courtyard that has passed between only two families in seven centuries: a fortress that became, and remains, a lived-in family s…
- Near Staindrop
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Fortified place · Medieval
Radcliffe Tower
Greater Manchester
Radcliffe Tower is the sole survival of a fortified 1403 manor house, a rare Grade I listed and scheduled remnant of local lordship in Greater Manc…
- Near Radcliffe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Raedykes
Aberdeenshire
A computer model of its roughly 93-acre rampart (an encircling bank built for defence) suggests room for three legions -- some 16,000 men -- making…
- Near Stonehaven
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Raglan Castle
Monmouthshire
Its hexagonal Great Tower once housed a steam-powered fountain that reputedly scared off a hostile search party: a castle built to dazzle as much a…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rahinnane Castle
County Kerry
More than half the outer walls of Rahinnane Castle still stand, a rectangular three-storey tower house set within the earthworks of a far older rin…
- Near Caherdaniel
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Rainsborough Camp
Northamptonshire
Rainsborough Camp preserves an Iron Age: the centuries before Rome arrived: hillfort, a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts, whose defences…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rampton Castle
Cambridgeshire
An unfinished siege-work whose builders simply walked away when their enemy died elsewhere: a rare frozen moment from the chaos of the civil war kn…
- Near Rampton
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Fortified place · Medieval
Raphoe Castle
County Donegal
Built from the dismantled stones of an older round tower, the bishop's residence survived two sieges and a rebellion before an accidental fire fini…
- Near Raphoe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rappa Castle
County Mayo
Three centuries of Bourke, Crofton and Knox ownership, and a run of High Sheriffs of Mayo, ended when the Gillespie family simply built a new house…
- Near Claremorris
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathcoffey Castle
County Kildare
Rathcoffey’s surviving gatehouse is the last trace of a Wogan manor transformed by a family feud, Tudor forfeiture, Civil War siege and Georgian re…
- Near Rathcoffey
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Rathdown Castle
County Wicklow
Excavation traces continuous use of this ravine-side site from the Neolithic to a Norman stronghold burned in 1301: one place spanning six thousand…
- Near Wicklow
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathmacknee Castle
County Wexford
One of County Wexford's best-preserved tower houses, its five-sided walled bawn and defensive features survive intact from a family who held their…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathumney Castle
County Wexford
A rare surviving Cistercian grange house rather than a true castle, built by the family who first held these lands and still owned by descendants w…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rattin Castle
County Westmeath
A 16th-century tower house forfeited amid the upheaval of 1641, its stone walls still standing close to where the M6 motorway now cuts through the…
- Near Kinnegad
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ravensworth Castle (North Yorkshire)
North Yorkshire
Ravensworth Castle’s moated fourteenth-century ruins, designed park and reused stone make an unusually legible record of aristocratic estate-making…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ravensworth Castle, Lamesley
Tyne and Wear
The family mined coal directly under their own house from about 1935 and demolished it at the same time. The wreckage was meant to build a model vi…
- Near Lamesley
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rayleigh Castle
Essex
Rayleigh Castle is Essex’s only castle named in Domesday Book, preserving a large Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower rai…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Red Castle, Shropshire
shropshire
Sandstone walls on a natural crag, ruinous by the time Leland saw them around 1540, and later the centrepiece of a landscape garden built around a…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Redwood Castle
County Tipperary
For three centuries this tower house was less a garrison than a working law school: seat of the Mac Aodhagáin, hereditary Brehon judges whose rulin…
- Near Newport
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Reigate Castle
Surrey
The castle itself vanished centuries ago, yet its rock-cut cave below the site is said to be where the barons drafted the terms that became Magna C…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Renhold Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber motte-and-bailey: an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard beside it: once guarded the Great Ouse va…
- Near Renhold
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Repentance Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Repentance Tower is a rare mid-sixteenth-century Border watchtower, built for warning rather than living and still marked by its enigmatic ‘REPENTA…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Restormel Castle
Cornwall
Restormel Castle is England’s most intact circular shell keep, transformed from a Norman fort into a luxurious administrative palace of the Earls o…
- Near Lostwithiel
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rhayader Castle
Powys
Built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again between 1177 and 1231, and then abandoned. Only the rock-cut ditch is visible.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rhuddlan Castle
Denbighshire
A castle built with a unique diamond-shaped layout, its gatehouses set at the corners rather than the sides, and reached by a river deliberately re…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Riber Castle
Derbyshire
A Victorian industrialist's folly, hauled block by block up a 200-metre hill by pulley: later a school, a wartime food store, and a wildlife park,…
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Medieval
Richmond Castle
North Yorkshire
Richmond Castle preserves an early Norman power centre above the Swale, later reshaped by military use and the First World War’s Richmond Sixteen.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Richmont Castle
Somerset
A castle King Stephen took by luring its garrison out and burning the gates behind them.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ringsbury Camp
Wiltshire
One historian has argued this modest Wiltshire earthwork is the true site of the Battle of Mount Badon, the battle that supposedly halted the Saxon…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Risinghoe Castle
Bedfordshire
A 20-foot earthen mound on private land near Bedford that historians cannot agree is a castle at all: one theory calls it a Norman stronghold, anot…
- Easy path
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Settlement · Medieval
Rispain Camp
Dumfries and Galloway
Rispain Camp is one of Scotland’s major Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) sites, where unusually well-preserved ramparts and excav…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Road Castle
Somerset
An almost square enclosure with rounded corners, seven-tenths of an acre, two miles west of Winsford.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Robertstown Castle
County Meath
Its bartizans sit on corbelling styled after Scottish tower houses, and a 1930s folklore recording still names the gunman who made these ruins his…
- Near Navan
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Roborough Castle
Devon
Roborough Castle preserves a high Iron Age enclosure or hillfort: a settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground, dating from roughly 80…
- Near Exeter
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roch Castle
Pembrokeshire
A thirteenth-century castle built by the Norman knight Adam de Rupe about 1200, near Haverfordwest.
- Near Roch
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rochester Castle
Kent
The keep that survived a king's siege engines, a burning mine of forty fat pigs, and still stands taller than any other in England.
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Fortified place · Pictish & early medieval
Rock of Cashel
County Tipperary
A limestone outcrop that held the crown of Munster for six centuries before its last king simply gave it to the Church: a rare handover from royal…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rockfleet Castle
County Mayo
A modest four-storey tower on Clew Bay's shore carries an outsized reputation as the stronghold most tied to Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen, and…
- Near Newport
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Rockingham Castle
Northamptonshire
A working royal fortress for four centuries that became a family home for five more: its D-shaped gatehouse and earthworks still trace that entire…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rockstown Castle
County Limerick
One of County Limerick's most structurally complete tower houses, with vaulted ceilings, a full spiral stair and ogee-headed window slits surviving…
- Near Kilmallock
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Roddenbury Hillfort
Somerset
A defended hilltop in Selwood, protected by law and repaired after damage from off-road biking.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Rodhuish Common
Somerset
An Iron Age hill fort - roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest - with a second, smaller oval enclosure inside it, where most sites of this class h…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Roman Rig
South Yorkshire
A linear earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) running for miles north of Rotherham whose builders remain…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roscrea Castle
County Tipperary
A 13th-century royal foundation whose gate tower, prison and Ormond-era plasterwork survive intact alongside one of only two Queen Anne staircases…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roslin Castle
Midlothian
Roslin Castle combines the Sinclair family’s long medieval lordship, a rare Scots-prose manuscript connection, destructive episodes from the Rough…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ross Castle
County Kerry
On the edge of Lough Leane, within what is now Killarney National Park, a square tower house of stone and Irish oak has stood since the late 15th c…
- Near Killarney
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rossmore Castle
County Monaghan
A decades-long rivalry over who could build the biggest room in County Monaghan left this Gothic mansion with three towers and more than 117 window…
- Near Clones
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rotherfield Greys Castle
Oxfordshire
A fourteenth-century fortified manor house, of which a single tower survives in ruin.
- Near Rotherfield Greys
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rothesay Castle
Argyll and Bute
A huge circular curtain wall, some 42 metres in diameter and originally around 7.9 metres high, still stands on a low mound above the town of Rothe…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rothley Castle
Northumberland
Daniel Garrett’s 1755 sham castle survives as a Grade II* part of Wallington’s designed landscape, built to frame Sir Walter Blackett’s view rather…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rougemont Castle
Devon
Rougemont Castle is Exeter’s Norman stronghold, built after the 1068 rebellion and later transformed into a courthouse, prison and civic cultural s…
- Near Exeter
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rougemont Castle, Weeton
North Yorkshire
A castle so thoroughly abandoned that its own successor is also a ruin: Rougemont gave way to Harewood Castle, which in turn gave way to Harewood H…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Roulston Scar
north-yorkshire
The Scots fought their way up this hillside in October 1322 and took the Earl of Richmond prisoner; Edward II fled Rievaulx so fast he left the Gre…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roundhay Park
West Yorkshire
Land granted by William the Conqueror to Ilbert de Lacy for his part in the Harrying of the North, now a large urban park on the edge of Leeds.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Roundton Hill
Powys
A volcanic hill too steep to plough, which is why its Iron Age fort: of the centuries from about 800 BC until the Romans came: its mountain pansies…
- Near Church Stoke
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Roundway Down and Covert
Wiltshire
A single chalk escarpment above Devizes carries a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) settlement, an Iron Age (the centuries…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rowton Castle
Shropshire
Rowton Castle traces a seventeenth-century country house through the Lyster and Rowton families, wartime displacement of a London blind college, fi…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roxburgh Castle
Scottish Borders
A grassy mound is nearly all that remains of what was once one of the most fought-over fortresses on the Anglo-Scottish border, changing hands at l…
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Fortified place · Roman
Royal Citadel, Plymouth
Devon
Plymouth’s Royal Citadel is a major seventeenth-century fortress that incorporated Drake’s defences and continues as an active military base overlo…
- Near Plymouth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ruardyn Castle
Gloucestershire
A Norman manor granted licence to crenellate in 1311, its stone walls and earthworks now reduced to grassy mounds behind a village church.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Rubers Law
Scottish Borders
Three separate strongholds - an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) hillfort, a Roman signal station and an Early Medie…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Ruborough Camp
Somerset
A defended site on the Quantock Hills near Broomfield, on an easterly spur of the ridge.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Rudbaxton Rath
Pembrokeshire
A ring-shaped enclosure and ringed keep, raised as a defence in the centuries before Rome arrived.
- Near Crundale
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rufus Castle
Dorset
Rufus Castle is Portland’s oldest surviving defensive structure, a late medieval cliff-top blockhouse whose ruins connect medieval warfare, coastal…
- Near Portland
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rugemont Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber stronghold so thoroughly erased that only its earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) outline and a…
- Near Ridgmont
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ruperra Castle
Caerphilly
A 1626 mock castle built to look centuries older than it was, now a fire-scarred ruin whose gardens still carry national heritage status.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ruperra Motte
Caerphilly
A Norman timber castle raised directly on top of an Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) hillfort (an Iron Age settlement defende…
- Near Rudry
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Ruthin Castle
Denbighshire
A red sandstone stronghold built by a Welsh prince against the English crown that later imprisoned a Catholic martyr and hosted a future king the n…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ruyton-XI-Towns Castle
Shropshire
Ruyton-XI-Towns Castle records repeated rebuilding and destruction on the Welsh Marches, with its sandstone tower reused in cottages and church rep…
- Near Ruyton-XI-Towns
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rye Castle
east-sussex
A rare survivor of Rye's medieval harbour defences, later reused as a courtroom and prison before becoming the town museum.
- Near Rye
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rye House, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
A single moulded-brick gatehouse is all that survives of a manor whose 1683 occupants stood accused of plotting to kill a king.
- Near St Albans
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Fortified place · Medieval
Saint David's Castle
County Kildare
A medieval tower house folded into Naas's 15th-century town walls, later home to a surgeon who pioneered hypnosis in the operating theatre.
- Near Naas
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Salcombe Castle
Devon
Salcombe Castle is a tide-accessible coastal gun battery whose Civil War siege and ruined towers preserve a dramatic defensive landmark on the Sout…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Saltwood Castle
Kent
A private home whose gatehouse still shelters descendants of the family that owned it since the 1950s, on a site where four knights are presumed to…
- Near Saltwood
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sandal Castle
West Yorkshire
A ruined castle above the Calder, begun in timber by the Warennes and rebuilt in stone, and the setting of a scene in Shakespeare.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sandgate Castle
Kent
Two surviving Tudor ledger books, 350 pages long, record its construction in such detail that a historian has called them the most complete buildin…
- Near Sandgate
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sandown Castle, Kent
Kent
A Parliamentarian prisoner died here in 1664 after months of what his wife called inhumane confinement in a fort already being described as ruinous…
- Near Deal
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sandsfoot Castle
Dorset
Sandsfoot Castle is a major Henry VIII coastal artillery fort whose Civil War service, cliff erosion and recent stabilisation illustrate both Tudor…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sanquhar Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Sanquhar Castle is a thirteenth-century Nith Valley stronghold whose Crichton ownership, ruinous decline and incomplete nineteenth-century restorat…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sauvey Castle
Leicestershire
A royal hunting lodge whose builders flooded the valley to surround it with an artificial lake: earthworks Historic England says have few parallels…
- Near Leicester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Scaleby Castle
Cumbria
A working private home built inside a genuine medieval war-castle: moated, twice besieged and burned in the Civil War, yet still lived in today.
- Near Carlisle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Scalloway Castle
Shetland Islands
Built by unpaid workers summoned from the parishes of Shetland, for an earl who was executed for misrule eight years after it was finished.
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Scarborough Castle
North Yorkshire
A single headland was fortified and refortified for over two thousand years running, from an early defended settlement to a Second World War listen…
- 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 · Medieval
Quoile Castle
County Down
Quoile Castle is a protected riverbank tower house that illustrates the dense network of small fortified residences around Strangford Lough.
- Near Downpatrick
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Raddon Top
Devon
Raddon Top preserves evidence for Neolithic (the late Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC in Britain), Early Iron Age and later Iron Age use on the hig…
- Near Cheriton Fitzpaine
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rahan Castle
County Donegal
Rahan Castle records the changing fortunes of Clan Suibhne in Donegal, from a fifteenth-century stronghold through plantation-era transfers and pro…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Rame Head
Cornwall
Rame Head is an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) promontory fort (a coastal spur defended by banks thrown across its…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathfriland Castle
County Down
Rathfriland Castle is a reduced Magennis stronghold whose single surviving wall preserves a seventeenth-century story of rebellion and deliberate d…
- Near Rathfriland
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rathlin Castle
County Antrim
Rathlin’s lost island castle sheltered Robert Bruce after defeat in 1306, then became the target of the 1575 assault whose killing of garrison and…
- Near Rathlin Island
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Fortified place · Medieval
Red Bay Castle
County Antrim
Red Bay Castle is a coastal Antrim stronghold shaped by Bissett and MacDonnell power, repeated destruction, and the wider contest for the Glens.
- Near Cushendall
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rheban Castle
County Kildare
Rheban’s roofless stone castle bears witness to a river frontier where Norman lords, Gaelic families and Confederate armies repeatedly contested au…
- Near Athy
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rhyd-y-gors Castle
Carmarthenshire
A bluff above the River Towy, about a mile south of Carmarthen, marks where an ancient ford once crossed and where Rhyd-y-gors Castle briefly stood…
- Near Llandeilo
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Fortified place · Medieval
Rochdale Castle
Greater Manchester
Rochdale Castle preserves the earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) outline of a post-Conquest motte-and-b…
- Near Rochdale
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roebuck, Dublin
County Dublin
Roebuck reveals how a medieval elite estate could be repeatedly remade after rebellion, through Gothic fashion, and finally for a modern university.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roodstown Castle
County Louth
Roodstown’s unusually tall fifteenth-century tower house retains a roof-walk, murder-hole and fireplaces, revealing the ambition behind a Pale subs…
- Near Dundalk
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Round Island (Dorset)
Dorset
Round Island is a small private Poole Harbour island whose setting off the Arne Peninsula and narrow separation from Long Island give it a distinct…
- Near Arne
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Fortified place · Medieval
Roxborough Castle
County Tyrone
Roxborough Castle was a Charlemont seat transformed into a French-château-style country house before its destruction during the Irish revolutionary…
- Near Dungannon
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Sancreed Beacon
Cornwall
Sancreed Beacon is a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) hilltop landscape in Penwith where cists, burial mounds and a hut s…
- Near Sancreed
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sandown Castle, Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
Sandown Castle was Henry VIII’s short-lived Device Fort, a hybrid coastal artillery design whose construction was interrupted by French attack and…
- Near Sandown
- Some walking
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