Fortified place · Iron Age
Scholes Coppice
South Yorkshire
A double bank and ditch enclose a wooded hilltop above Rotherham with no obvious way in: an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about…
- Some walking
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 18 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Scoles Manor
Dorset
Scoles Manor combines a thirteenth-century medieval structure with a 1635 farmhouse and a long, documented chain of Dorset families, making it an u…
- Near Corfe Castle
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Scot's Dyke
North Yorkshire
Each stretch of bank and ditch differs enough in height and width to show separate work-gangs dug it, not one planned scheme.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Scotstarvit Tower
Fife
Scotstarvit Tower is a remarkably intact six-storey Fife tower house, recording the transition from an Inglis family residence to Sir John Scot’s l…
- Near St Andrews
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Fortified place
Scoveston Fort
Pembrokeshire
The only fort ever built of the inland line that was to guard Milford Haven from a landward attack, laid out for 32 guns and 128 men and never give…
- Near Waterston
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Scraesdon Fort
Cornwall
Scraesdon Fort is a Grade II listed Palmerston fort built to defend Plymouth's naval base, preserving the scale and strategic anxieties of nineteen…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Scratchbury Camp
Wiltshire
A defended settlement on high ground, raised around 100 BC, encloses a smaller, far older bank-and-ditch enclosure that three separate excavation t…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Scutchamer Knob
Oxfordshire
A round barrow: a prehistoric burial mound of earth: whose name records a king's killing, a shire's assembly point, and a Viking army's superstitio…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Seabegs Wood
Falkirk
Seabegs Wood preserves a fortlet on the Antonine Wall, with excavated rampart (a defensive bank of earth or stone) foundations and a position betwe…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Seagate Castle
North Ayrshire
Seagate’s scheduled ruin preserves Irvine’s former harbour route and the sixteenth-century Montgomerie town house, where defence, aristocratic disp…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sedgwick Castle
West Sussex
A double concentric moat in a former deer park, 140 metres across at the outer ring, whose stone went into the foundations of a house in 1600.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Segsbury Camp
Oxfordshire
A Victorian excavation into the rampart turned up a shield boss and urn fragments beside human bone: a burial that may have been slipped into the e…
- Near Letcombe Regis
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Severndroog Castle
Greater London
Severndroog Castle is a striking 18th-century memorial folly that links Britain’s imperial naval history with the surveys that helped create the Or…
- Near Shooter’s Hill
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sham Castle
Somerset
A folly on Claverton Down above Bath, its screen wall pierced by a pointed arch between turrets and towers.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shanbally Castle
County Tipperary
Shanbally was the grandest private house the English architect John Nash ever built in Ireland: and within 150 years the state itself dynamited it…
- Near Cahir
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shane's Castle
County Antrim
Shane’s Castle layers medieval O’Neill power, John Nash’s unrealised rebuilding, destructive fires, and a later tourist railway on the shores of Lo…
- Near Randalstown
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sheffield Castle
South Yorkshire
Buried beneath a demolished 20th-century market, its foundations still trace the medieval castle where Mary, Queen of Scots spent fourteen years a…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sherborne Castle
Dorset
Sherborne Castle combines Sir Walter Raleigh’s Tudor lodge, the ruins of a powerful twelfth-century bishop’s palace and a major eighteenth-century…
- Near Sherborne
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sheriff Hutton Castle
North Yorkshire
For a century and a half this was the seat of the Council of the North, and briefly a residence of Richard III himself, before its stone was carted…
- Easy path
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Settlement · Iron Age
Shipton Hill Settlement
Dorset
Shipton Hill Settlement is a rare small Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) defended community, whose natural slopes, banks and dome…
- Near Shipton Gorge
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shirburn Castle
Oxfordshire
A supposed visit by Dante's tutor, quoted in Victorian sources, turned out to be a forgery in a book published in 1948.
- Near Shirburn
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shotwick Castle
Cheshire
A Norman river-crossing castle whose flooded ditches defended the Dee ford before the fort became a royal hunting lodge and then earthworks.
- Near Chester
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shrewsbury Castle
Shropshire
Shrewsbury Castle began as William I’s Welsh-border command and became a civic, military and museum landmark; excavated ditches, high-status feasti…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shrule Castle
County Mayo
A river-crossing stronghold on the Mayo–Galway border whose 1570 siege killed a gallowglass chief and left the man who took it wounded in the face.
- Near Claremorris
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Sidbury Castle
Devon
Sidbury Castle is a substantial Iron Age hillfort: an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground: whose large summit setting…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Sidbury Hill
Wiltshire
A far older settlement was found sealed beneath the bank in the 1950s. Access is difficult: the ground carries tank tracks and occasional artillery…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sizergh
Cumbria
One family held this house for over seven centuries, and its Elizabethan panelling was sold abroad, missed, and finally brought home in 1999.
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skelton Castle
North Yorkshire
Skelton Castle shows how a medieval stronghold was demolished yet partially absorbed into a Gothic country house and changing estate identity.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skenfrith Castle
Monmouthshire
A circular keep rises from the middle of a squared curtain wall beside the Monnow: one-third of a deliberately linked trio of castles that governed…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skipness Castle
Argyll and Bute
A working stronghold refortified across three centuries, ending its working life not by decay but under active siege in 1646: the last Scottish cas…
- Near Skipness
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skipsea Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
The Normans built their motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) on a mound already a millennium and a half old, and dammed a…
- Near Beverley
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skipton Castle
North Yorkshire
One of the few English castles never taken by force in nearly a thousand years, it endured a three-year Civil War siege and still stands roofed and…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Skitten Broch
Highland
A broch excavated twice within four decades of Highland archaeology before being levelled entirely for a wartime runway: its erasure is now the cle…
- Near Killimster
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Slade Castle
County Wexford
A four-storey tower house guards Bannow Bay and Waterford Harbour from a tiny 210-acre estate, its scale paid for by fishing or trade rather than l…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Slane Castle
County Meath
A late-Georgian rebuild of a confiscated Fleming estate that became, from 1981, the natural amphitheatre behind some of rock music's biggest outdoo…
- Near Slane
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Slapton Castle
Devon
Slapton Castle is an Iron Age promontory fort: a coastal spur defended by banks across its neck: whose low but strategic position overlooks Slapton…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Slate Hill Settlement
Northumberland
Four concentric ramparts curve round the north and west of the enclosure; quarrying has taken the east side down to one.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sleady Castle
County Waterford
One family's grave in Lismore cathedral, a castle their descendant built eighty years later, and a great-granddaughter of the tenants who once serv…
- Near Dungarvan
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sleaford Castle
Lincolnshire
A bishop's fortified manor rather than a warrior's stronghold, it hosted two kings and a Tudor state council before all but vanishing beneath its o…
- Near Sleaford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Slwch Tump
Powys
A defended hilltop close to Brecon, also known as Slwch Camp.
- Near Brecon
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Small Down Knoll
Somerset
Fourteen round barrows run in a single line along the crest of the hill, ringed by the banks and ditches of an enclosure raised in the Bronze Age,…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Smerby Castle
Argyll and Bute
Two separate bonds, in 1594 and 1597, show the family here signing not as MacDonald but as M'Connall: a rare direct trace of how Gaelic Kintyre act…
- Near Campbeltown
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Smythapark
Devon
Smythapark is an Iron Age promontory hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age: near Bratton Fleming, part of a Devon landscape notab…
- Near Bratton Fleming
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Snabrough broch
Shetland Islands
Snabrough Broch sits on a short, low promontory on the shore of Snabrough Loch, on the island of Unst in Shetland, its ruined wall now measuring ar…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Snape Castle
North Yorkshire
A mob from the Pilgrimage of Grace once held Katherine Parr and her stepchildren hostage inside its walls, years before she became queen of England.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Snodhill Castle
Herefordshire
Recent digs found a stone hall keep buried inside the visible tower, pushing its origin back to 1067 and making it one of England's earliest stone…
- Near Peterchurch
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Solsbury Hill
Somerset
A flat-topped hill above Batheaston, with the remains of an ancient defended settlement.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Someries Castle
Bedfordshire
A fortified manor rather than a true castle, its surviving gatehouse ranks among the earliest brick buildings raised in England.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Somerton Castle
Lincolnshire
A king of France spent roughly a year confined here after Poitiers, inside a fortress whose 1330s artillery towers were a design a generation ahead…
- Near Somerton
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sorbie Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Sorbie Tower is the ancestral stronghold of Clan Hannay, a late-sixteenth-century fortified house whose surviving lower levels preserve a rare Gall…
- Near Sorbie
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Fortified place · Medieval
South Cerney Castle
Gloucestershire
A castle so easily confused with two others of the same era that historians still dispute whether it, or a neighbouring site, saw King Stephen's fo…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
South Cowton Castle
North Yorkshire
A country gentleman built this house like a fortress, its twin corner towers a plain answer to the violence of the Wars of the Roses.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
South Moreton Castle
Oxfordshire
Two separate earthworks half a mile apart preserve both a Norman lord's stronghold and a disputed siege-castle from the 12th-century Anarchy.
- Near South Moreton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
South Weald Camp
Essex
South Weald Camp is a rare east-of-England late Iron Age hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement from the centuries before Rome arrived: whose alte…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Southampton Castle
Hampshire
One of the first castles in England fitted with cannon, and once the storehouse of the royal wine trade through Southampton's medieval docks.
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Southsea Castle
Hampshire
One of Henry VIII's Device forts, stormed in the Civil War, rebuilt by Charles II's Dutch engineer, and still training its guns on the Solent as la…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sowerby Castle, Cumbria
Cumbria
Its walls have vanished, but its name has not: Castle Sowerby parish still carries the memory of a timber stronghold once passed between the Englis…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Spitbank Fort
Hampshire
A Victorian island gun-fort built to catch any warship that slipped past its two larger neighbours in the Solent: now a scheduled monument (legally…
- Near Portsmouth
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Fortified place · Medieval
Spofforth Castle
North Yorkshire
A hall-tower cut straight into the rock it stands on, wrecked in the Civil War, its ruins now owned outright by the village that saved the field ar…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Springfield Castle
County Limerick
A Norman foothold that became a Gaelic-Norman lordship, sheltered a 17th-century poet, burned in 1921, and is still lived in by the family that fir…
- Near Limerick
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Spynie Palace
Moray
For roughly five hundred years this was the working seat of the Bishops of Moray, and its tower still stands as the largest medieval tower house in…
- Near Elgin
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Andrew's Castle, Hamble
Hampshire
Raised in barely a year against an invasion that never came, its guns went on to watch the Solent for a century before the sea itself demolished mo…
- Near Winchester
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Andrews Castle
Fife
St Andrews Castle was the palace and prison of Scotland’s bishops, a frontline fortress in the Wars of Independence and Reformation (the sixteenth-…
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Briavels Castle
Gloucestershire
Its gatehouse carries three full sets of working portcullises, a defensive feature no comparable English castle actually completed, guarding a stro…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Catherine's Castle
Cornwall
St Catherine's Castle is a compact Henrician gun fort at Fowey that shows four centuries of coastal defence, from Henry VIII's invasion fears to Se…
- Some walking
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Fortified place
St Catherine's Fort
Pembrokeshire
The only fort ever built of a chain meant to run from Tenby to Freshwater West, finished unarmed in 1870 and turned into a private house before its…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
St Catherine's Hill, Hampshire
Hampshire
A single chalk hilltop carries an Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillfort, a lost medieval chapel, a 17th-century turf maze, an…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Donat's Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A castle on cliffs above the Bristol Channel, on ground held since well before the Romans came.
- Near St Donats
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Fagans Castle
Cardiff
An Elizabethan mansion raised inside the surviving D-shaped wall of a medieval castle, later given whole to the nation with its gardens and collect…
- Near St Fagans
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Quintins Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A stone keep of the late twelfth century survives inside the later gatehouse: a building swallowed by the one that replaced it.
- Near Cowbridge
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stafford Castle
Staffordshire
A castle rediscovered in the 1790s by workmen underpinning its last standing wall: and rebuilt on its own buried foundations.
- Near Stafford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stamford, Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire
A stone-built market town where a 1333 walkout of Oxford scholars nearly founded England's third university, and where a medieval bull run ran thro…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Stanborough
Devon
Stanborough is an Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) promontory hillfort (a defended enclosure on high ground, ringed with banks an…
- Near Halwell
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stansted Mountfitchet Castle
Essex
Stansted Mountfitchet Castle is a scheduled Norman ringwork (an early castle defended by a circular bank and ditch rather than a mound) and bailey…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Stantonbury Camp
Somerset
The fort sits on the line of the Wansdyke, and the iron tools found here are farming implements rather than weapons.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Stanwick Iron Age Fortifications
North Yorkshire
Nine kilometres of ditch and rampart enclose some 300 hectares: one of the largest fortified sites in Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Starborough Castle
Surrey
A Georgian folly of dressed sandstone conceals the moat and footprint of a fortified manor licensed for war in 1341: one that briefly held a captiv…
- Near Lingfield
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stirling Castle
Stirling
The castle Edward I kept bombarding after it had already surrendered, because he wanted to try out his new trebuchet.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Stockland Castle
Devon
Stockland Castle preserves two distinct Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) hillforts on one Devon hillside, showing how prehist…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stogursey Castle
Somerset
A castle ordered destroyed by the crown twice, in 1215 and 1228, and still standing to be extended in stone in 1300.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Stokeleigh Camp
Somerset
One of three forts of the Iron Age, roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest, ringing the Avon Gorge: with an innermost rampart, an encircling bank…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stokesay Castle
Shropshire
A wool merchant built it to look like Edward I's Welsh castles, and it was never meant to fight. Almost nothing has changed since the 1290s.
- Near Stokesay
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Stonea Camp
Cambridgeshire
Barely two metres above the surrounding marsh, this bank of gravel was still high enough and dry enough to be worth fortifying, fighting over, and…
- Near Stonea
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stow Green, St Briavels
Gloucestershire
A grassy mound and its silted ditch are the only remains of the small Norman ring-motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) that once guarde…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stowey Castle
Somerset
An early Norman castle of the eleventh century at Nether Stowey, known locally as The Mount.
- Near Nether Stowey
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Fortified place · Roman
Strageath
Perth and Kinross
One of the chain of forts along the Gask Ridge, and the name survives in three farms and a mill.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Strancally Castle
County Waterford
A working medieval river-stronghold turned into an 1830s Gothic country house, with a Spanish murder-hole legend still clinging to its ruined prede…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Sturminster Newton Castle
Dorset
Sturminster Newton Castle uniquely combines an Iron Age, the centuries before Rome arrived, promontory fort, a defensible enclosure on a projecting…
- Near Sturminster Newton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sudeley Castle
Gloucestershire
The only privately owned castle in the world with a queen of England buried in its grounds: Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's last wife, lies in the cha…
- Near Gloucester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sutton Valence Castle
Kent
Sutton Valence Castle preserves the keep (the principal tower, built to be held even if the walls fell) of a strategically placed 12th-century Kent…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Sutton Walls Hill Fort
Herefordshire
Excavated skeletons here bear arrow wounds and decapitation cuts from a 1st-century Roman assault: rare direct physical evidence of an Iron Age (fr…
- Some walking
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Seaton Down
Devon
Seaton Down is an unusual Iron Age promontory fort: a headland cut off by a bank to make a defensible enclosure: whose long linear barrier demonstr…
- Near Seaton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shankill Castle
County Kilkenny
Shankill Castle joins a Butler tower-house core to Georgian and Victorian landscape design, now animated by a living artist's home, gardens and an…
- Near Paulstown
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shanmuckinish Castle
County Clare
Shanmuckinish Castle preserves the near-full height of a fifteenth-century Irish tower house, its collapsed wall exposing vaulted rooms, passages a…
- Near Ballyvaughan
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Shoulsbury castle
Devon
Shoulsbury Castle is Exmoor’s largest and best-known hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement: with an unusual rectangular plan that has prompted de…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sketrick Castle
County Down
Sketrick Castle preserves a rare island tower house with a boat bay, spring passage, and a history of medieval capture and storm damage.
- Near Killinchy
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skryne Castle
County Meath
Its Irish name outlives its walls: Caisleán Scrín Cholm Cille records a shrine to Colmcille on this hill long before Adam de Feypo raised his motte…
- Near Tara
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stewart Castle, Northern Ireland
County Tyrone
Stewart Castle links a Plantation manor and two seventeenth-century burnings to a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) burial…
- Near Cookstown
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stockport Castle
Greater Manchester
Stockport Castle controlled a strategic ford where the Goyt and Tame form the Mersey, and its 1173 role in the barons’ rebellion, early decline and…
- Easy path
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