Fortified place · Medieval
Swansea Castle
Swansea
Founded in 1107 as the seat of the Lordship of Gower, a timber castle standing by 1116 above the River Tawe.
- Near Swansea
- Easy path
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 19 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Sweetworthy
Somerset
Two Iron Age enclosures on one slope, with a deserted medieval settlement on the same ground - and the ditch of one now serves as a trackway.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Swerford Castle
Oxfordshire
A twelfth-century castle in the village of Swerford, built as an earth mound carrying a tower with a walled yard beside it.
- Near Swerford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sycharth
Powys
The house Owain Glyndwr grew up in, praised in detail by a poet and burned to the ground by the future Henry V in May 1403.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tamworth Castle
Staffordshire
A palace of the Mercian kings burned by Vikings, rebuilt as a burh by Aethelflaed, ordered demolished by King John, and bought for the town in 1897…
- Easy path
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Fortified place
Tandragee Castle
Armagh
Tandragee Castle is a nineteenth-century rebuilding of an earlier O'Hanlon stronghold, preserving the layered history of Plantation conflict, arist…
- Near Tandragee
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tantallon Castle
East Lothian
Tantallon is Scotland’s last medieval curtain-wall castle, a dramatic coastal fortress whose single massive landward wall defended a naturally clif…
- Near North Berwick
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Tap o' Noth
Aberdeenshire
Drone and lidar surveys count as many as 800 huts inside its outer rampart: evidence, researchers say, for the largest known settlement in early-me…
- Near Rhynie
- 50 min walk from car park
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Taps Combe Camp
Somerset
A hill fort shaped like a letter D, fifty metres across, also recorded as Chelvey Batch Settlement.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tarbert Castle
Argyll and Bute
A royal stronghold fought over for nearly a thousand years, from early-medieval burnings to a 1494 siege by a Scottish king, now looked after by th…
- Near Tarbert
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tarset Castle
Northumberland
Tarset’s low foundations mark a formally planned four-turret border castle, authorised in 1267 and deliberately destroyed in 1525 rather than repea…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire
Ralph Cromwell’s fifteenth-century Great Tower, built with 700,000 fashionable bricks, became the 1910 rescue that helped inspire Britain’s foundat…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Taunton Castle
Somerset
The hall where Judge Jeffreys hanged 144 men after the Monmouth Rebellion: now the Museum of Somerset.
- Near Taunton
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Tedbury Camp
Somerset
A hoard of Constantine Junior coins was found here in 1691, on a promontory already fortified in the Iron Age, roughly 800 BC until the Roman conqu…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tellarought Castle
County Wexford
Ownership can be traced through named tenants across six centuries, from a 1307 Sutton grant to a 2019 rescue by the state: a rare unbroken paper t…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Temple House Manor and Castle
County Sligo
A Templar castle raised in 1181 on a Sligo lakeshore gave its name to the Georgian house the same family has occupied for over 350 years.
- Near Sligo
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tenby Castle
Pembrokeshire
A Norman promontory fortress that was destroyed in 1153, twice besieged, and finally made redundant not by an enemy but by the town walls built aro…
- Near Tenby
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tenby town walls
Pembrokeshire
One of the most complete medieval town walls in Britain, begun after a Welsh prince sacked the town in 1260 and still running down to the sea along…
- Near Tenby
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Terryglass Castle
County Tipperary
A four-towered keep completed just in time for its own builder's debts to hand it to the English crown, on ground carrying monastic life since the…
- Near Nenagh
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
The Bulwarks, Porthkerry
Vale of Glamorgan
The south side is now cliff edge. There was probably a line of defences along it once, and the sea has taken them.
- Near Rhoose
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
The Castle, Newcastle
Tyne and Wear
The city is named after a castle that no longer exists: a timber work of 1080 raised on ground the Romans had already fortified at Pons Aelius.
- Near Newcastle upon Tyne
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Fortified place · Iron Age
The Frith
Hampshire
A modest single-banked stronghold standing guard over the approach to Calleva Atrebatum, one of Roman Britain's great towns, rather than a place of…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
The Larches, Monmouthshire
Monmouthshire
An Iron Age hillfort (an upland enclosure defended by earthen banks) near Trellech, recorded as a protected monument in a Welsh landscape where hun…
- Near Trellech
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
The Mint (Carlingford)
County Louth
A merchant's fortified townhouse whose carved street-facing windows preserve a rare burst of Celtic-revival ornament on an otherwise plain defensiv…
- Near Carlingford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
The More
Hertfordshire
A Tudor palace so magnificent a French ambassador rated it above Hampton Court, and the refuge chosen for Catherine of Aragon after her marriage wa…
- Near St Albans
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
The Rofft
cheshire
The Rofft began as an early fortified enclosure and later became a castle near Marford; quarrying erased its earthworks, leaving names as the clear…
- Near Chester
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Fortified place · Iron Age
The Rumps
Cornwall
The Rumps combines a well-excavated Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) promontory fort (a headland cut off by ramparts to make…
- Near Wadebridge
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
The Trundle
West Sussex
An Iron Age enclosure on St Roche Hill, raised over a much earlier one, four miles north of Chichester.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
The Wrekin
Shropshire
An Iron Age tribal capital stormed and burnt by the Romans in AD 47: and a hill so familiar that its name became the local phrase for the long way…
- Near Telford
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thetford Castle
Norfolk
Thetford Castle’s motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) is England’s second-largest man-made mound, preserving the dramatic core of a Bi…
- Near Thetford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thirlwall Castle
Northumberland
Thirlwall Castle survives as a Border tower strengthened with Hadrian’s Wall stone, its ruin linking Roman material to later medieval defence.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thirsk Castle
North Yorkshire
Deliberately levelled by royal order in 1176, its stone is said to have gone straight into the parish church still standing in the town today.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thoor Ballylee
County Galway
The tower where W. B. Yeats wrote some of his best-known poetry, once called by Seamus Heaney 'the most important public building in Ireland.'
- Near Gort
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thornbury Castle
Gloucestershire
Built as a residence for the wealthiest noble in England, it was left unfinished when its owner was executed for plotting against the Tudor crown.
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thorpe Waterville Castle
Northamptonshire
A bishop built this fortified manor with timber stolen from a neighbouring abbey's woods: then it was besieged in the Wars of the Roses and finally…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Threave Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Threave Castle is a powerful record of Black Douglas lordship in Galloway, combining a 14th-century tower house with one of Britain’s earliest purp…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thurleigh Castle
Bedfordshire
An earthen motte with a rare two-tier summit and one of the largest, most irregular baileys of any English castle of its kind: yet almost nothing o…
- Near Thurleigh
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Thurnham Castle
Kent
Thurnham Castle, or Godard’s Castle, preserves the flint bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) wall of a small 12th-century North Downs f…
- Near Thurnham
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tibbers Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Tibbers Castle preserves a rare Scottish example of a timber earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) castle…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tickhill Castle
South Yorkshire
A private house behind a fortified Norman gatehouse conceals one of King John's two chief strongholds against a feared French invasion.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Tidbury Ring
Hampshire
Beneath ploughed-out defensive banks, two Roman buildings were raised inside this fort centuries after the Britons who first enclosed the hill were…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tilbury Fort
Essex
Tilbury Fort is the Thames defence where Tudor invasion fears became a major 17th-century star fort, later a magazine and military logistics base f…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Tinboeth Castle
Powys
A Mortimer castle built inside an Iron Age hillfort, which served as its outer bailey: and abandoned because peace made it pointless.
- Near Llanbister
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tinnakill Castle
County Laois
Its four-storey limestone walls hide a double puzzle: a construction date disputed across two centuries, and a carved figure removed and lost witho…
- Near Portarlington
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tintagel Castle
Cornwall
Tintagel Castle unites a fifth- and sixth-century elite settlement with a thirteenth-century Cornish castle and one of Britain’s most influential A…
- Near Tintagel
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Tirefour Castle
Argyll and Bute
A drystone broch: a round, hollow-walled tower distinctive to Scotland's Iron Age, the centuries before Rome arrived: survives to a maximum height…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tiverton Castle
Devon
Tiverton Castle preserves a Norman and Courtenay stronghold whose dramatic 1645 capture ended its military role and led to its transformation into…
- Near Tiverton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Toddington Castle
Bedfordshire
A grass-covered mound in a Bedfordshire village still carries the folk memory of an 'old woman' frying pancakes underground, layered over the real…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tolquhon Castle
Aberdeenshire
Built for show rather than defence, its gatehouse still carries the founder-laird's own inscription naming the exact day in 1589 he finished the work.
- Near Tarves
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tomen y Rhodwydd
Denbighshire
A princely stronghold thrown up in a single year of conquest and burned within a decade: its earthworks still mark the moment Owain Gwynedd tore th…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tomen yr Allt
Powys
A timber castle burnt in 1257, whose destruction shows up as daub and a scorched layer in a 1978 excavation.
- Near Llanfyllin
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tonbridge Castle
Kent
Tonbridge makes Norman conquest tangible through a siege-scarred Medway stronghold whose 1260 gatehouse still dominates grounds opened as a public…
- Near Tonbridge
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tong Castle
Shropshire
Capability Brown's first commission in Shropshire. The house was demolished in 1954 and the M54 now runs over the site.
- Near Tong
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Toothill Fort
Hampshire
A single defensive bank and ditch still ring the spur's tip, and a stand of planted redwoods now makes the old lookout visible for miles around.
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Topcliffe Castle
North Yorkshire
A Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) and bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) at a river confluence that saw a king…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Torberry Hill
West Sussex
A hilltop enclosure raised in the centuries before Rome arrived, spelled variously Tarberry and Torbery.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Torr a'Chaisteal
North Ayrshire
Torr a’Chaisteal preserves the low, turf-covered defences of an Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) dun and its link to Arran’s wide…
- Near Blackwaterfoot
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Torwoodlee Broch
Scottish Borders
Roman pottery, glass and a coin found packed inside its walls turn this collapsed tower into rare physical evidence of contact: hostile or looted:…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Totnes Castle
Devon
Totnes Castle is one of England’s best-preserved Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower raised on a mound with a walled cour…
- Near Totnes
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Totternhoe Castle
Bedfordshire
A rare double-bailey layout cut into a chalk hillside: an unusual arrangement for an English motte-and-bailey castle, an early Norman stronghold wi…
- Near Totternhoe
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Totternhoe Knolls
Bedfordshire
A single hillside reserve holds a Norman castle's earthworks, chalk grassland rich in rare orchids, and the quarry that once supplied stone for Wes…
- Near Totternhoe
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tower of London
Greater London
Founded during the Norman Conquest, the Tower of London is both a formidable royal fortress and an evolving national institution: palace, prison, m…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Traquair House
Scottish Borders
Its Bear Gates have stood locked since the eighteenth century under a vow never to reopen them: a promise the family has kept for more than two hun…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Tre'r Ceiri
Gwynedd
Its dry-stone ramparts still stand up to four metres high around some 150 roundhouses: one of the best-preserved Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to…
- Near Bangor
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Treago Castle
Herefordshire
Mason's marks cut into its stone match those at Raglan Castle and trace to William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke's workshop: physical evidence link…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tredustan Castle
Powys
A mound raised within a year of the Norman victory at Brecon, to hold down the district it stands in.
- Near Talgarth
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Treen Cliff
Cornwall
A protected Penwith cliffscape where a scheduled prehistoric (before any written account of Britain existed) cliff castle shares ground with rare m…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tregantle Fort
Cornwall
A Palmerston fort above the Channel approaches to Plymouth, built for 35 guns and still used for military training more than 160 years later.
- Near Looe
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tregrug Castle
Monmouthshire
The bailey here, at 164 by 78 metres, is the largest single enclosure of any castle in England and Wales: yet recent scholarship reads it not as a…
- Near Abergavenny
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Trematon Castle
Cornwall
Trematon Castle is a striking Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongside) ab…
- Near Saltash
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Trendle Ring
Somerset
Trendle Ring is an undated Quantock earthwork (a mound or ditch formed by moving soil, not by building) whose steep slope, single rampart (a defens…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Treryn Dinas
Cornwall
Treryn Dinas is an Iron Age cliff fort: the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest: whose successive ramparts, Logan Rock and coastal cul…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tretower Castle
Powys
A round keep built inside an older shell keep, with the gap between them roofed over: and abandoned because the family preferred the house next door.
- Near Tretower
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Triermain Castle
Cumbria
A minor Cumbrian stronghold whose stone came straight from Hadrian's Wall, and whose lord's name found its way into Coleridge's gothic poem "Christ…
- Near Carlisle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Trim Castle
County Meath
Trim Castle’s unique twenty-cornered great tower grew from de Lacy’s Boyne crossing stronghold into Ireland’s most ambitious Norman castle complex.
- Near Trim
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Trimontium (Newstead)
Scottish Borders
One of the largest caches of Roman military finds in Britain: arms and armour from 117 pits: came from a fort that was, briefly, the empire's most…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Trowbridge Castle
Wiltshire
Nothing of the fortress stands above ground today, yet its ditch still bends Trowbridge's main street around a shape laid out nine centuries ago.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Trusty's Hill
Dumfries and Galloway
Carved into the living rock near the entrance to a small vitrified hillfort, a Pictish (of the Picts, the people of northern and eastern Scotland f…
- Near Newton Stewart
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tullynally Castle
County Westmeath
The Pakenham family who built it are tied by marriage to the Duke of Wellington, and the house they left behind is still the largest in private han…
- Near Castlepollard
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Tunley Camp
Somerset
Tunley Camp is a nearly ploughed-down early fortified settlement that illustrates how modest earthworks fit into wider debates about power, farming…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Turnberry Castle
South Ayrshire
Robert the Bruce grew up here and ordered it destroyed in 1310, so the English could not have it. Nobody rebuilt it.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tutbury Castle
Staffordshire
Slighted twice, rebuilt as a princely household, used to hold Mary Queen of Scots, and finally pulled down by order of Parliament.
- Near Tutbury
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Twizell Castle
Northumberland
A castle on a bend of the River Till at Tillmouth Park, protected by law for its architecture and its archaeology.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Twmbarlwm
Caerphilly
A hillfort, a Norman castle mound and a giant's grave all share one summit, and the hill's silhouette is still read across Gwent as a symbol of the…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Twmpath Castle
Cardiff
Once the third-largest motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) in the medieval Lordship of Glamorgan, it held one link in an…
- Near Cardiff
- Rough ground
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Swyre Head
Dorset
Swyre Head is the high point of the Isle of Purbeck, valued for its broad coastal and inland views and for a summit shaped by later landscape inter…
- Near Kingston
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tangy Loch Castle
Argyll and Bute
A causeway now vanished beneath the water once linked this island stronghold to the shore, leaving a ruin that in the seventeenth century belonged…
- Near Campbeltown
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tattycor
County Tyrone
Tattycor is a small Tyrone townland where a protected rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth bank) and a sharply recorded ninet…
- Near Cookstown
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Fortified place · Medieval
The New Castle, County Down
County Down
The New Castle guarded a Shimna River ford at Newcastle for nearly four centuries before its 1830 demolition erased the fortified structure.
- Near Newcastle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tilsworth Castle
Bedfordshire
Two castles, not one: a lost Saxon motte on the knoll above, and the fortified moated manor below it that a forged letter, a poisoning plot and eig…
- Near Tilsworth
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Tinnahinch Castle
County Carlow
Tinnahinch Castle is a River Barrow tower house built to control a crossing, retaining machicolation (an opening in a parapet floor for dropping mi…
- Near Graiguenamanagh
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Togher Castle
County Cork
Togher is a substantially intact late-sixteenth-century MacCarthy tower house, retaining defensive bartizans, a winding stair and dungeon from the…
- Near Bandon
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tonnagh More
County Tyrone
Tonnagh More is a Tyrone townland where a protected rath (a ringfort, a farmstead enclosed by a circular bank and ditch) and stable 1840s populatio…
- Near Cookstown
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tower Dock
City of London
Tower Dock preserves the last visible head of a Thames inlet that helped protect the Tower of London and marked the edge of its historic Liberty.
- Near London
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Trawscoed fort
Ceredigion
A Roman fort for up to 800 infantry, discovered from aerial marks and placed to command a river crossing on the route through Ceredigion.
- Near Trawsgoed
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Trevelgue Head
Cornwall
Trevelgue Head is an Iron Age promontory fort: a coastal spur defended by banks thrown across its neck, the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman…
- Near Newquay
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Trink Hill
Cornwall
Trink Hill preserves a summit barrow: a prehistoric burial mound of earth: standing stone and mining landscape above west Cornwall, showing how a s…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tully Castle
County Fermanagh
Tully Castle preserves a Plantation-era Lough Erne stronghold whose destruction in the 1641 rebellion ended Hume occupation and left a rare fortifi…
- Near Enniskillen
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tullyhogue Fort
County Tyrone
Tullyhogue Fort was the O’Neill inauguration site, where ceremonial guardians and the Leac na Rí embodied the political sovereignty of Tyrone.
- Near Cookstown
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Fortified place · Medieval
Tullykelter Castle
County Fermanagh
Tullykelter Castle preserves a heavily overgrown Plantation-era ruin whose land grant, Scottish family, and troubled tenancies reveal Fermanagh’s s…
- Near Enniskillen
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