Fortified place · Medieval
Badminton House
Gloucestershire
A private ducal seat whose Great Hall gave a global sport its name, while four centuries of rebuilding by Kent, Gibbs and the Somerset family layer…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 2 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Baginton Castle
Warwickshire
A castle with two names and almost no visitors, where the Earl of Northumberland was held after Hotspur's defeat at Shrewsbury in 1403.
- Near Baginton
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Baile Hill
North Yorkshire
The last surviving trace of a twin-castle system William the Conqueror threw up on both banks of the Ouse within a year of taking York.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Baile Mhargaite (Sandy Dun)
Highland
Never excavated and only waist-high in places, its walls, annexe, ditch and outer defence still trace a complete Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the…
- Near Bettyhill
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bailieborough Castle
County Cavan
A Plantation-era fortified house that shaped an entire Cavan town, then vanished so completely that a lakeside forest trail is now the only trace.
- Near Bailieborough
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bakewell Castle
Derbyshire
Its very origin is disputed: was it a Saxon burh raised by Edward the Elder in 924, or a 12th-century Norman motte, the earthen mound a castle was…
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Medieval
Balgonie Castle
Fife
Balgonie Castle shows five centuries of incremental change, from a 14th-century tower house to a restored residence within the remains of a 17th-ce…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Balladoole
Isle of Man
Six thousand years of continuous ritual use culminate in a Viking chieftain's boat grave, deliberately cut into the Christian burials it displaced.
- Near Douglas
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballands Castle
Somerset
A surviving motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle), bailey (the defended yard attached to the mound) and encircling ditches…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinacarriga Castle
County Cork
Ballinacarriga Castle is a structurally sound sixteenth-century tower house that retains rare defensive details and a Sheela Na Gig high on its eas…
- Near Ballineen
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinafad Castle
County Sligo
A ten-man Elizabethan garrison post that survived two separate attacks in Ireland's turbulent seventeenth century, and today stands open, free and…
- Near Sligo
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballindalloch Castle
Moray
Continuously lived in by one family since 1546, its Z-plan tower survived a burning by Montrose's men and a feud that ended in murder at a neighbou…
- Near Ballindalloch
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinlough Castle
County Westmeath
One of a handful of Irish Catholic families still living in the same house they held since the seventeenth century, under a coat of arms whose foun…
- Near Delvin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballycar Castle
County Clare
A tower house so thoroughly erased that even the house later built on its footings was a roofless ruin by the 1890s: known today almost entirely th…
- Near Newmarket-on-Fergus
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballycowan Castle
County Offaly
A Gaelic tower house, an English fortified house, and a Cromwellian bombardment all marked the same ridge west of Tullamore within less than a cent…
- Near Tullamore
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyfounder Rath
County Down
Ballyfounder Rath preserves the compact earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) form of a ringfort on the Ar…
- Near Downpatrick
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballygally Castle
County Antrim
Built by a Scottish settler in 1625, Ballygally is a sea-facing fortified house that resisted attacks in 1641 before becoming a hotel without losin…
- Near Larne
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballygunner Castle
County Waterford
A Georgian-fronted country house wrapped around medieval and 17th-century masonry, standing, by local belief, on the site of an earlier Viking stro…
- Near Waterford
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballylahan Castle
County Mayo
Only one of Ballylahan's twin towers survived a near-destruction in 1316, yet its bawn wall still shows the sloping base-batter of the Mac Siurtain…
- Near Castlebar
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyloughan Castle
County Carlow
Ballyloughan Castle is a County Carlow National Monument whose twin-towered gatehouse and high thirteenth-century walls preserve the outline of a s…
- Near Bagenalstown
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymalis Castle
County Kerry
Ballymalis Castle stands on the north bank of the River Laune, close to where the river meets the Gaddagh, on level ground about 4.3 km northwest o…
- Near Beaufort
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymoon Castle
County Carlow
Ballymoon Castle is a striking open-courtyard National Monument whose granite walls preserve a rare, possibly unfinished medieval castle plan near…
- Near Borris
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymore Castle
County Galway
A tower house built on a marriage settlement changed hands through Cromwellian confiscation and a Williamite siege, then quietly became a Georgian…
- Near Loughrea
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymote Castle
County Sligo
The most symmetrical of Ireland's keepless castles, closely paralleling Edward I's Beaumaris in Wales: and the last Norman castle ever raised in Co…
- Near Ballymote
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballynahinch Castle
County Galway
A cricketing Indian prince, a brewer, and an animal-welfare pioneer each owned this house in turn: a private demesne that has passed through more s…
- Near Cleggan
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballynahow Castle
County Tipperary
A five-storey tower still carries its full parapet defences intact: four evenly spaced machicolations and a walled secret chamber reached only thro…
- Near Clonmel
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyquirk
County Tipperary
What stands today is barely half the building: three vanished towers and a whole upper storey were stripped away in the nineteenth century, and an…
- Near Clonmel
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyshannon Castle
County Donegal
A vanished O'Donnell stronghold whose 1597 siege helped decide the fate of Gaelic Ulster, though not one stone of it now stands above ground.
- Near Ballyshannon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Balmuildy
East Dunbartonshire
Balmuildy is one of only two Antonine Wall forts known to have stone ramparts, with excavated baths, inscriptions and objects now held in Glasgow’s…
- Near Bearsden
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Balvaird Castle
Perth and Kinross
Carved heads support the roundels on the wall-walk, and the cap-house over the stair is a miniature tower house of its own: detail that may have be…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bamburgh Castle
Northumberland
Bamburgh Castle is a Northumberland coastal fortress whose Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, royal, and Armstrong layers span more than 1,500 years.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bampton Castle, Devon
Devon
A Norman motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) survived siege, a stone rebuild, and a licence to crenellate, yet stands tod…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bampton Castle, Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire
Two irreconcilable founding stories - a queen's earthwork (a mound or ditch formed by moving soil, not by building) of 1142 and an earl's licensed…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Banbury Castle
Oxfordshire
Its 1225–50 rebuild gave it an early concentric pentagonal plan: a design historians note otherwise belongs to later castles like Harlech and Beaum…
- Near Banbury
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Banbury Hill
Dorset
Banbury Hillfort preserves a scheduled Iron Age (the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest) enclosure in Dorset, where a surviving rampa…
- Near Okeford Fitzpaine
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Banc y Betws
Carmarthenshire
Nothing is recorded of who raised this earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) or why, yet at some nine metr…
- Near Carmarthen
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Banwell Camp
Somerset
Stone Age artefacts, and others of the Bronze Age, roughly 2500-800 BC, have come off a hill fort raised long after both.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Bar Hill Fort
East Dunbartonshire
Bar Hill’s fort, bathhouse and deep well preserve unusually direct evidence of Antonine Wall garrison life, including shoes that may point to women…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Barbury Castle
Wiltshire
Two deep ditches and ramparts crown a downland vantage point where Roman-era buildings gave way to a Saxon conquest that helped found the kingdom o…
- Near Wroughton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barden Tower
North Yorkshire
A ruined 15th-century hunting lodge that, lacking any village to gather around, became the de facto centre of community life for the farms and haml…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bargy Castle
County Wexford
A working Norman keep still standing after eight centuries, its story tied to a rebel commander's execution, a Cromwellian confiscation, and the ch…
- Near Wexford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barland Castle
Powys
An early Norman castle of timber tower and walled yard near Old Radnor, known also as Bishopston Old Castle.
- Near Old Radnor
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barnard Castle (castle)
County Durham
A Balliol-built stronghold that later became one of Richard III's favourite residences, and whose owner stripped it to repair Raby Castle.
- Near Barnard Castle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barnstaple Castle
Devon
Excavation beneath its earthen mound uncovered over a hundred early Christian graves, showing the Normans had raised their stronghold directly on t…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barnwell Castle
Northamptonshire
Barnwell Castle retains exceptional walls, towers and gatehouse from a thirteenth-century quadrangular stronghold with earlier Norman and Civil War…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barry Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A wooden ringwall of the twelfth century rebuilt in stone, its gatehouse still standing two storeys high in a Barry suburb.
- Near Barry
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barryscourt Castle
County Cork
Barryscourt is a restored sixteenth-century tower-house complex that preserves the imprint of the Barrys, the Desmond Rebellions and a later recove…
- Near Carrigtwohill
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bartinney Castle
Cornwall
Bartinney Castle is an Iron Age hilltop enclosure, dating from the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest, in Penwith whose circular eart…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Barwick-in-Elmet Castle
West Yorkshire
Four powers fortified this ground in turn: the Britons, the Romans, the kings of Northumbria and finally the Normans.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Basing House
Hampshire
A brick palace that once rivalled Hampton Court in scale was reduced to smoking rubble in a single afternoon in 1645, and villagers were then invit…
- Near Basingstoke
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bass of Inverurie
Aberdeenshire
A wooden castle mound that once governed the whole lordship of the Garioch, its earthworks still holding an oak gangway and a 14th-century face-jug…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bat's Castle
Somerset
A hillfort mapped for eighty years before anyone recognised it: until schoolboys found eight coins spanning four and a half centuries.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bathampton Down
Somerset
A single bank and flat-bottomed ditch on a limestone plateau 170 metres above the Avon, where the ground falls away towards Bath.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Battle of Homildon Hill
Northumberland
At the summit of Humbleton Hill in north Northumberland sit the remains of an Iron Age: the centuries before Rome arrived: hillfort, a settlement d…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Battledykes
Angus
Assessed to have sheltered 50,000 to 60,000 men, this is one of the largest Roman camps ever built in Scotland: a single night's stop on a campaign…
- Near Forfar
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Battlesbury Camp
Wiltshire
An Iron Age fort above Warminster whose pits held a chariot-wheel hub, a carpenter's saw and a door latch-lifter: the gear of people living there.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bayard's Cove Fort
Devon
One of the few English blockhouses whose eleven gunports still face the water they were built to sweep, English Heritage has already named it among…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Baynard Castle, Cottingham
East Riding of Yorkshire
A double-ditched stronghold hosted a king twice within a century, then vanished so completely that within decades farmhouses stood inside its own e…
- Near Dunbar
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Fortified place · Medieval
Baynard's Castle
City of London
Two royal dynasties met their political end inside its walls: Lady Jane Grey's nine-day reign was formally ended here, and Richard III accepted the…
- Near London
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Beacon Hill Battery
Essex
Beacon Hill Battery is a layered defence of Harwich harbour, preserving Tudor, Napoleonic, Victorian and Second World War responses to the strategi…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Beacon Hill, Burghclere, Hampshire
Hampshire
One of Hampshire's best-preserved Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) hillforts, settlements defended by banks and ditc…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Beacon Ring
powys
A hilltop enclosure raised in the centuries before Rome arrived, with a royal monogram planted inside it in trees.
- Near Welshpool
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Fortified place · Roman
Bearsden Roman fort
East Dunbartonshire
Bearsden preserves one of the Antonine Wall’s best-known military bathhouses, discovered beneath twentieth-century housing and now protected close…
- Near Bearsden
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Beaudesert Castle
Warwickshire
An Iron Age fort reshaped into a Norman castle, seat of the de Montforts for more than a century, and now a mound with one stone on it.
- Near Henley-in-Arden
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumaris Castle
Isle of Anglesey
Beaumaris Castle is Edward I’s most symmetrical concentric fortress, designed to secure Anglesey after conquest but never completed; its sea-suppli…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumaris town walls
Isle of Anglesey
Beaumaris town walls show how Edward I’s initially unwalled colonial town responded to Owain Glyndŵr’s 1403 capture: a 15th-century circuit of ditc…
- Near Beaumaris
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumont Castle
Oxfordshire
A medieval castle at Mixbury, built either on a mound or as a circular banked enclosure.
- Near Mixbury
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Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumys Castle
Berkshire
The 1347 raid that killed a nobleman, terrified a son of Edward III, and ended in a forced marriage is the best-documented event at this otherwise…
- Near Swallowfield
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bedd-y-Cawr Hillfort
Denbighshire
One of a dense cluster of hillforts crowning the Rhos Hills above the River Elwy, its name recalling a giant's grave though no burial has ever been…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bedford Castle
Bedfordshire
For eight weeks in 1224 it withstood the concentrated military resources of the entire English crown, one of the longest and costliest sieges of th…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Beech Bottom Dyke
Hertfordshire
It likely belonged to a chain of earthworks - with Devil's Dyke and The Slad - that may have sealed the Catuvellauni's tribal capital between two r…
- Near Hertford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Beeston Castle
Cheshire
A stronghold with no keep at all: its builder trusted a sheer sandstone crag and a ring of D-shaped towers to do a keep's job instead.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Belbury Castle
Devon
Its very purpose is unresolved: hillfort or livestock pen: and its name preserves a stray echo of Beowulf in the Devon landscape.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Belfast Castle
County Antrim
The name has outlived four separate castles on two sites: a Victorian mansion on Cave Hill inherited the title from a medieval stronghold fought ov…
- Near Belfast
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bellister Castle
Northumberland
Bellister Castle combines a ruinous medieval tower with a nineteenth-century castellated mansion, preserving nearly eight centuries of adaptation n…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Belsar's Hill
Cambridgeshire
A fen-island stronghold that changed hands between prehistory and the Norman Conquest, sitting squarely on the only causeway into rebel-held Ely.
- Near Willingham
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Belsay Castle
Northumberland
Belsay Castle is a Grade I pele tower whose medieval defence became an attached manor, then a deliberately romantic folly within the Belsay estate.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Belvoir Castle
Leicestershire
Rebuilt at least four times on the same commanding ridge, the present castle is a Georgian fantasy of a medieval stronghold: yet it has housed one…
- 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
Bagenal's Castle
Down
A sixteenth-century Newry fortified house hidden within a bakery for generations, rediscovered in 1996 and restored as a public museum.
- Near Newry
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Balksbury
Hampshire
A once-triangular Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC) hillfort (a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts) largely swallowed by a bypass and housin…
- Near Andover
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinalacken Castle
County Clare
Ballinalacken Castle is a Burren tower house built in stages, where fifteenth-century defensive fabric and a 1641 Tudor chimney record centuries of…
- Near Doolin
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballincollig Castle
County Cork
Ballincollig preserves the keep (the great tower at a castle's heart), curtain wall and towers of a Barrett stronghold whose ownership and conditio…
- Near Ballincollig
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinskelligs Castle
County Kerry
A tower raised by the MacCarthy Mórs to watch a bay, now itself being watched over by the sea that is slowly taking its ground away.
- Near Ballinskelligs
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballycarbery Castle
County Kerry
Less than half of the high curtain wall that once enclosed Ballycarbery Castle still stands, its base pierced by arrow slits and a staircase buried…
- Near Cahersiveen
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyhannon Castle
County Clare
Ballyhannon Castle is an exceptionally intact fifteenth-century Clare tower house whose complex passages, defences and long MacNamara history survi…
- Near Quin
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyheigue Castle
County Kerry
The crenellated parapet that gives Ballyheigue Castle its name crowns a building that was never a fortress. What stands ruined above a golf course…
- Near Ballyheigue
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymaloe House
County Cork
Ballymaloe House incorporates traces of a fifteenth-century Anglo-Norman castle within a later country house that became a landmark of modern Irish…
- Near Shanagarry
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymarkahan Castle
County Clare
Ballymarkahan Castle is a MacNamara fifteenth-century tower house in Quin, recorded as a ruin for nearly two centuries and part of Clare’s dense ca…
- Near Quin
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Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyroney Castle
County Down
Ballyroney Castle records a County Down motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower raised on a mound with a walled court beside it) sit…
- Near Banbridge
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bangor Castle
County Down
Bangor Castle layers a former abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) site, a Victorian Jacobethan mansion and civic administration w…
- Near Bangor
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Fortified place · Medieval
Barmeath Castle
County Louth
Its grounds were shaped by the 18th-century landscape architect Thomas Wright, laid over a castle that had already stood for three centuries by the…
- Near Dundalk
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Barsalloch Fort
Dumfries and Galloway
The site carries two widely separated chapters of the human past. Aspects of Barsalloch Fort are thought to date to the Mesolithic period, placing…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Beacon Castle
Devon
At roughly 290 metres above sea level, Beacon Castle occupies a hilltop close to Parracombe in Devon, its position commanding the ground that falls…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Beacon Hill, Leicestershire
Leicestershire
An Iron Age hilltop settlement, of the centuries before Rome arrived from about 800 BC, on some of the oldest volcanic rock in Britain, inside a co…
- Near Woodhouse
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Belford Castle
northumberland
Philip Davis can see no reason to build a motte here when a better-defended prehistoric camp with a medieval chapel stands so close by: the identif…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bellaghy Bawn
County Londonderry
Bellaghy Bawn turns a Plantation-era fortified house built over a ringfort into a record of rebellion, civic care, archaeology and local cultural m…
- Near Bellaghy
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Fortified place · Medieval
Belle Isle Castle
County Fermanagh
Belle Isle Castle layers an eighteenth-century Lough Erne estate, designed gardens, changing family ownership and a modern hospitality afterlife on…
- Near Lisbellaw
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bellingham Castle
Northumberland
Bellingham Castle preserves the recorded location of a lost Northumberland motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth m…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Belvelly Castle
County Cork
Belvelly Castle commands the bridge approach to Great Island, a compact tower house whose strategic position drew medieval families, wartime use an…
- Near Cobh
- Easy path
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