Fortified place · Medieval
Bembridge Fort
Isle of Wight
Bembridge Fort is a Palmerston-era command fort on the Isle of Wight, whose long military life spans invasion fears, submarine detection, air defen…
- Near Bembridge
- Some walking
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 3 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Benefield Castle
Northamptonshire
A minor ringwork: a castle enclosure ringed by a bank: whose garrison, serving the future Edward I, raided a neighbouring manor and stole a town's…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Benington Castle
Hertfordshire
One of at least 21 castles Henry II had torn down in 1177 - yet its earthworks survive because a Georgian house was later built to make use of them…
- Near Hertford
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bennachie
Aberdeenshire
Its summit fort at Mither Tap has stone ramparts with none of the vitrification seen at other Aberdeenshire hillforts, and the hill has been floate…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Benton Castle
Pembrokeshire
Two unequal round towers flanking an entrance above the wooded Eastern Cleddau, around a courtyard later taken into a private house.
- Near Burton
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Fortified place · Medieval
Berkeley Castle
Gloucestershire
The oldest continuously occupied castle in England still held by the family that rebuilt it in the 12th century, and the traditional scene of a kin…
- Near Gloucester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Berkhamsted Castle
Hertfordshire
A wooden fort raised within weeks of the Norman Conquest grew into a royal residence and administrative seat of the Earldom of Cornwall, and later…
- Near Berkhamsted
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry Camp
Devon
On a plateau some 140 metres above the sea, where Langham Field on Littlecombe Hill near Branscombe in Devon runs out towards the cliff, the earthw…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry Castle, Black Dog
Devon
Berry Castle is an unusual Devon earthwork, a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone, that challenges the expected form a…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry Castle, Somerset
Somerset
A defended hillside enclosure near Luccombe, marked by surviving banks.
- Near Luccombe
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry Head
Devon
An Iron Age hill fort here was largely erased by Napoleonic forts built in a single decade to guard the Torbay fleet from French invasion.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry Mound
Worcestershire
Excavation uncovered evidence of a later refortification episode that oddly matches local tradition of King Alfred trapping Danish raiders within i…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Berry Pomeroy Castle
Devon
A private fortress raised as late as the 1480s, then rebuilt inside its own walls as a four-storey Tudor mansion: two castles in one, sharing a sin…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry Ring
Staffordshire
A hillfort: a defended enclosure on high ground, ringed with banks and ditches: whose bank has almost gone but whose ditch is still eighteen metres…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry's Wood
Devon
A single limestone rampart (a defensive bank of earth or stone) still rings a wooded hilltop above the River Lemon, with a sunken approach and a po…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berth Hill
Staffordshire
Josiah Wedgwood II piped water off this hillfort, a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age, to his hall - damaging the inner rampart, a defens…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Bertha (Perth)
Perth and Kinross
A Roman fort north of Perth at the meeting of the Almond and the Tay.
- Near Perth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Berwick Castle
Northumberland
Berwick Castle’s repeated Anglo-Scottish captures and railway-era dismantling make its fragmentary remains an unusually direct record of changing b…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Betchworth Castle
Surrey
A crumbled fortified medieval stone house north of Brockham, its corners strengthened in the eighteenth century.
- Near Betchworth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Beverston Castle
Gloucestershire
A rare pentagonal castle, its bluish stone likely quarried alongside Calcot Manor's, that survived a 12th-century battle and a 17th-century siege a…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bevisbury
Hampshire
A Roman road cuts straight through this Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) fort's ramparts and still does today, as the ordinar…
- Near Chute
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bewcastle Castle
Cumbria
Its dry moat still follows the ditch of the Roman fort it replaced, and a rigged football match here once became the trigger for a Border reiver am…
- Near Brampton
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bickleigh Castle
Devon
Bickleigh Castle layers a Norman chapel, fifteenth-century Courtenay mansion and Civil War destruction beside the Exe, with its gatehouse and walls…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bicton Castle
Shropshire
An eleventh- or twelfth-century castle site at Bicton, where only the ditch and outer bank survive.
- Near Bicton
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Sacred place · Roman
Biddlestone Chapel
Northumberland
Biddlestone Chapel is a rare Catholic chapel built into a thirteenth-century pele tower, where medieval defence, Gothic Revival worship, and wartim…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bigbury Camp
Kent
Bigbury Camp is east Kent’s only confirmed Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) hillfort, a defended settlement on high ground, prese…
- Near Canterbury
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Fortified place · Medieval
Biggleswade Castle
Bedfordshire
A castle whose stone was never dressed and whose walls were never built above earth: its entire form survives only as ditches and cropmarks along a…
- Near Biggleswade
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Bincknoll Castle
Wiltshire
A single grassy promontory carries two unresolved stories at once: a disputed Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) fort and the sturd…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bindon Hill
Dorset
Bindon Hill is a vast Iron Age: roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest: coastal enclosure whose scale and sparse settlement evidence suggest a pas…
- Near West Lulworth
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Birr Castle
County Offaly
A private family seat whose grounds held the largest telescope on Earth for seventy years, and now host a working node in a Europe-wide radio-astro…
- Near Birr
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bishopton Castle
County Durham
Its motte: the earthen mound a castle was raised on: was one of only twenty English mounds core-sampled and radiocarbon-dated by archaeologists che…
- Near Bishopton
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bitchfield Tower
Northumberland
Bitchfield Tower is a restored fifteenth-century pele tower whose attached manor and succession of owners chart five centuries of Northumberland es…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Ball Camp
Somerset
A defended hilltop near Dunster, with a deep ditch and high bank still visible.
- Near Dunster
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Black Castle, Bristol
Bristol
A pretend fortress built entirely from a factory's black waste slag, so convincingly castellated that a visiting Horace Walpole first mistook it fo…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Castle, East Lothian
East Lothian
A double ring of earthen ramparts with two carefully placed causewayed entrances, sited between two other named hillforts in a dense East Lothian c…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Black Ditches, Cavenham
Suffolk
Four and a half miles of undated dyke running across the Suffolk breckland, from the Lark to the Icknield Way.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Head, Cornwall
Cornwall
Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) ramparts above St Austell Bay share the headland with later military remains and a…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Hill (South Lanarkshire)
South Lanarkshire
A hill valued as a viewpoint for four thousand years: with a cairn, a mound of piled stones often covering a burial, that may line up on Tinto to f…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Black Meldon
Scottish Borders
A hillfort whose seven round houses survive as ring-grooves: and five of them stand in a deliberate straight line.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blackbury Camp
Devon
Blackbury Camp is a well-preserved Middle Iron Age Devon hillfort, an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground between roug…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blackcastle Hill, East Lothian
East Lothian
A single earthen bank, not the layered ramparts of its grander neighbours, rings this Lammermuir summit: a modest, univallate answer to the same Ir…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blackdown Rings
Devon
Blackdown Rings preserves an Iron Age hillfort, a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts from about 800 BC, commanding the River Avon valley in…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blacker's Hill
Somerset
A geophysical survey in 1999 found that the two circuits here were not built together: the fort began with one rampart, a defensive bank of earth o…
- Near Chilcompton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blackness Castle
Falkirk
Blackness Castle is a Firth of Forth fortress transformed from Crichton residence and state prison into an advanced artillery work, prison and ammu…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bladon Castle
Derbyshire
A castle that was never meant to defend anything: its battlements front little more than a single long wall, built purely for effect.
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blaenllynfi Castle
Powys
A privately owned ruined stone castle near Bwlch, probably of the early thirteenth century and captured several times.
- Near Bwlch
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blair Castle
Perth and Kinross
The ancestral home of Clan Murray and historic seat of the Dukes of Atholl.
- Near Blair Atholl
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Blaise Castle Estate
Bristol
A folly built to fake a medieval past gave its name to a Neoclassical mansion, a landscaped gorge and nine cottages that became the template for ev…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bleddfa Castle
Powys
A castle of mound and courtyard near Llangunllo, known also as Bledeach or Bledvach.
- Near Llangunllo
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blenkinsopp Castle
Northumberland
Blenkinsopp Castle captures the long conversion of a medieval border tower into a Victorian mansion, then a fire-damaged ruin with a surviving dome…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bletchingley Castle
Surrey
A Norman earthen castle above Bletchingley village, where the earthworks survived largely undisturbed beneath later woodland.
- Near Bletchingley
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bletsoe Castle
Bedfordshire
The birthplace, in 1441 or 1443, of Margaret Beaufort: mother of Henry VII and grandmother of the entire Tudor dynasty.
- Near Bletsoe
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Blewburton Hill
Oxfordshire
Three distinct building phases and a violent final abandonment were followed, centuries later, by an early Anglo-Saxon cemetery dug straight into t…
- Near Blewbury
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bloodgate Hill Iron Age Fort
Norfolk
Bloodgate Hill is Norfolk’s largest known Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillfort, a 210-metre circular enclosure whose survivi…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Boddington Camp
Buckinghamshire
A single rampart: a defensive bank of earth or stone: and ditch enclose some six hectares of wooded hilltop east of Wendover, one of the largest de…
- Near Boddington
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bodelwyddan Castle
Denbighshire
A Tudor manor rebuilt twice over: once as Greek Revival, once as dramatic Gothick castle: before serving as a girls' school, a war hospital and a n…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bodiam Castle
East Sussex
Bodiam is the iconic English moated quadrangular castle, designed in 1385 for both defence and display and now conserved as a National Trust landmark.
- Near Bodiam
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Boghead (bastle)
Northumberland
Boghead is a rare, relatively unmodified border bastle (a fortified farmhouse of the Anglo-Scottish border, with livestock housed below) whose defe…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolbec Castle
Buckinghamshire
A stronghold Hugh II de Bolbec had no right to build, raised without royal licence during a civil war and condemned by a pope before Cromwell finis…
- Near Whitchurch
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolebroke Castle
East Sussex
A modest Tudor hunting lodge with an outsized claim to fame: reputedly the base from which Henry VIII pursued his courtship of Anne Boleyn.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolesworth Castle
Cheshire
A castellated sandstone mansion remodelled by the architect of Portmeirion, still run by the family that bought it in 1856 and now known as much fo…
- Near Tattenhall
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolingbroke Castle
Lincolnshire
A future king was born within these walls: Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, giving the ruin a direct line to the English crown.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolsover Castle
Derbyshire
A working medieval stronghold was abandoned to ruin, then rebuilt from scratch in the 1600s as a fantasy of turrets and painted ceilings meant pure…
- Near Bakewell
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bolton Castle
North Yorkshire
A single family has held these walls since 1379: surviving a royal burning, Civil War slighting, and six months as prison to a captive Scottish queen.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bondgate Tower
Northumberland
Bondgate Tower is Alnwick’s surviving medieval gateway, turning a town-wall project of the Percy earls into a working feature of the modern street.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Boringdon Camp
Devon
Boringdon Camp is a scheduled bank-and-ditch monument above the Plym Valley, layered over an older ring ditch and dating from the period the centur…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Roman
Borough Hill
Northamptonshire
One of Britain's largest Iron Age hillforts lies beneath a working BBC transmitter mast: three thousand years of settlement crowned by shortwave br…
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Borough Hill Roman villa
Northamptonshire
A Roman villa with its own hypocaust heating system, deliberately reburied by its Victorian excavator to protect it: so the past survives precisely…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Borthwick Castle
Midlothian
Borthwick Castle is an exceptionally complete 1430 Scottish tower house, associated with Mary, Queen of Scots and visibly marked by Cromwell’s 1650…
- Near Borthwick
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Fortified place · Medieval
Borve Castle, Benbecula
Outer Hebrides
On the machair at the south-west tip of Benbecula, in the Western Isles, the ruined shell of a three-storey tower house stands with its north wall…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bossiney Castle
Cornwall
Bossiney Castle is a scheduled Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) whose private, largely unexcavated mound preserves the early…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bothal Castle
Northumberland
Bothal Castle preserves a medieval gatehouse and curtain-wall fragments within a continuously adapted estate that passed from the Bertrams to the O…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bothwell Castle
South Lanarkshire
A large medieval castle on a high, steep bank above a bend in the Clyde, between Bothwell and Uddingston.
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Fortified place · Roman
Bothwellhaugh Roman Fort
North Lanarkshire
Bothwellhaugh Roman Fort reveals how a crossing of the South Calder linked soldiers, cavalry, bathing and the wider Antonine frontier landscape.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bourne Castle
Lincolnshire
Bourne Castle survives as earthworks and moats in Wellhead Park, with survey evidence preserving the footprint of a long-lived medieval manor-castl…
- Near Bourne
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bow Castle Broch
Scottish Borders
One of only three brochs surviving in the Scottish Borders, and the only one to have yielded a Roman cockerel-shaped brooch alongside 2nd-century a…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bowes Castle
County Durham
An unusually rare hall-keep design, raised at royal expense against the threat from Scotland, seeded one of England's few deliberately planned medi…
- Near Bowes
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Fortified place · Medieval
Brackenbury Battery
Suffolk
A coastal battery built over by housing, remembered now for what it did in July 1939.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bradley hill fort
Cheshire
The smallest of Cheshire's seven Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) hill forts, it turned a single bank, ditch and a stream's s…
- Near Frodsham
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Braemar Castle
Aberdeenshire
Built in 1628 to check the rising Farquharsons, burned by a Farquharson colonel sixty years later, and now restored and run entirely by local volun…
- Near Braemar
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Braich-y-Dinas
Conwy
Braich-y-Dinas was a major Penmaenmawr hillfort: an Iron Age settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground, from about 800 BC until the R…
- Near Conwy
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bramber Castle
West Sussex
The ruins of a Norman castle of mound and walled yard, caput of the great feudal barony of Bramber, long held by the Braose family.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Brampton Bryan Castle
Herefordshire
A three-week Civil War siege here was commanded by a woman, Brilliana Harley, whose defence of the castle became one of the conflict's best-documen…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Brancepeth Castle
County Durham
A coal-mining fortune rebuilt this castle so thoroughly in the 1820s that its walls now read as Regency ambition wrapped around a Norman skeleton.
- Near Brancepeth
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Fortified place · Medieval
Brandon Castle
Warwickshire
A stone castle pulled down in 1265 because its owner backed the king: now low earthworks disappearing under scrub.
- Near Brandon
- 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
Benburb Castle
County Armagh
Benburb Castle commands the Blackwater border from a limestone cliff, joining a restored historic bawn with later religious and nineteenth-century…
- Near Moy
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Berry Castle, Huntshaw
Devon
Berry Castle preserves a rectangular Huntshaw Wood enclosure whose 2015 clearance revealed opposing entrances but left its Roman or early farming-p…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Birrens Roman Fort (Blatobulgium)
Dumfries and Galloway
More inscribed and sculptured Roman stones have been recovered from Birrens than from any other site in Scotland, and it is this dense scatter of a…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Roman
Black Hill Roman Camps
Perth and Kinross
Two Roman camps within the extensive military complex centred on the fort at Ardoch.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blackrock Castle
County Cork
Blackrock Castle began as Cork’s anti-piracy river fort and now hosts an observatory, turning a harbour defence into a place for public astronomy.
- Near Cork
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Blackwater Castle
County Cork
Blackwater Castle layers a Norman fortress over a much older promontory fort: a headland cut off by ramparts to make a defensible enclosure: preser…
- Near Lismore
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Blarney Castle
County Cork
Blarney Castle is a MacCarthy stronghold whose fifteenth-century keep carries the Blarney Stone, connecting a turbulent medieval history with Irela…
- Near Blarney
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bledisloe Tump
Gloucestershire
A timber castle and a mysterious raised mound once watched over the River Severn here, destroyed in the 1970s and leaving only rival theories about…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Block House (Melcombe)
Dorset
Melcombe’s lost Block House records an early modern town-built artillery fort, showing how Weymouth’s harbour communities developed local defences…
- Near Weymouth
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bolt Tail
Devon
Bolt Tail preserves faint remains of an ancient fort built across a South Hams headland, later marked by nearby shipwrecks.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Borough Hill, Sawston
Cambridgeshire
A broad oval enclosure some 430 metres across, ringed by more than one bank and ditch: a defensive scheme built at real scale, not a token boundary.
- Near Sawston
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bottreaux Castle
Cornwall
Bottreaux Castle survives chiefly as earthworks, but its motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) preserves the footprint of…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Bourn Castle
Cambridgeshire
A Norman sheriff's earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) stronghold that burned in the 13th century and wa…
- Near Bourn
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Bow Hill, West Sussex
West Sussex
A South Downs ridge carrying a cross dyke, tumuli, long barrows, an Iron Age hillfort and four Bronze Age barrows: the interest is along it, not on…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Branny
County Tyrone
Branny is a compact Tyrone townland whose protected hilltop enclosure and sheep-fold name preserve both ancient and pastoral landscape history.
- Near Omagh
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