Fortified place · Iron Age
Cadson Bury
Cornwall
A single bank and ditch ringing 2.5 hectares above the Lynher, with opposed entrances east and west and not one house platform visible inside it.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 5 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caer Bach
Conwy
A small, little-investigated hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age: above the Conwy valley whose double defences still hold the p…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caer Bran
Cornwall
The inner wall of Caer Bran was once a circular stone-lined rampart (a defensive embankment ringing the site) twelve feet thick, enclosing a space…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caer Caradoc
Shropshire
A hill above Church Stretton, named for Caradog and distinct from the fort near Bucknell.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caer Caradoc (Chapel Lawn)
shropshire
Two Shropshire hillforts sixteen miles apart carry this name, and both are claimed as the site of Caratacus's last battle against Rome.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caer Castell Camp
Cardiff
A nine-metre earthen mound still rises inside a working school's grounds, one of the few Norman-period defences to survive Cardiff's expansion larg…
- Near Rumney, Cardiff
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caer Drewyn
Denbighshire
A dry-stone rampart (a defensive embankment ringing the site) nearly three hectares in extent, still remembered as the muster point where Owain Gly…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caer Euni
Gwynedd
Caer Euni is a compact, expanded Iron Age hillfort: a settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground from roughly 800 BC until the Roman c…
- Near Llandderfel
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Roman
Caer Gybi (fort)
Isle of Anglesey
Caer Gybi is a rare Roman coastal fortlet at Holyhead whose substantial walls were reused for St Cybi’s monastery, linking late Roman defence with…
- Near Holyhead
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Caer Lêb
isle-of-anglesey
A double-banked enclosure on marshy ground west of Brynsiencyn where an 1865 dig found a Roman coin, a bronze brooch and Samian pottery: and, above…
- Near Brynsiencyn
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caer y Twr
isle-of-anglesey
An Iron Age hillfort on the summit of Holyhead Mountain whose ruined ramparts still stand three metres high, with the footings of a later tower: a…
- Near Holyhead
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caerau Hillfort
Cardiff
A ruined medieval church and an unrecorded castle mound sit inside the ramparts, three layers of settlement stacked on one Cardiff ridge.
- Near Cardiff
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Caergwrle Castle
Flintshire
The last castle built by a Welsh ruler before the conquest of 1282, it changed hands from Dafydd ap Gruffydd to an English queen within six years,…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caerlaverock Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Caerlaverock is the UK’s only triangular castle, retaining a moat, great gatehouse and Renaissance lodging amid a history of sieges, rebuilding and…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Caerleon Roman Fortress and Baths
Newport
Caerleon is one of only three permanent legionary fortresses in Roman Britain, with unusually accessible remains of its baths, amphitheatre and bar…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caernarfon Castle
Gwynedd
Caernarfon Castle is Edward I’s monumental administrative fortress in north Wales, a deliberately Roman-imperial design whose defences, unfinished…
- Near Caernarfon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caernarfon town walls
Gwynedd
Caernarfon’s town walls are an unusually intact Edwardian circuit, built with the castle to establish a new administrative capital and still defini…
- Near Caernarfon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caerphilly Castle
Caerphilly
Britain's first concentric castle, ringed by artificial lakes so elaborate one historian called them the most sophisticated water defences in the c…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caesar's Camp, Bracknell Forest
Berkshire
A mile-long rampart shaped like an oak leaf, built by hand on ground too poor to farm: one of the largest hillforts in southern England, sustained…
- Near Crowthorne
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caesar's Camp, Rushmoor and Waverley
Surrey
One of the largest multivallate hillforts in southern England, its Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) ramparts were later reused wh…
- Near Farnborough
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caherduff Castle
County Mayo
Taken into Irish state care in 1918, this Mayo tower house survives today chiefly as a protected National Monument, its stone walls the last clear…
- Near Ballina
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cahir Castle
County Tipperary
One of the largest castles in Ireland, built on a river island where a stone-fort name, a royal siege, a notorious murder trial and a Cromwellian s…
- Near Cahir
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cainhoe Castle
Bedfordshire
Its entire village died with the Black Death in 1348, then lay forgotten until 20th-century excavation uncovered the earthworks of a Norman motte,…
- Near Clophill
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cairnbulg Castle
Aberdeenshire
One of nine strongholds historian W. Douglas Simpson grouped as the castles of the Knuckle, Aberdeenshire's rocky north-east headland, and still he…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cairnburgh Castle
Argyll and Bute
A single fortress split across two separate islets in the Treshnish Isles, held in turn by the heirs of Somerled and the Macleans of Duart for over…
- Near Tobermory
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Caisteal Grugaig
Highland
A drystone tower still rising over its own five-step internal stair and a triangular lintel massive enough to have never needed a keystone.
- Near Shiel Bridge
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caister Castle
Norfolk
Caister Castle is a rare fifteenth-century moated castle whose Fastolf and Paston ownership stories, 1469 siege and rich documentary record in the…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caldicot Castle
Monmouthshire
A Norman stronghold rebuilt by the king's own uncle in the 1380s, then rescued from farmyard ruin by a Victorian family who filled its towers with…
- Near Caldicot
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caldwall Castle
Worcestershire
One tower is all that survives of a courtyard castle once laid out like Stokesay in Shropshire: four towers around a yard, now reduced to a single…
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Callaly Castle
Northumberland
Callaly Castle layers a medieval pele tower within a long-evolving country house, revealing how Northumberland’s defensive residences were transfor…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Calshot Castle
Hampshire
One of Henry VIII's Device Forts still standing almost exactly where the Tudor navy needed it, later reinvented three times over: as a smuggling wa…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caludon Castle
West Midlands
One large fragment of sandstone wall is all that is left of a house restyled as a castle in 1305 and held by the Mowbrays until 1481.
- Near Coventry
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Calvay Castle
Outer Hebrides
A ruined castle occupies a small islet off the island of Calbhaigh, at the eastern approaches to Loch Boisdale on South Uist, reached only by a cau…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Camber Castle
East Sussex
A Device Fort built by Henry VIII that was already obsolete before it was finished, then left stranded a mile inland as the sea it was built to gua…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cambridge Castle
Cambridgeshire
A single earthen mound on the city's highest ground is all that survives of a royal fortress that Edward I once rebuilt at a cost topping £2,630 in…
- Near Cambridge
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Candleston Castle
Bridgend
A fortified manor abandoned to the sand, spared the fate of neighbouring Kenfig Castle only by the extra few feet of ground it happened to stand on.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Cannington Camp
Somerset
A hilltop held through the Bronze Age, roughly 2500-800 BC, and the Iron Age, from about 800 BC until the Romans came - argued over as the site of…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Canterbury Castle
Kent
Canterbury Castle is a major Norman royal stronghold on the Dover–London road, whose Henry I keep, later jail use and industrial damage preserve th…
- Near Canterbury
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Capler Camp
Herefordshire
Its Domesday-era name records it as a lookout post above the Wye: a purpose the double ramparts still make obvious a thousand years on.
- Near Fownhope
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Captain of St Mawes
Cornwall
St Mawes pairs an unusually ornate Henrician clover-leaf artillery fort with Pendennis across the Carrick Roads, showing how Tudor coastal defence…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cardiff Castle
Cardiff
A Roman fort, a Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) with the largest earth mound built anywhere in Wales, and a Victorian fanta…
- Near Cardiff
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Cardiff Roman Fort
Cardiff
Beneath the mock-medieval towers of Cardiff Castle lie the walls of a Roman fort whose original Latin name has never been settled. Candidates drawn…
- Near Cardiff
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cardigan Castle
Ceredigion
A working medieval fortress became a private Regency house, then a near-ruin occupied by one woman for sixty years: until Cardigan itself brought i…
- Near Cardigan
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cardoness Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Cardoness Castle is a remarkably preserved fifteenth-century Galloway tower house whose MacCulloch history, Gordon feud and state protection make i…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carew Castle
Pembrokeshire
Walls of Carboniferous limestone rising above a tidal millpond, carrying more than nine centuries of building.
- Near Carew
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carisbrooke Castle
Isle of Wight
Carisbrooke Castle is the Isle of Wight’s strongest historic fortress, evolving from early defensive occupation to an Elizabethan bastioned fort an…
- Near Carisbrooke
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Carl Wark
South Yorkshire
A rampart (an encircling bank built for defence) described as unlike anything else in Northern England, guarding a cliff-edge enclosure whose build…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carlisle Castle
Cumbria
A working stone keep (the great tower at a castle's heart) raised in the 1120s and fought over for the next 600 years, ending as the last English f…
- Near Carlisle
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carlow Castle
County Carlow
Carlow Castle was Ireland’s first towered keep, a bold early-thirteenth-century design now reduced to its western wall and two corner towers.
- Near Carlow
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carlton Castle
Lincolnshire
Carlton Castle, known as Castle Hill, marks the site of a once substantial twelfth-century motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tow…
- Near Castle Carlton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carmarthen Castle
Carmarthenshire
A castle destroyed and rebuilt at least six times in a single century, then site of a royal death that put a Tudor on the English throne a generati…
- Near Carmarthen
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carn Brea Castle
Cornwall
Carn Brea turns a medieval chapel into a fantastical Basset hunting lodge perched directly on summit boulders, leaving possible earlier masonry vis…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Carn Liath (broch)
Highland
Excavated twice a century apart, its walls conceal a Bronze Age burial that predates the broch by centuries: the tower was built over an older grav…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carnasserie Castle
Argyll and Bute
A ruined 16th-century tower house stands on raised ground about 2 kilometres north of Kilmartin, at the head of Kilmartin Glen in Argyll and Bute.…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carndochan Castle
Gwynedd
Carndochan Castle is a small Welsh stone castle on the Lliw Valley ridge, whose incomplete historical record is sharpened by recent excavation and…
- Near Llanuwchllyn
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Roman
Carpow Roman Fort
Perth and Kinross
A thirty-acre Roman fort at the meeting of the Tay and the Earn, held from the late second century into the early third.
- Near Carpow
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Carreg Cennen Castle
Carmarthenshire
A cave beneath the walls holds its own freshwater spring, running deep into the hillside: the detail that let a fortress survive on a waterless lim…
- Near Llandeilo
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carreghofa Castle
Powys
A Marcher castle that changed hands at least six times in 135 years, was probably a silver mine as well as a fortress, and was traded once for a pr…
- Near Carreghofa
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrick Castle
Argyll and Bute
A Campbell stronghold built on a rock in Loch Goil, hosted a hunting king and a queen's overnight stay, then was deliberately burned by a Royal Nav…
- Near Carrick Castle
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrickabraghy Castle
County Donegal
A rock accessible only at low tide gave one clan control of Inishowen's coast for four centuries, then hid the peninsula's last great lord as he pl…
- Near Clonmany
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrickkildavnet Castle
County Mayo
A four-storey tower built to watch a narrow sea-passage became one of the strongholds of Grace O'Malley, the sixteenth-century pirate queen of the…
- Near Achill
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carriganass Castle
County Cork
A tower house perched directly over the Ouvane river, built by an O'Sullivan Beare chief and captured in the campaign that followed Kinsale: now a…
- Near Kealkill
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrigaphooca Castle
County Cork
A five-storey tower raised by one branch of the MacCarthys just as another rebuilt Blarney nearby: and a refuge for a lord pardoned by Elizabeth I…
- Near Macroom
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrignacurra Castle
County Cork
One of only three Cork tower houses built with a triangular gun-loop bastion called a redan, and the only one where a dig turned up coins two centu…
- Near Macroom
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrigrohane Castle
County Cork
Carrigrohane Castle overlooks the River Lee from a Cork cliff edge, combining a MacCarthy-associated stronghold, Confederate-Wars decline, nineteen…
- Near Cork
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Carrock Fell
Cumbria
A rare outcrop of gabbro in a range of crumbling slate, its summit crowned by an Iron Age hillfort, a defended hilltop settlement from the centurie…
- Near Keswick
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carsluith Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Carsluith Castle is a sixteenth-century Galloway tower house whose Lindsay and Brown history, Catholic recusancy and surviving hall-and-stair archi…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cartington Castle
Northumberland
Cartington Castle is a partly restored Northumberland ruin whose medieval pele tower, Royalist siege, and nineteenth-century conservation trace cen…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cary Castle
Somerset
A castle a king abandoned the siege of Bristol to attack: and starved out rather than broke into.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caskieben
Aberdeenshire
A timber tower's mound and moat still trace the outline beneath Keith Hall, a mansion that grew from Z-plan castle to Georgian seat over seven cent…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castallack Round
Cornwall
Castallack Round preserves the rampart (a defensive bank of earth or stone) of a Cornish enclosed settlement and the remains of a later courtyard h…
- Near Lamorna
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell Aberlleiniog
Isle of Anglesey
A Norman stronghold that lost a pitched siege to a returning Welsh prince in 1094, with 124 defenders killed: one of the rare Anglesey castles whos…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell Arnallt
Monmouthshire
A Welsh ruler's fortified court, wiped out in one night of retribution for a Christmas massacre at Abergavenny Castle in 1175.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castell Caer Seion
Conwy
Castell Caer Seion is an Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) Conwy hillfort (a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age) with a r…
- Near Conwy
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castell Cawr
Conwy
An Iron Age hillfort (a hilltop site enclosed by ramparts of earth) in woodland above Abergele, noted by antiquaries alongside the traces of a Roma…
- Near Conwy
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell Coch
cardiff
Three Victorian-roofed towers rise from the remains of a thirteenth-century stronghold, making Castell Coch a deliberate meeting of medieval ruin a…
- Near Tongwynlais
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Castell Dinas
Powys
The highest castle in England or Wales, built in stone inside the ramparts of an Iron Age hillfort a thousand years older: a defended hilltop settl…
- Near Talgarth
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Castell Dinas Brân
Denbighshire
A ruined stone castle crowning an Iron Age hillfort, built by a Welsh prince as a buffer against England: then burned by its own defenders rather t…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell Du
Powys
A castle of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd that appears once in the documents, in 1271, and is never mentioned again.
- Near Sennybridge
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell Gwallter
Ceredigion
A Norman motte still stands unbreached by a single stone wall: its timber tower long gone but the earthworks and ditches that ringed it remain almo…
- Near Llandre
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castell Henllys
Pembrokeshire
Four roundhouses and a granary reconstructed on their excavated foundations inside a defended enclosure of the pre-Roman centuries.
- Near Nevern
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell Meredydd
Newport
Castell Meredydd preserves a compact, contested thirteenth-century Welsh castle where Morgan ap Hywel resisted marcher pressure, a round tower and…
- Near Machen
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell Moel
carmarthenshire
Castell Moel preserves two uncertain stories at Llangain: the overgrown remains of a late-medieval hall house and a reported earlier castle mound n…
- Near Carmarthen
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castell Nadolig
Ceredigion
A farmer's spade here turned up the Penbryn Spoons, a pair of Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) bronze divination tools now held i…
- Near Aberystwyth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castell y Bere
ceredigion
Castell y Bere is Llywelyn the Great's long, rock-bound castle in the Dysynni Valley, later captured by Edward I and abandoned after a Welsh revolt.
- Near Llanfihangel-y-pennant
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castercliff
Lancashire
Castercliff is a scheduled Iron Age (the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest) multivallate hillfort, a settlement defended by multiple…
- Near Colne
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Casterley Camp
Wiltshire
A very large enclosure on the Wiltshire downs from the Iron Age, from about 800 BC until the Romans came, which may never have been defensive and w…
- Near Upavon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Acre Castle and town walls
Norfolk
Castle Acre is an exceptional planned medieval landscape where a Norman castle, Cluniac monastery, deer park and walled settlement were consciously…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle an Dinas, St Columb Major
Cornwall
Three concentric rings of bank and ditch around a summit that already held two burial mounds a thousand years before anyone thought to fortify it.
- Near St Columb Major
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Batch
Somerset
A Norman earthwork on a ridge above Weston-super-Mare that may not be a motte at all: the hollow in its top suggests a ringwork, a castle enclosure…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Campbell
Clackmannanshire
Castle Campbell was the lowland seat of Clan Campbell’s earls and dukes of Argyll, where a fifteenth-century tower grew into a royal and political…
- Near Alloa
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Camps
Cambridgeshire
A Domesday-era manor whose earthen motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) once carried the largest fortress in Cambridgeshir…
- Near Castle Camps
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Caherkinmonwee Castle
County Galway
A working family home today, this five-storey tower house stood roofless for two centuries before a stonemason bought and rebuilt it by hand, nail…
- Near Kinvara
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Carbury Castle, County Kildare
County Kildare
Carbury Castle layers a Norman castle mound, medieval fortress and Colley manor on the ancestral landscape of the Dukes of Wellington.
- Near Carbury
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Carn Euny
Cornwall
Carn Euny preserves the visible stone houses and a 20-metre fogou of a settlement occupied from the Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman co…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carra Castle, Antrim
County Antrim
Carra layers a late-medieval coastal residence over ground used for flint working in the middle Stone Age, roughly 9000–4000 BC, and became the sce…
- Near Cushendall
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrickfergus Castle
County Antrim
Carrickfergus Castle is a rare, deeply layered Norman waterfront fortress whose changing defences map centuries of power on Belfast Lough.
- Near Carrickfergus
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrickmines Castle
County Dublin
Carrickmines matters because its Anglo-Norman frontier defences, massacre history and M50 campaign made buried archaeology a public argument about…
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Carrigogunnell
County Limerick
Carrigogunnell Castle sits on an outcrop of volcanic trap rock near the village of Clarina, County Limerick, its ruined keep still overlooking the…
- Near Caherconlish
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Balfour
County Fermanagh
Castle Balfour pairs a restored Plantation-era Scottish-style castle with evidence of an earlier ringfort, revealing deep continuity at Lisnaskea’s…
- Near Lisnaskea
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No places match those filters.