Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Carra
County Mayo
One structure carries three successive hands - Anglo-Norman founders, a Gaelicised lordship, and a Cromwellian-era grantee - on the shore of Lough…
- Near Castlebar
- Rough ground
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 6 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
-
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Close
Devon
Castle Close is a modest but strategically placed Devon earthwork: a bank or ditch dug and heaped from the ground itself, with no masonry: whose li…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Coeffin
Argyll and Bute
A 13th-century hall-castle on a Lismore promontory, raised on the site of an earlier Viking stronghold and named for a Danish prince said to haunt…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Combe Castle
Wiltshire
A keep with at least four walled yards attached to it, and possibly five: an unusual arrangement for a twelfth-century castle.
- Near Castle Combe
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Crag
Cumbria
The summit fort was sliced in two by quarrying and now shares its rock outcrop with a First World War memorial: an ancient site reused as workshop,…
- Near Rosthwaite
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Ditches
Wiltshire
Three concentric ramparts survive as earthworks on the hill above south-east Tisbury.
- Near Tisbury
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Donovan
County Cork
A tower house blown apart by gunpowder still stands two-thirds intact on its riverside rock, its spiral staircase surviving the collapse that later…
- Near Clonakilty
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Dore
Cornwall
One of Cornwall's most closely investigated Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest) hillforts, later made famous by a Civil War retreat…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Drogo
Devon
Castle Drogo is England's last castle, a twentieth-century granite house that transformed medieval and Tudor motifs into a deliberately modern Nati…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Dyke
Devon
Castle Dyke is a hilltop fort in south Devon dating from roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest, a compact but strategically placed earthwork: a b…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Fraser
Aberdeenshire
The signed mason's mark of John Bell links this tower house to the same masonic family credited with Craigievar, Crathes and Midmar, the grandest o…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Roman
Castle Greg
West Lothian
One of the best-preserved Roman earthworks in Scotland: under an acre, with two ditches that were once fifteen feet deep.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Gurteen de la Poer
County Waterford
A Victorian baronial castle built by an Anglo-Norman Catholic dynasty, sharing its architect and builder with Kylemore Abbey and, since 1998, home…
- Near Dungarvan
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Hackett
County Galway
A Norman tower house whose owning family was said by W. B. Yeats to carry fairy blood, linking a modest Galway ruin to one of Ireland's most influe…
- Near Tuam
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Harrison
County Cork
A great house that vanished within living memory, its ballroom-scale hall once displaying relics dug up during the building of a nearby railway line.
- Near Bandon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Hewen
Cumbria
Excavation eventually proved this was no medieval castle at all, but an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) and Romano-…
- Near Penrith
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Hill, Chessington
Greater London
A medieval earthwork on an Oxford college's ancient deer park survives as both a scheduled monument and Kingston's highest-rated wildlife site: pro…
- Near Chessington
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Hill, Hampshire
Hampshire
A single bank and ditch on a New Forest ridge that gave rise to a dragon legend still remembered in a village pub name a mile away.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Hill, Mere
Wiltshire
A stone castle built for the king's own brother in 1253 was stripped to its footings within two centuries: earthworks above Mere are almost all tha…
- Near Mere
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Horneck
cornwall
Castle Horneck is a listed Georgian house near Penzance whose medieval name preserves only a tentative association with an earlier castle or fortif…
- Near Penzance
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle in Hagley Park
Worcestershire
A castle built already ruined: raised as sham wreckage in the 1740s using stone reputedly stripped from a dissolved abbey (a monastery headed by an…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Knob
Derbyshire
If built during the Anarchy, it would rank among Derbyshire's few surviving Norman castles: later repurposed as a Cold War nuclear-monitoring post.
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Knowe, Northumberland
Northumberland
Castle Knowe is a compact Iron Age hillfort, a defended settlement on high ground from the period before Rome arrived, in the Cheviots whose concen…
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Castle Law, Abernethy
Perth and Kinross
A contour fort above Abernethy, scheduled since 1964: older than the medieval lordship in the village below, and with no recorded connection to it.
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Castle Law, Forgandenny
Perth and Kinross
A multiple-enclosure hillfort above Forgandenny whose banks and ditches are effectively its entire history: the written record has almost nothing t…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Maine
County Kerry
A castle built into the middle of its own bridge, it held out for thirteen months under siege in 1599: longer than any other stronghold in Munster…
- Near Tralee
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Menzies
Perth and Kinross
A sixteenth-century Z-plan seat of the Menzies chiefs, sold off in pieces after 1910 and bought back by the clan society half a century later.
- Near Weem
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Naze
derbyshire
An Iron Age promontory fort that needed to defend one side only: the gritstone edge does the rest: and was found in 1957 to have been rebuilt again…
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Castle Neroche
Somerset
A castle named after a kennel for hunting dogs, whose earthworks are too big for a Norman castle: and which ended up as a base against poachers.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Nimble
Powys
A castle site near Old Radnor, marked by a ditched mound and an adjoining yard.
- Near Old Radnor
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle of Mey
Highland
The only home Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother ever owned outright, rescued from near-ruin in 1952 and still kept in family use by King Charles III…
- Near Mey
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Old Fort
West Midlands
A hill fort with a house standing inside it, and a second entrance that only survives in the notes of an antiquarian: an early collector-scholar of…
- Near Dudley
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Ring
Staffordshire
The highest point on Cannock Chase, held for five centuries and abandoned when Rome arrived: with a medieval hunting lodge inside the ring.
- Near Cannock Wood
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Rings, Wiltshire
Wiltshire
Castle Rings is an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground. It hide…
- Near Donhead St Mary
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Rising Castle
Norfolk
Castle Rising is one of Britain’s most impressive Norman castle landscapes: a finely carved keep, huge earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks…
- Near Castle Rising
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Roche
County Louth
A widow's determination to secure her Irish lands with a stone fortress in 1236 produced not just a formidable border castle but one of Ireland's m…
- Near Dundalk
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Rushen
Isle of Man
A working castle clock gifted by Elizabeth I in 1597 still keeps time above a fortress that served in turn as royal seat, prison and parliament hou…
- Near Douglas
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Salem, Cork
County Cork
A Norman tower house with 11-foot-thick walls became a refuge for early Quakers, hosting both George Fox and William Penn within a single decade of…
- Near Skibbereen
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Stalker
Argyll and Bute
A four-storey tower house on a tidal islet reachable only at low tide, restored twice from ruin and now among the best-preserved medieval castles i…
- Near Port Appin
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Tioram
Highland
A stronghold whose Gaelic name means "dry castle" sits on an island that vanishes under the tide twice a day: and served as Clanranald's seat for s…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Toot
Shropshire
A Mortimer castle destroyed in 1155 as punishment for its owner's rebellion: and a site that has never produced a single find.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Tump
Powys
An early castle at Trecastle, built by Bernard de Neufmarche and later rebuilt.
- Near Trecastle
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Tump, Dymock
Gloucestershire
A 14-metre earthen motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) at Dymock records one family's rise and a king's determination to tear such pri…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castlebourne folly
Worcestershire
A theatrical sham castle whose towers, mouldings and blocked doorway were built purely to be looked at - a Georgian answer to nearby Clent Castle,…
-
Fortified place · Roman
Castlecary Roman fort
Falkirk
Castlecary Roman Fort anchors an Antonine Wall landscape where archaeological finds: altars, a bathhouse, children’s shoes and military inscription…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Roman
Castlehill Fort
East Dunbartonshire
Castlehill marks an Antonine Wall fort whose surviving plantation masks important Sixth Legion distance slabs and evidence for the frontier’s const…
- Near Bearsden
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castlekirk
County Galway
Castlekirk, or Hen's Castle, is an exceptionally early mortared Irish castle on a tiny Lough Corrib island, remembered equally for its turbulent hi…
- Near Athenry
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castlelost Castle
County Westmeath
Its Irish name is not martial at all: 'the castle of the losset', a farmer's compliment comparing the surrounding land to a kneading-trough heaped…
- Near Mullingar
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castles and Town Walls of King Edward in Gwynedd
Gwynedd
This World Heritage Site brings together Edward I’s Gwynedd castles and walls: exceptional late-medieval fortifications that were also instruments…
- Near Caernarfon
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castles Camp
Somerset
Roman coins have been turned up on a hilltop fortified in the Iron Age, roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest, and nobody has explained why.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castlesteads, Greater Manchester
Greater Manchester
Castlesteads is a scheduled Iron Age (the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest) promontory fort (a coastal spur defended by banks throw…
- Near Bury
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castlethorpe Castle
Buckinghamshire
Built by a Flemish lord granted his manor by William the Conqueror, this timber stronghold was deliberately levelled by a royal commander in 1215 a…
- Near Castlethorpe
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castleton Town defences
Derbyshire
A ditch and bank cut into the hillside beneath Peveril Castle, tying the whole town of Castleton into its lord's medieval defences rather than leav…
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Caus Castle
Shropshire
A ruined castle on the Long Mountain foothills, overlooking the route from Shrewsbury to Montgomery.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Caverswall Castle
Staffordshire
An early seventeenth-century mansion built in castellar style inside the walls of a thirteenth-century castle.
- Near Caverswall
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cawdor Castle
Highland
A tower house said to have been built around a living holly tree, its site chosen by tradition after a gold-laden donkey lay down to rest beneath it.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cawood Castle
North Yorkshire
In 1465 a single enthronement feast at Cawood consumed 104 oxen and 25,000 gallons of wine: a display of archiepiscopal wealth rivalling a royal co…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Cefn Carnedd
Powys
A six-hectare hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement of the Iron Age: that grew from a much smaller one, and a candidate for the site of Caratacus…
- Near Caersws
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Prehistoric
Cefnllys Castle
Powys
A new castle built here by Roger Mortimer helped push Llywelyn ap Gruffudd into refusing fealty to Edward I: and into the war that ended Welsh inde…
- Near Llandrindod Wells
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cessford Castle
Scottish Borders
A Border Reiver stronghold whose name outlived it: the ruined tower still lends its title to the Duke of Roxburghe, who is Baron Ker of Cessford to…
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Chalbury Hillfort
Dorset
Chalbury Hillfort is a strategically placed settlement enclosure from the centuries before Rome arrived, with storage pits, hut platforms, burial m…
- Near Bincombe
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Charleville Castle
County Offaly
Roofless from 1968 until restoration began in 1973, this earl's Gothic folly is now better known for ghost hunts and film crews than for the grande…
- Near Tullamore
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Charlton Castle
Shropshire
A manor fortified by royal licence in 1316, lived in by the Lords of Powys for two centuries, and now too overgrown to read.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Charterhouse Camp
Somerset
A single-rampart hillfort on Mendip beside a Roman town: and a candidate for the lost settlement of Iscalis.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chartley Castle
Staffordshire
A ruin north of Stowe-by-Chartley, on the estate where Mary, Queen of Scots was imprisoned in 1585.
- Near Chartley
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Cheddar Gorge
Somerset
A limestone gorge in the Mendips holding the show caves where Britain's oldest complete skeleton was found.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cheney Longville Castle
Shropshire
A courtyard manor fortified by licence in 1394, shelled and captured in the Civil War, and held by one family since 1745.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chepstow Castle
Monmouthshire
Chepstow Castle is Britain’s oldest surviving post-Roman stone fortification, a defining Marcher stronghold above the Wye whose fabric spans Norman…
- Near Chepstow
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chepstow Port Wall
Monmouthshire
A single controlled gateway through 1,100 metres of stone wall let a medieval lord tax every trader entering Chepstow's market and port at once.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Cherbury Camp
Oxfordshire
An Iron Age enclosure larger than Uffington Castle yet built on flat, marshy ground with no hill in sight: and the unlikely birthplace of the Pusey…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chester Castle
Cheshire
A single walled site holds a Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongside) ori…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Chesters Hill Fort
East Lothian
A settlement of some twenty roundhouses survives inside its ramparts and ditches: Historic Environment Scotland rates it one of the best-preserved…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cheveley Castle
Cambridgeshire
The only castle of its kind ever built in Cambridgeshire, raised by a London Lord Mayor as a moated hunting lodge rather than a fortress.
- Near Cheveley
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chichester Castle
West Sussex
Two kings ordered it destroyed. The first order was ignored, the French took it, and the second was carried out.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chiddingstone Castle
Kent
Chiddingstone Castle preserves a Kent country-house site transformed from a Tudor timber dwelling into a Gothic Revival mansion, later becoming Den…
- Near Canterbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chilham Castle
Kent
Chilham Castle pairs a still-inhabited 1174 Norman keep (the castle's main tower, and its strongest building) with a notable 1616 Jacobean manor, a…
- Near Canterbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chillingham Castle
Northumberland
Chillingham Castle charts the transformation of a fortified Anglo-Scottish border stronghold into a restored historic house, while its grounds reta…
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Chilworth Ring
Hampshire
A prehistoric hillfort survives only as the shape of a suburban street: its single rampart (the raised bank thrown up around a fortified enclosure)…
- Near Chilworth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chipchase Castle
Northumberland
Chipchase Castle preserves a massive fourteenth-century pele tower within a Jacobean mansion, recording the conversion of a border defensive house…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chirk Castle
Wrexham
A castle lost to a royal court rather than a siege: and a parkland that still hides a stretch of Offa's Dyke, rediscovered by archaeologists only i…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Chiselbury
Wiltshire
An Iron Age ring fort still flanked by two mysterious cross dykes built to block the very ridge route it commands: with WWI regimental badges later…
- Near Fovant
- Some walking
_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1953850.jpg?width=800)
More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Caulfield
County Tyrone
Castle Caulfield preserves substantial ruins of a Plantation-era house, exposing how Caulfield’s grant overlaid an older O’Donnelly and O’Neill lan…
- Near Dungannon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Connell
County Limerick
The ruins of Castle Connell stand on a rock above the River Shannon, visible from the road as it approaches the village of Castleconnell, about 11…
- Near Castleconnell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Conway
County Kerry
A single stretch of medieval walling above the River Laune in Killorglin is all that survives of Castle Conway, a fortress that stood on this groun…
- Near Killorglin
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Head, Devon
Devon
Castle Head commands a tight bend of the River Tamar, where an Iron Age (the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest) promontory fort (a c…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Hill, Huddersfield
West Yorkshire
A vitrified fort: its ramparts burned hot enough to fuse the stone. Such sites are rare in England and usual in Scotland.
- Near Huddersfield
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Hill, Torrington
Devon
Castle Hill, Torrington, identifies two separate elevated earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) sites: the…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Howe
Cumbria
A steep, man-made mound rising over Kendal that once carried a timber Norman stronghold, now a public park with the earthworks still intact.
- Near Kendal
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Castle Law
Midlothian
Castle Law is a scheduled Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) hill fort in the Pentlands, preserving earthworks and a s…
- Near Edinburgh
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Otway
County Tipperary
Castle Otway preserves the ruins of an eighteenth-century Tipperary country house built against an older castle, shaped by the Otway family’s long…
- Near Tipperary
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Saunderson
CAVAN
A ruined Plantation-era family seat beside Upper Lough Erne, whose grounds now host an international Scout centre across the Ireland–Northern Irela…
- Near Belturbet
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Upton
County Antrim
Castle Upton turns a Plantation-era house into a layered record of Upton family politics, Robert Adam’s design and a major twentieth-century restor…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castlebawn
county-clare
The authorities blew it up in 1827 to clear out illicit poitín makers. Three of the four walls were built well enough to survive the explosives.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castlemore Moat
County Carlow
The last visible trace of Raymond le Gros, one of the Norman invasion's own commanders, who ruled this stretch of the Slaney valley from the mound…
- Near Carlow
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Castlepook
County Cork
A Norman tower still keeps its stone-vaulted roof intact after more than six centuries, even as vandals have stripped away its finer masonry.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Caterthun
Angus
Two Iron Age hillforts crown the same ridge: fortified settlements built by communities living before and during the early centuries of recorded hi…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Chalgrave Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber stronghold raised in two building phases around 1086, abandoned within two centuries, then excavated and levelled until nothing above grou…
- Near Chalgrave
-
Fortified place
Chapman's Pool
Dorset
Chapman’s Pool combines Jurassic Coast geology, a short-lived nineteenth-century lifeboat station and a Royal Marines memorial landscape above the…
- Near Worth Matravers
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Charlemont Fort
Armagh
Charlemont Fort was a strategically vital seventeenth-century Blackwater garrison, contested in Confederate and Williamite wars before its destruct…
- Near Charlemont
-
Settlement · Iron Age
Chisenbury Camp
Wiltshire
Excavated pottery, worked stone and human burial remains now sit in Devizes Museum, the clearest surviving trace of an Iron Age (from around 800 BC…
- Near Upavon
.jpg?width=800)
No places match those filters.