Fortified place · Medieval
Crom Castle
County Fermanagh
Crom Castle layers a Plantation stronghold, resistance to two Jacobite sieges, and a nineteenth-century country house across an Upper Lough Erne es…
- Near Newtownbutler
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 8 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cromwell's Castle
Cornwall
A Civil War gun tower on Tresco, built to bar hostile ships from New Grimsby harbour and later enlarged for a new imperial conflict.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Crookston Castle
Glasgow City
The only medieval castle still standing within Glasgow's boundaries, and the very first property the National Trust for Scotland ever acquired.
- Near Gloucester
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Fortified place · Medieval
Croom Castle
County Limerick
Two broken tower walls at a bend in the River Maigue mark a fortress that gave the FitzGeralds of Kildare their cry, Crom Abú: ‘Croom for ever’.
- Near Croom
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Croome Court
Worcestershire
The house served as Capability Brown's first architectural commission, then later a Catholic school, the Hare Krishna movement's UK headquarters, a…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Crosskirk Broch
Highland
A broch built inside an older promontory fort, fully excavated and then bulldozed into the sea in 1972: it survives only as a record, not a ruin.
- Near Reay
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Roman
Croy Hill
North Lanarkshire
Croy Hill is the Antonine Wall’s exceptional unditched sector, combining difficult geology, frontier forts, a bathhouse and rich religious finds.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Crug Eryr Castle
Powys
A Welsh prince's castle where the Archbishop of Canterbury stopped in March 1188 to recruit for the Third Crusade.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Crug Hywel
Powys
An Iron Age fort on a flat-topped hill that gave Crickhowell its name: though the name may not have belonged to the hill first.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cruggleton Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Cruggleton Castle is a rare multi-period coastal stronghold where excavations revealed occupation from the Iron Age (roughly 800 BC until the Roman…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cuckney Castle
Nottinghamshire
Cuckney is a short-lived lordly experiment whose low castle mound and faint enclosed yard still meet the edge of the parish churchyard.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cullahill Castle
County Laois
A MacGillapatrick tower house with a Sheela na Gig on its outer wall, including patterned stonework around its mullioned windows and traces of an O…
- Near Cullahill
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Culverhay Castle
Somerset
A ringwork castle whose date is uncertain by more than a century: and which was given a stone keep long after its bank was raised.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Culzean Castle
South Ayrshire
Eisenhower was given an apartment at the top of this castle in 1945, as a condition of the family handing it to the nation.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Cunnilear Camp
Devon
Cunnilear Camp is a recorded hillfort above the River Yeo, a defended settlement on high ground dating from from about 800 BC until the Romans came…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Curdon Camp
Somerset
Quarrying and bulldozing took nearly all of it. Two and a half metres of bank survive on the south and west.
- Some walking
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Fortified place
Cyfarthfa Castle
Merthyr Tydfil
Cyfarthfa Castle embodies Merthyr Tydfil’s ironmaking wealth: a grand 1820s Crawshay mansion overlooking the works, later transformed into a public…
- Near Merthyr Tydfil
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cymbeline's Castle
Buckinghamshire
A 42-metre earthen mound in Buckinghamshire woodland carries the name of an ancient British king, a Victorian legend of raising the devil, and find…
- Near Great Kimble
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dairsie Castle
Fife
Dairsie gathers Fife’s ecclesiastical, royal and civil-war histories in one tower: a bishop’s estate, a besieged refuge for Mary’s jewels, and a re…
- Near St Andrews
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dalden Tower
County Durham
Excavations in the 1960s and 1980s traced a vanished medieval hall and its moat beneath the ground of an estate that changed hands four times acros…
- Near Durham
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dale Castle
Pembrokeshire
A fragment of medieval castle surviving inside a modern dwelling and farm, much of it removed in a 1910 remodelling.
- Near Dale
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dally Castle
Northumberland
Dally Castle preserves the foundations of an early Northumberland hall house whose repeated medieval adaptations and later stone robbing reveal bot…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dalston Hall
Cumbria
A fortified merchant's house whose 500-year chain of owners runs from border reivers to a royalist commander's flight to a Scottish dye pioneer who…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dalton Castle, Cumbria
Cumbria
A monastery built its own courthouse and prison into a single fortified tower: and that tower kept dispensing justice for three centuries after the…
- Near Dalton-in-Furness
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Danby Castle
North Yorkshire
A working manorial court still meets in its former great chamber, making Danby Castle one of the few English castles where medieval justice has nev…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Danebury
Hampshire
Twenty seasons of excavation under Barry Cunliffe turned this single Hampshire hillfort, an Iron Age: the centuries before Rome arrived: settlement…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dangan Castle
County Meath
A ruined Georgian mansion where the future Duke of Wellington grew up amid a 600-acre landscaped estate, later the lair of a nationalist landlord t…
- Near Trim
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Danish Camp
Essex
Danish Camp is a scheduled Middle Iron Age fortified settlement at Shoeburyness, whose surviving banks preserve domestic occupation and later coast…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dardistown Castle
County Meath
A tower house whose owners bred a Grand National-winning bloodline and supplied the bricks for one of Drogheda's landmark buildings: its story runs…
- Near Drogheda
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dartmouth Castle
Devon
Dartmouth Castle shows more than five centuries of changing coastal defence at the entrance to one of Devon’s most important historic harbours.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Darver Castle
County Louth
A Norman lookout raised above two rivers passed through only three families in over eight centuries, from the knight who first fortified it to the…
- Near Dundalk
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Daw's Castle
Somerset
A sea-cliff enclosure west of Watchet, where earth banks still mark an ancient defensive position eighty metres above the Bristol Channel.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Deal Castle
Kent
Deal Castle is Henry VIII’s great artillery fortress for the Downs anchorage, preserving an ambitious 66-gun bastioned design shaped by invasion fe…
- Near Deal
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Deborah's Hole Camp
Swansea
An Iron Age fort on the cliff above the cave it is named for, with the Wales Coast Path running straight through it.
- Near Rhossili
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Deddington Castle
Oxfordshire
Extensive banks and ditches, all that survives of an eleventh-century timber castle.
- Near Deddington
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Fortified place · Medieval
Deel Castle
County Mayo
A Jacobite forfeiture cost the Bourkes their tower house; the Georgian mansion built beside it in 1791 was burnt in 1922, leaving only the older st…
- Near Ballina
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Deganwy Castle
Conwy
Deganwy Castle commands the Conwy estuary from a volcanic outcrop and preserves the layered contest between Welsh princes and English power before…
- Near Conwy
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Denbigh Castle and town walls
Denbighshire
A triangular gatehouse of three octagonal towers, once banded in coloured stone and topped by a royal statue, that a leading castle historian ranks…
- Near Denbigh
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Denbury Hill
Devon
Denbury Hill is a prominent Devon hillfort, a settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground, with visible defences and burial mounds. Its…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Denham Castle
Suffolk
Henry II stripped the Suffolk nobles who had backed Stephen. Desning was slighted, but the hall inside its walled courtyard stayed in use for anoth…
- Near Gazeley
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Fortified place · Medieval
Derryhiveny Castle
County Galway
Built right at the close of nearly seven centuries of O'Madden lordship over this stretch of the Shannon, the tower house reads as one family's fin…
- Near Gort
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Desborough Castle
Buckinghamshire
Three distinct phases of use lie stacked in one earthwork here: a prehistoric enclosure, a barrow reused as a Saxon assembly site, and a Norman rin…
- Near High Wycombe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Desmond Castle (Kinsale)
County Cork
A Kinsale tower house built as a customs house around 1500, later used as a naval prison, town gaol, famine workhouse and wine museum.
- Near Kinsale
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Desmond Hall and Castle
County Limerick
South of the main square at the western end of Newcastle West stand the ruins and restored remains of Desmond Hall and Castle, a set of medieval bu…
- Near Adare
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Devil's Dyke, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
The surviving western ditch is one of the strongest candidates for the stronghold where Julius Caesar defeated the British king Cassivellaunus in 5…
- Near Hertford
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Fortified place · Medieval
Devizes Castle
Wiltshire
A flamboyant Victorian mansion of turrets and battlements sits directly over an 11th-century Norman stronghold that imprisoned a king's rival, a qu…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dilston Castle
Northumberland
Dilston Castle’s surviving tower and chapel tell a concentrated story of Catholic recusancy, Jacobite rebellion, estate forfeiture, and later conse…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dimlands
Vale of Glamorgan
A small Tudor-styled gentry house of the 1790s, standing where the fortress of the last ruler of Morgannwg had been: its fields still called Caer W…
- Near Llantwit Major
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dinas Dinorwig
Gwynedd
Dinas Dinorwig is Arfon’s largest and most heavily defended hillfort (an upland enclosure defended by earthen banks), whose massive multi-phase ear…
- Near Llanrug
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Dinas Emrys
Gwynedd
Dinas Emrys is a post-Roman hillfort: a defended hilltop settlement: and later castle site where excavated ramparts and pool intertwine with the fo…
- Near Beddgelert
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dinas Powys hillfort
Vale of Glamorgan
A hillfort abandoned under Rome and reoccupied in the fifth century by a lord who employed a blacksmith and a jeweller: probably Irishmen looking f…
- Near Dinas Powys
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dinedor Camp
Herefordshire
Since 2016 the hillfort: a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts: has belonged to the community whose village gave it its name, and a 1951 tre…
- Near Dinedor
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dinefwr Castle
Carmarthenshire
The chief seat of a Welsh royal dynasty for centuries, sitting on a ridge above a hundred-foot drop to the River Towy, its ruins mark where the rul…
- Near Llandeilo
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dinerth Castle
Ceredigion
A timber castle above the Arth valley repeatedly built, captured and destroyed during the struggle between Welsh rulers and Anglo-Norman lords.
- Near Aberarth
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dinies Camp
Somerset
An enclosure classed as an Iron Age hillfort and considered medieval: standing on the site of an earthwork, a bank and ditch dug and heaped from th…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dirleton Castle
East Lothian
A thirteenth-century cluster keep of three joined round towers: among the earliest Scottish castles built with towers projecting beyond the walls,…
- Near Dunbar
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dodleston Castle
Cheshire
A mound and ditch outside Chester record two phases of fortification: an early castle enclosure later remade as a Norman castle for a Cheshire mano…
- Near Chester
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Fortified place · Medieval
Doe Castle
County Donegal
A tower house held by hereditary gallowglass warriors for two centuries, then forfeited to the Crown, sold to a settler, and used by an Irish Confe…
- Near Creeslough
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dolbadarn Castle
Gwynedd
Dolbadarn Castle was Llywelyn the Great’s pass-side symbol of princely power, preserving one of the finest surviving Welsh round towers above Llyn…
- Near Llanberis
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dolebury Warren
Somerset
A hillfort of the Iron Age whose ramparts made a perfect rabbit warren: and whose name may mean the idol hill.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dolforwyn Castle
Powys
A Welsh prince's castle that fell in 1277 because nobody had dug a well: and whose siege may have brought Edward I's master castle-builder to Wales.
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dolwyddelan Castle
Conwy
Dolwyddelan Castle is a Welsh princes’ stronghold guarding a key Snowdonia route, with its earlier tower and later history still legible on the Lle…
- Near Conwy
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Domen Fawr, Tafolwern
Powys
A Welsh prince's motte, the earthen mound a castle was raised on, between two rivers, fought over twice by Welshmen and last heard of in 1244 with…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Donamon Castle
County Roscommon
Continuously inhabited since at least 1154, Donamon passed from Gaelic chiefs through Norman knights, Burke lords and missionaries: and now shelter…
- Near Roscommon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Donegal Castle
County Donegal
The O'Donnell stronghold at Donegal Town, combining a fifteenth-century Gaelic keep with a Jacobean wing and a major twentieth-century restoration.
- Near Donegal
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Donington Castle
Leicestershire
Donington Castle is a lost early-twelfth-century Leicestershire fortress whose political history survives through its de Lacy ownership and later i…
- Near Castle Donington
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Fortified place · Medieval
Donore Castle
County Meath
A rare survivor of Henry VI's 1429 scheme to subsidise defensive towers on the edge of the Pale, later the site of a McGeoghegan family massacre du…
- Near Drogheda
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Fortified place · Medieval
Doon Castle
County Mayo
Almost nothing remains of this MacPhilbin stronghold except its shape in the ground: the clearest local proof that Lord Sligo's Westport House was…
- Near Ballina
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Doon Castle Broch
Dumfries and Galloway
On the south side of Ardwell Point, where the land juts into the North Channel on the Rhins of Galloway, the remains of Doon Castle broch (a tall c…
- Near Newton Stewart
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dorstone Castle
Herefordshire
Raised by a knight serving under the Norman conqueror of Brecknock, this border stronghold was later singled out by a king for reinforcement agains…
- Near Dorstone
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dough Castle
County Clare
A single Cromwellian officer's decision to spare it from demolition is the reason any of this sand-founded tower house survives at all.
- Near Doolin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Doune Castle
Stirling
Only two ranges of the intended courtyard were ever finished, and the stonework is almost all late fourteenth century: repaired, but never replaced.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Doune of Relugas
Moray
Doune of Relugas is a long-occupied promontory hillfort, a hilltop enclosure ringed by earth ramparts, overlooking the Findhorn valley, where a tim…
- Near Dunphail
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dover Castle
Kent
Dover Castle is England’s long-defended Channel stronghold, where a Roman lighthouse, Henry II’s great keep, Napoleonic tunnels and Operation Dynam…
- Near Dover
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Down End Castle
Somerset
A castle of earth mound and walled yard near Puriton, known also as Chisley Mount and Chidley Mount.
- Near Dunball
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dowsborough
Somerset
An Iron Age fort above the Bristol Channel that a corrupted place-name suggests was still being used as a lookout in Alfred's time.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dragon Hill, Uffington
Oxfordshire
A flat-topped chalk hillock beneath the Uffington White Horse where a bare, grassless scar is said to mark the spot a dragon died.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Drakelow Hillfort
Worcestershire
One of a scatter of small Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) promontory forts along the Kinver Edge ridge, defended by more than on…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Driffield Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
Driffield’s Moot Hill compresses Roman, possible Northumbrian royal and Norman castle history into an earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Drishane Castle
County Cork
A MacCarthy stronghold confiscated and restored twice over two centuries, later reused as a convent school, a film set and a home for asylum seekers.
- Near Millstreet
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Drochil Castle
Scottish Borders
A palace-like fortress with a corridor running the full length of every floor: its builder's execution left the ambitious design frozen half-finish…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dromagh Castle
County Cork
A tower house rebuilt twice over: once as a Big House with false battlements, once by fire in 1921: leaving four round towers standing sentry over…
- Near Macroom
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dromaneen Castle
County Cork
One of just three strongholds raised by the O'Callaghan clan, this Jacobean mansion hosted a Papal Nuncio in 1642 and lay in ruins within a decade.
- Near Castletownbere
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dromore Castle (County Clare)
County Clare
Dromore Castle is a National Monument tower house in a Clare nature reserve, preserving the O'Brien family's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century str…
- Near Ruan
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Drum Castle
Aberdeenshire
One of only three 13th-century tower houses in Scotland to survive largely unaltered, and held unbroken by one family, the Irvines, for roughly 650…
- Easy path
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Daly Castle
County Galway
A tower house rebuilt piecemeal by two very different Galway fortunes: a Tribes-of-Galway merchant family, then sugar-plantation wealth from Jamaic…
- Near Loughrea
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dane John Mound
Kent
Dane John Mound condenses Canterbury’s Roman, Norman and civic history: a Roman burial mound transformed into a motte (the great earth mound at the…
- Near Canterbury
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Denton Castle
Norfolk
Denton Castle is a scheduled Norman castle mound and enclosed yard whose large ditched mound and horseshoe enclosure preserve a clear early post-Co…
- Near Denton
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Fortified place · Medieval
Derby Fort
Isle of Man
Derby Fort is a Civil War-era gun battery on St Michael’s Isle that records how the Isle of Man defended Derbyhaven against seaborne threat; its ca…
- Near Castletown
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Fortified place · Medieval
Derg Castle
County Tyrone
Derg Castle preserves a river-ford stronghold whose O’Neill–O’Donnell conflict, Plantation bawn and later erosion chart Castlederg’s medieval origi…
- Near Castlederg
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dewerstone
Devon
Dewerstone combines a defensible promontory above the Plym, dating from from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest, with Dartmoor’s enduring super…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dilham Castle
Norfolk
Dilham Castle preserves the fragmentary remains of a fifteenth-century fortified manor, linking a royal veteran’s local ambitions with Norfolk’s la…
- Near Dilham
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dinghurst fort
Somerset
A defended hilltop south of Churchill, enclosed by a scarp.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dodman Point
Cornwall
South Cornwall's highest headland, where an Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) promontory fort (a coastal spur defende…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dolbury
Devon
Dolbury is the local name for a hillfort: a settlement defended by banks and ditches on high ground between roughly 800 BC and the Roman conquest:…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Doon of May
Dumfries and Galloway
The facing stones of the wall have almost entirely gone, but the heat that once fused the rampart (an encircling bank built for defence) still show…
- Near Newton Stewart
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Doonagore Castle
County Clare
Doonagore Castle is a rare cylindrical Burren tower house whose hilltop setting, Spanish Armada tragedy and twentieth-century restoration make it a…
- Near Doolin
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dorchester Castle
Dorset
Dorchester Castle was a medieval motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongside) fortif…
- Near Dorchester
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dromoland Castle
County Clare
Dromoland Castle is the former ancestral home of the O'Briens of Inchiquin, a Gaelic royal lineage, whose conversion to a luxury hotel preserved th…
- Near Newmarket-on-Fergus
- Easy path
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Fortified place
Drumbanagher House
County Armagh
Drumbanagher House shows how a grand nineteenth-century country house could vanish by choice, leaving one triumphal porte-cochère to carry its memory.
- Near Portadown
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