Fortified place · Medieval
Drumharsna Castle
County Galway
A tower house whose stones bore witness to one of the Irish War of Independence's most notorious atrocities: the torture and murder of the Loughnan…
- Near Gort
- Easy path
By type
Fortified places of Britain & Ireland
Page 9 of 21.
Search and filters apply to these 100 places.
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Drumlanrig Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Drumlanrig Castle is a major late-seventeenth-century Scottish Renaissance house whose pink sandstone architecture, designed landscape, art collect…
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Fortified place · Roman
Drumquhassle
Stirling
A Flavian glen-blocker fort found from the air in the 1970s: and given a name chosen to be hard for the English to say.
- Near Drymen
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dryslwyn Castle
Carmarthenshire
The only native Welsh castle known to have grown to three full wards: a stronghold built, expanded and finally besieged by its own former builders'…
- Near Carmarthen
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Duart Castle
Argyll and Bute
A ruin stripped to its foundations after 1691 and rebuilt two centuries later by the very chief's descendant who lost it: a rare case of a clan sea…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Duddo Tower
Northumberland
Duddo Tower preserves the ruin of a border manor whose medieval pele was destroyed in a Scottish attack and replaced by a sixteenth-century Claveri…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dudley Castle
West Midlands
A Norman castle of mound and walled yard, rebuilt in stone in the twelfth century and now a ruin above the town.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dudsbury Camp
Dorset
Dudsbury Camp is a three-hectare defended settlement on the River Stour, dating from the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest. It retai…
- Near West Parley
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Duffield Castle, Derbyshire
Derbyshire
Excavation uncovered a keep almost the footprint of the White Tower of London: a Norman statement of power so thoroughly demolished by 1269 that on…
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Medieval
Duffus Castle
Moray
Its stone tower still leans bodily off the earthen motte it was built on, frozen mid-collapse: a rare, visible lesson in why timber-age mounds made…
- Near Elgin
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumglow
Perth and Kinross
A burial cairn - a mound of stones raised over a grave - sits inside the ramparts of the fort on this summit.
- Near Dunfermline
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumpdon Hill
Devon
Dumpdon Hill is one of Devon’s largest and clearest Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) earthworks, where a prominent s…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dùn a' Choin Duibh
Argyll and Bute
Its Gaelic name preserves a guardian-dog legend rather than any battle record, and its ridge commands an open sightline across four separate lands.
- Near Tobermory
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dùn an Achaidh
Argyll and Bute
Scorch marks still visible on its foundations appear to confirm a local legend of islanders burning out a tyrannical Norse chief's son from Coll's…
- Near Acha
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun an Sticir
Outer Hebrides
Three stone causeways lace across Loch an Sticir on North Uist, carrying a single line of dry ground from the B893 road to a broch (a tall circular…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dùn Ara
Argyll and Bute
Reachable only by boat or cliff path, this ruined castle stands atop an earlier Gaelic fort and may have guarded a harbour built for Norse-age ships.
- Near Tobermory
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Beag
Highland
A countess spent six years hand-sifting its spoil heaps, and coins running from Henry II to George III show this Skye tower stayed in use long afte…
- Near Inverness
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Bharabhat, Great Bernera
Outer Hebrides
A thirty-metre stone causeway crosses the water of Loch Bharabhat to reach the islet on which Dun Bharabhat stands, its walls rising above the loch…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Borrafiach
Highland
A drystone tower on Skye's Waternish coast still stands over two and a half metres high, with its internal gallery wall exposed to view along the e…
- Near Halistra
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Carloway
Outer Hebrides
On the south side of Dun Carloway the original wall still stands to 9.2 metres, and on the east side sections of the old wall reach close to nine m…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dùn Cholla
Argyll and Bute
Tradition ties this hilltop fort to an exiled Irish king and to Columba's first Scottish church: one summit knotted into two founding legends.
- Near Scalasaig
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Cruinn
Highland
A smaller broch or dun was built inside the ruins of an earlier hillfort on the same rocky knoll: two separate strongholds, one after the other, on…
- Near Dunvegan
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Dornaigil
Highland
Above its blocked doorway, Dun Dornaigil's wall still climbs to nearly seven metres: among the tallest surviving drystone tower stonework anywhere…
- Near Altnaharra
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dùn Dubh
Argyll and Bute
The name Dùn Dubh renders from Scottish Gaelic as "the black dun", and the early 20th-century antiquary Erskine Beveridge counted it among the four…
- Near Arinagour
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dùn Eibhinn
Argyll and Bute
A hilltop stronghold on Colonsay carries a Norse name to this day: Fort of Eyvind: a rare physical trace of Viking-era rule surviving in the Hebrides.
- Near Scalasaig
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dùn Èistean
Outer Hebrides
On an inter-tidal sea stack off the north-east coast of the Isle of Lewis, near the village of Knockaird (Cnoc Àrd) in the district of Ness (Nis),…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Evan
Highland
A double ring of vitrified (burnt so fiercely that the stone melted and set again) and rebuilt walls crowns a rock between two river valleys, with…
- Near Cawdor
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Fiadhairt
Highland
A double-walled stone tower dating the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest stands on a loch-side knoll near Dunvegan, excavated in 189…
- Near Dunvegan
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Dùn Galláin
Argyll and Bute
The fort's own name, Fort of the Strangers, and a battle remembered on the beach just to its north, seem to point at the same event from two differ…
- Near Scalasaig
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Grugaig
Highland
A rare surviving 'semi-broch': the transitional D-shaped form that shows how the great circular broch towers of the Highlands may have evolved.
- Near Glenelg
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Dun Guaidhre
Argyll and Bute
A small Iron Age (the period from roughly 800 BC to the Roman conquest) stronghold on Islay whose very name is entangled with a Norse-Gaelic king w…
- Near Kilmeny
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Hallin
Highland
Its walls still rise close to four metres, with an intact mural gallery and lintel in place: one of Skye's better-preserved brochs, and one never d…
- Near Hallin
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dùn Meadhonach
Argyll and Bute
Its Gaelic name, Middle Fort, hints at a lost network of strongholds along this stretch of Colonsay: of which this is now the only one still named.
- Near Lower Kilchattan
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Mor Vaul
Argyll and Bute
A drystone tower with an internal diameter of 9.2 metres and walls roughly 4.5 metres thick stands on a rocky knoll on the northern coast of Tiree,…
- Near Balemartine
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dùn Morbhaidh
Argyll and Bute
Two potsherds incised with the figures of deer, lifted from Dùn Morbhaidh and now kept in the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, are among…
- Near Gallanach
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dun Nosebridge
Argyll and Bute
Its name fuses Gaelic and Norse in one word: a fort whose very label records the island passing from Gaelic to Viking hands and back again.
- Near Bridgend
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Ringill
Highland
A stone roundhouse dating from the centuries before Rome arrived that Clan MacKinnon later refitted as its own stronghold, so the ruin carries two…
- Near Inverness
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dun Skeig
Argyll and Bute
Two forts share one summit here: a compact Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) dun with a single entrance, and beside i…
- Near Clachan
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Skudiburgh
Highland
A vitrified (burnt so fiercely that the stone melted and set again) Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) fort with a later dun built…
- Near Uig
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Telve
Highland
Its drystone wall still rises over ten metres without a scrap of mortar, making Dun Telve one of the tallest surviving brochs anywhere in Scotland.
- Near Inverness
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Troddan
Highland
Its stairway still climbs to a first-floor landing inside a wall four and a half metres thick: one of Scotland's most intact broch (a tall circular…
- Near Inverness
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dun Ugadale
Argyll and Bute
Its Gaelic name preserves a memory of owls in the glen below, while a brooch once kept by its owners carries a tradition linking the fort to Robert…
- Near Ugadale
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Vulan
Outer Hebrides
On the southern edge of a promontory in South Uist stand the oval walls of Dun Vulan, known in Scottish Gaelic as Dùn Mhùlan or Dùn Mhaoilinn. The…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunamase
County Laois
For over four centuries the Rock passed through Viking raiders, Norman marcher lords and the O'More kings of Laois: each in turn rebuilding the reg…
- Near Portlaoise
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunaneeny Castle
County Antrim
Dunaneeny Castle joins MacDonnell clan power, a defensible Ballycastle headland, possible prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) occ…
- Near Cushendun
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Fortified place · Prehistoric
Dunasead Castle
County Cork
A modest 1620s tower house masks a much longer story: a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) ringfort, a Norman keep, and two…
- Near Baltimore
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunaverty Castle
Argyll and Bute
A single narrow path is the only way in: sea guards the other three sides: and in 1647 that natural trap became the site of one of Scotland's blood…
- Near Southend
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunbar Castle
East Lothian
A red-stone stronghold so formidable it was besieged, rebuilt and fought over for a thousand years, then torn down so thoroughly no one could ever…
- Near Dunbar
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunboy Castle
County Cork
A shattered tower house on Berehaven harbour where a two-week siege in 1602 broke the power of the O'Sullivan Bere clan and ended their control of…
- Near Castletownbere
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Duncannon Fort
County Wexford
A star-shaped fort on a Waterford Harbour peninsula that hosted two fleeing and sheltering kings in the same year, and later gave its name to a reb…
- Near Duncannon
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dundanion Castle
County Cork
A Tudor tower house deliberately reshaped into an ornamental ruin by Victorian stonemasons, and tied by local tradition to William Penn’s departure…
- Near Kinsale
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dundon Hill Hillfort
Somerset
A hill that looks like a mountain because everything around it is flat: with a barrow, a burial mound of heaped earth, raised in the Bronze Age, ro…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dundonald Castle
South Ayrshire
A fourteenth-century royal residence on a hill between Kilmarnock and Troon.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dundurn, Scotland
Perth and Kinross
The Annals of Ulster record a siege here in 683 and the death of a king in 889 - a fort of the Picts, the people of northern and eastern Scotland f…
- Near St Fillans
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dunearn
Highland
Two ramparts set barely six metres apart, likely braced by internal timbers, and traces of vitrification suggesting the fort was deliberately burne…
- Near Forres
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Roman
Dungeon Hill
Dorset
Dungeon Hill is a scheduled hillfort dating from roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest, where a surviving rampart: a defensive bank of earth or s…
- Near Buckland Newton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dungiven Castle
County Londonderry
Dungiven Castle layers Plantation bawn walls, an Ogilby nineteenth-century rebuilding and a remarkable afterlife as homes, army base, ballroom and…
- Near Dungiven
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunguaire Castle
County Galway
A sixteenth-century tower still carrying the name of a legendary king of Connacht, now shut behind its own restored walls by a funding dispute with…
- Near Kinvara
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunkerron Castle
County Kerry
A four-storey tower still stands roofless above Kenmare Bay, the seat from which one branch of the O'Sullivan Mór dynasty ruled before Cromwellian…
- Near Sneem
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunlough Castle
County Cork
Three separate keeps, not one, linked by a wall running from sea cliff to a dammed lake: a defence built from the landscape itself, never recorded…
- Near Ballydehob
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunluce Castle
Antrim
Dunluce Castle is a dramatic cliff-edge medieval stronghold whose MacQuillan and MacDonnell history, Armada connection and adjacent planned town ma…
- Near Bushmills
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunmanus Castle
County Cork
A working dungeon, a rare adjoining five-storey tower, and an unbroken clan gathering founded to save it: Dunmanus punches well above its ruined wa…
- Near Durrus
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunmoe Castle
County Meath
A frontier keep on the western edge of The Pale, its ruined towers still standing over the Boyne where rival kings are said to have dined a day apa…
- Near Navan
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunmore Castle
County Galway
Dunmore Castle is a repeatedly rebuilt Galway stronghold whose compact hall-keep records Anglo-Norman defence, Gaelic attack, Tudor confiscation an…
- Near Clarinbridge
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dunnideer Castle
Aberdeenshire
Its walls were quarried from a vitrified hillfort: an enclosure of the Iron Age, the centuries before Rome from about 800 BC, whose ramparts were b…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunollie Castle
Argyll and Bute
The Irish annals name Dun Ollaigh three times over: attacked or burned in 686, 698 and 701: and then record it rebuilt in 714 by Selbach mac Fercha…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunoon Castle
Argyll and Bute
A royal stronghold fought over by kings, besieged with English ships and troops, and hosted Mary, Queen of Scots for three days in 1563.
- Near Dunoon
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunraven Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A Georgian castellated hunting lodge over a medieval manor and older fortifications, demolished in 1962 with its walled garden and gatehouse left s…
- Near Southerndown
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunrobin Castle
Highland
A fourteenth-century keep with six-foot walls and stone-vaulted ceilings still survives at the core of the building Charles Barry expanded into the…
- Near Inverness
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunsandle Castle
County Galway
A 15th-century tower house whose great hall still carries tie beams and a groin vault rare in Irish castle building, kept alive by restoration rath…
- Near Athenry
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunsany Castle and Demesne
County Meath
Occupied by one family - the Cusacks, then the Plunketts by marriage - since building began around 1180, it ranks among the longest continuously he…
- Near Kilmessan
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Dunscaith Castle
Highland
Its name comes not from a clan or a king but from Scáthach, the legendary warrior-woman said to have trained the Irish hero Cú Chulainn in the arts…
- Near Inverness
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dunsinane Hill
Perth and Kinross
Nineteenth-century antiquarians came here because of Macbeth and dug the hill fort apart. Little of value was learned.
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunstaffnage Castle
Argyll and Bute
One of the oldest stone castles in Scotland, Dunstaffnage was raised in the second quarter of the 13th century by the MacDougall lords of Lorn and…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunstanburgh Castle
Northumberland
Dunstanburgh Castle is Northumberland’s largest castle: a dramatic coastal stronghold built as Thomas of Lancaster’s political refuge and status st…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunster Castle
Somerset
Two families held the Tor for nine hundred years. The de Mohuns took it at the Conquest and the Luttrells kept it from the 1370s until 1976, so the…
- Near Dunster
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Duntrune Castle
Argyll and Bute
A 13th-century curtain wall and 17th-century tower house fused into one lived-in home: held by only three families in eight centuries, still owned…
- Near Crinan
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunure Castle
South Ayrshire
A ruin on a rocky headland of the Carrick coast, five miles south of Ayr, on a site of the late thirteenth century.
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dunwood Camp
Hampshire
Its single earthen rampart shows no trace of an accompanying ditch and never closes into a finished circuit: a Hampshire hillfort, an Iron Age: the…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunyvaig Castle
Argyll and Bute
A galley stronghold on Lagavulin Bay that anchored the Lord of the Isles' fleet and was fought over in five separate sieges within a single decade.
- Near Lagavulin
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Durham Castle
County Durham
For over seven centuries this was not a garrison but a working seat of government: home to prince-bishops who could raise armies, levy taxes and st…
- Near Durham
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Durhamstown Castle
County Meath
A County Meath towerhouse inhabited without a break since 1420, its owners running from an Elizabethan Lord Deputy to a modern guest house and rest…
- Near Navan
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Durno
Aberdeenshire
The largest Roman marching camp yet found north of the Antonine Wall, revealed only by a chance aerial photograph after two millennia buried beneat…
- Near Inverurie
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Eardisley Castle
Herefordshire
A Domesday-era stronghold reduced to a mound and two water-filled ditches, yet its Civil War burning and a surviving gatehouse trace one family's f…
- Near Eardisley
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Earl's Palace, Birsay
Orkney Islands
Robert Stewart’s fortress-palace embodies the political ambition of James V’s illegitimate son, combining ceremonial halls with gun-holed defences…
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Fortified place · Medieval
East and West Blockhouses
Pembrokeshire
The East Blockhouse is the standing remnant of Henry VIII's 1539 Milford Haven pair in Wales; Second World War trenches cut into the Tudor gun-towe…
- Near Angle
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Fortified place · Iron Age
East Myne
Somerset
Recorded as a hill fort of the Iron Age, roughly 800 BC until the Roman conquest, and considered to be a deserted post-medieval farmstead, from the…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
East Orchard Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
Called a castle but never fortified as one: a manor house of the Berkerolles, destroyed in Llywelyn Bren's revolt and dismantled for its stone afte…
- Near St Athan
- Rough ground
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Drumboe Castle
County Donegal
A Plantation-era castle at a River Finn ford, remembered above all as the site of the 1923 Drumboe massacre during the Irish Civil War.
- Near Ballindrait
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Drumsonnus
County Tyrone
Drumsonnus gives an otherwise ordinary townland a formally protected ancient enclosure, tying a small rural landscape to Northern Ireland’s archaeo…
- Near Cookstown
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Fortified place · Medieval
Duffield Castle, North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
Duffield Castle survives as earthworks on the River Derwent floodplain, preserving the location of a documented medieval castle after its buildings…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumyat
Clackmannanshire
Dumyat’s Castle Law preserves an excavated hill fort with evidence for occupation from around 500 BC and again in the fifth to seventh centuries AD.
- Near Alloa
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dun Ardtreck
Highland
A cliff-edge Skye fort twice built and twice destroyed by fire: one of the clearest examples anywhere of the transitional "semi-broch (a tall circu…
- Near Tokavaig
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Duncorn Hill
Somerset
A rounded flat-topped hill of 178 metres on the limestone plateau south of Bath, close to the Fosse Way.
- Near Bath
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dundrum Castle
County Down
Dundrum Castle is a layered Norman hill fortress whose keep, gatehouse and later Gaelic adaptations command Dundrum Bay and the approaches to Lecale.
- Near Dundrum
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dungannon Castle
County Tyrone
Dungannon is worth seeking out for the way one hilltop concentrates Gaelic lordship, Plantation rebuilding, civil conflict and archaeology beneath…
- Near Dungannon
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunham Castle
Greater Manchester
Dunham Castle is a documentary medieval castle whose surviving mound and former moat remain archaeologically uncertain, illustrating how later land…
- Near Dunham Massey
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunseverick Castle
Antrim
Dunseverick Castle preserves an ancient coastal promontory with Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC), early Christian, V…
- Near Bushmills
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Duropolis
Dorset
Duropolis is a large Iron Age (the centuries before Rome arrived, from about 800 BC) settlement near Winterborne Kingston whose dense roundhouse pl…
- Near Winterborne Kingston
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
East Cowes Castle
Isle of Wight
East Cowes Castle was John Nash’s celebrated Gothic Revival home, now demolished but remembered through its surviving gatehouse, icehouse, clock an…
- Near East Cowes
- Easy path
No places match those filters.