Sacred place · Medieval
Inis Cathaigh
County Clare
Inis Cathaigh, or Scattery Island, preserves a major early Christian monastery, round tower and later military battery at the strategic mouth of th…
- Near Kilrush
- Some walking
The temporal lens · era 5 of 5
Medieval Britain & Ireland
Abbeys, castles and the worked stone of the high and later Middle Ages.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Huntly Castle
Aberdeenshire
Four successive castles rose on this one riverside site, each rebuilt by the Gordons after fire, siege or royal demolition: a single ruin holding f…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Donnington Castle
Berkshire
Its lone three-storey gatehouse survived only because Parliament's 1646 demolition order stopped short, the price of an 18-month Royalist siege tha…
- Near Newbury
- 250 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Denny Abbey
Cambridgeshire
Three unrelated religious orders in turn occupied the same buildings, and a countess who founded a Cambridge college is buried somewhere beneath th…
- Near Waterbeach
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Castle (Kilmallock)
County Limerick
A fifteenth-century tower house whose name borrows the prestige of Limerick's grander castle, now pierced clean through by a single large Gothic arch.
- Near Kilmallock
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Skellig Michael
County Kerry
A monastery of dry-stone beehive cells on a bare Atlantic crag, eleven kilometres out and six hundred steps up, built by monks who chose the least…
- Near Portmagee
- Rough ground
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Birnam Oak
Perth and Kinross
Birnam Oak, sometimes known as Macbeth's Oak, stands on the south bank of the River Tay and is associated with the surviving edge of Birnam Wood.
- Near Birnam
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Capon Tree
Scottish Borders
Concrete, brick and timber now hold together a sessile oak reckoned at about a thousand years old: one of the last trees of the Jedforest, and the…
- Near Jedburgh
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Fortingall Yew
Perth and Kinross
Fortingall Yew is a named yew tree beside the church at Fortingall in Perth and Kinross. Its precise age is not independently confirmed here.
- Near Fortingall
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Neil Gow's Oak
Perth and Kinross
A bench beneath this oak was engraved with a line from a Michael Marra song about sitting under it with Niel Gow's ghost. A falling branch destroye…
- Near Dunkeld
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Sacred place · Medieval
Strata Florida Abbey
Ceredigion
A Cistercian abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) founded in 1164 that became a dynastic burial place, a centre for Welsh chronicles…
- Near Pontrhydfendigaid
- Easy path
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Carved stone · Medieval
Bewcastle Cross
Cumbria
A near-complete Northumbrian cross carved with figures, runes and one of England's earliest sundials, still standing where it was first raised some…
- Near Bewcastle
- Easy path
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Bickering Bush
East Ayrshire
Bickering Bush preserves the memory of a named hawthorn, its lost site tied to Caprington Castle lands and Wallace tradition.
- Near East Ayrshire
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Birnam Sycamore
Perth and Kinross
Birnam Sycamore stands near Birnam Oak on the south bank of the River Tay and is associated with the surviving edge of Birnam Wood.
- Near Birnam
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Ding Dong tree
East Lothian
The Ding Dong tree is a copper beech that became a school landmark, won Scotland’s Tree of the Year and shaped children’s outdoor life.
- Near East Lothian
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Great Yew of Ormiston
East Lothian
The Great Yew of Ormiston is a layering yew first recorded in 1474 and regarded as a significant surviving tree in Scotland.
- Near East Lothian
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Katie Wearie's Tree
Perth and Kinross
Katie Wearie’s Tree was a named Linlithgow memorial to a drover girl, preserved in an early twentieth-century postcard even though little else is k…
- Near Perth and Kinross
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Queen Mary's Thorn
Fife
Queen Mary’s Thorn keeps royal memory alive in St Andrews through a living tree, while the absence of contemporary evidence makes its famous planti…
- Near Fife
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Ancient tree · Medieval
The Balmerino Sweet Chestnut
Fife
The Balmerino Sweet Chestnut makes former monastic grounds a record of living heritage: inventory data, exceptional girth and national tree designa…
- Near Balmerino
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Ancient tree · Medieval
The Craigends Yew
Renfrewshire
A yew that has cloned itself into a grove: branches bending to the ground, rooting, and sending up new stems, until the crown reached a hundred met…
- Near Renfrewshire
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Ancient tree · Medieval
The Last Ent of Affric
Highland
An elm that outlived both the forest around it and the disease that took most of its kind, saved by standing somewhere nothing would sensibly have…
- Near Highland
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Ancient tree · Medieval
The Skipinnish Oak
Highland
A four-hundred-year-old oak that nobody knew was there. It took a ceilidh band, a woodland conference and a walk the morning after the gig for the…
- Near Achnacarry
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Wallace Oak (Elderslie)
Renfrewshire
By the mid-nineteenth century a Scotsman's snuff box was expected to contain a fragment of this oak. The relic trade is what killed it.
- Near Renfrewshire
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Wallace Oak (Port Glasgow)
Inverclyde
Although the Wallace story cannot be confirmed, the lost oak’s storm-felled remains and memorial show how a local legend became durable civic memory.
- Near Inverclyde
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Wallace Oak (Torwood)
Falkirk
The lost Wallace Oak shows how a woodland landmark became a national relic, its unproven Wallace tradition driving souvenir cutting and an unusuall…
- Near Falkirk
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Ancient tree · Medieval
Wallace Yew (Elderslie)
Renfrewshire
Parish records of the 1700s already call it 'this ancient tree'. Arson in 1978 and storms in 2005 let in a fungus that is now killing it; twelve cu…
- Near Renfrewshire
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberdour Castle and Gardens
Fife
Aberdour Castle and Gardens combine one of Scotland’s oldest datable standing castles with a 400-year architectural sequence and terraced gardens t…
- Near Aberdour
- 46 metres from car park
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Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval
Aberlemno Sculptured Stones
Angus
The stones were carved during the height of Pictish (of the Picts, the people of northern and eastern Scotland from about AD 300 to 900) power in A…
- Near Aberlemno
- 31 metres from car park
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Roman
Antonine Wall: Rough Castle
Falkirk
Rough Castle is one of the best-preserved forts on the Antonine Wall, retaining the defensive landscape of Rome’s short-lived northern frontier and…
- Near Bonnybridge
- 15 min walk from car park
- Some walking
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Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval
Brandsbutt Stone
Aberdeenshire
Brandsbutt preserves the symbols of the Picts, people of northern and eastern Scotland from about AD 300 to 900, beside an Ogham inscription still…
- Near Inverurie
- 1 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Settlement · Pictish & early medieval
Brough of Birsay
Orkney Islands
A tidal island where Pictish metalworkers: people of northern and eastern Scotland from about AD 300 to 900: Norse rulers and medieval pilgrims suc…
- Near Birsay
- 625 metres from car park
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Burghead Fort
Moray
At roughly three times the size of any other early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) enclosed site in Scotland, th…
- Near Burghead
- 30 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Cairnpapple Hill
West Lothian
Cairnpapple Hill, on a dominating summit 312 metres above sea level with views from coast to coast in central lowland Scotland, was used and re-use…
- Near Bathgate
- 264 metres from car park
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cambuskenneth Abbey
Stirling
Cambuskenneth Abbey, a provostry of canons regular on land enclosed by a meander of the River Forth near Stirling, was founded by order of King Dav…
- Near Stirling
- 263 metres from car park
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Fortified place · Medieval
Castle Sween
Argyll and Bute
Castle Sween, on the eastern shore of Loch Sween in Knapdale, Argyll, is thought to be one of the earliest stone castles built in Scotland: and is…
- Near Achnamara
- 466 metres from car park
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Dryburgh Abbey
Scottish Borders
A monastery under an abbot on the banks of the Tweed, nominally founded in 1150 by agreement with Hugh de Morville.
- Near St Boswells
- 363 metres from car park
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dumbarton Castle and Dumbarton Rock
West Dunbartonshire
The longest recorded history of any stronghold in Scotland: capital of Strathclyde, taken by Vikings in 871 after its water failed.
- Near Dumbarton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Iron Age
Dunadd Fort
Argyll and Bute
Dunadd is a hillfort in Argyll and Bute, occupied from the Iron Age and into the early medieval period, and believed to have been the capital of th…
- Near Kilmartin
- 237 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Dunfermline Abbey
Fife
Dunfermline Abbey combines one of Scotland’s great round-arched churches, built before the Gothic style, with the country’s richest concentration o…
- Near St Andrews
- 2 min walk from car park
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Fortified place · Medieval
Dunnottar Castle
Aberdeenshire
The Annals of Ulster record two sieges of 'Dún Foither' in 681 and 694, possibly the earliest written references to the site; the 681 attack has be…
- Near Stonehaven
- 8 min walk from car park
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Finlaggan, Eilean Mor
Argyll and Bute
In the first half of the 7th century a monastic community was established on Eilean Mor, the largest of the three islands in Loch Finlaggan: either…
- Near Port Askaig
- 520 metres from car park
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Inchmahome Priory
Stirling
Reached only by a motor boat that runs from March to September, Inchmahome holds the roofless thirteenth-century buildings of a monastic house foun…
- Near Port of Menteith
- 998 metres from car park
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Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Iona Abbey
Argyll and Bute
Saint Columba came to Iona from Ireland with twelve companions in 563, founding a monastery when Iona was part of the Kingdom of Dál Riata. It beca…
- Near Baile Mor, Iona
- 1.8 km from car park
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Settlement · Prehistoric
Jarlshof
Shetland Islands
Jarlshof preserves an unusually complete sequence of human occupation, with remains dating from about 2500 BC to the seventeenth century AD.
- Near Sumburgh
- 3 min walk from car park
- Some walking
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Carved stone · Medieval
Jedburgh Abbey
Scottish Borders
In 1118, before his accession to the Scottish throne, Prince David established a foundation of Augustinian canons at Jedburgh. It rose from priory:…
- Near Jedburgh
- 1 min walk from car park
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Tomb or burial place · Pictish & early medieval
Keills Chapel and Cross
Argyll and Bute
The chapel dates from the 11th century. Its now re-roofed structure houses an important collection of early stone sculpture, and the original Keill…
- Near Tayvallich
- 73 metres from car park
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Kelso Abbey
Scottish Borders
Kelso Abbey was founded at Roxburgh in 1128 by Tironensian monks from Tiron, near Chartres in France. The community had first entered Scotland c. 1…
- Near Kelso
- 2 min walk from car park
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Tomb or burial place · Pictish & early medieval
Kildalton Cross and Chapel
Argyll and Bute
A single carved slab from around the 8th century, still standing almost undamaged in its churchyard: widely judged the finest surviving Celtic high…
- Near Port Ellen
- 1 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Tomb or burial place · Pictish & early medieval
Kilmory Knap Chapel
Argyll and Bute
Macmillan's Cross survives inside as one of the finest West Highland carvings anywhere: a clan chief and his hunting dogs cut into stone over six c…
- Near Kilmory, Knapdale
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Sacred place · Prehistoric
Laggangairn Standing Stones
Dumfries and Galloway
Laggangairn’s stones link a setting from before written records reached Britain to early Christian crosses and a medieval Whithorn pilgrimage route…
- Near Newton Stewart
- 164 min walk from car park
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Melrose Abbey
Scottish Borders
St Mary's Abbey, Melrose was founded in 1136 by Cistercian monks at the request of King David I of Scotland: the first Cistercian abbey in Scotland…
- Near Melrose
- 2 min walk from car park
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Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval
Picardy Symbol Stone
Aberdeenshire
A double-disc, a serpent and a mirror cut into whinstone around AD 600: three of the clearest Pictish (of the Picts, the people of northern and eas…
- Near Insch
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Restenneth Priory
Angus
Restenneth Priory was a monastic house of Augustinian canons founded by Jedburgh Abbey, under the patronage of King Malcolm IV of Scotland, in 1153…
- Near Forfar
- 3 min walk from car park
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Carved stone · Pictish & early medieval
Ruthwell Cross
Dumfries and Galloway
The Ruthwell Cross is a stone Anglo-Saxon cross probably dating from the 8th century, when Ruthwell: now in Scotland: was part of the Anglo-Saxon K…
- Near Ruthwell
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Smailholm Tower
Scottish Borders
Smailholm Tower is a peel tower (a small border stronghold, built as a refuge against raiders) atop the crag of Lady Hill, around five miles west o…
- Near Smailholm
- 1 min walk from car park
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Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
St Andrews Cathedral
Fife
The Cathedral of St Andrew was founded in 1158 to provide more accommodation than the older church of St Regulus (St Rule) afforded, and became the…
- Near St Andrews
- 6 min walk from car park
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
St Ninian's Cave
Dumfries and Galloway
St Ninian’s Cave is a Catholic pilgrimage site in Physgill Glen where early-medieval carved stones, rockfall-altered geology and modern film histor…
- Near Whithorn
- 25 min walk from car park
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Torphichen Preceptory
West Lothian
The Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem were invited to Scotland in 1132 by David I, and the preceptory: their Scottish headqu…
- Near Torphichen
- 1 min walk from car park
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Settlement · Prehistoric
Traprain Law
East Lothian
The hill was already a place of burial by around 1500 BC and shows evidence of occupation and ramparts after 1000 BC; the ramparts were rebuilt and…
- Near East Linton
- 25 min walk from car park
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Tullibardine Chapel
Perth and Kinross
A large part of the chapel dates to 1446, when it was built by Sir David Murray, Baron of Tullibardine, of Tullibardine Castle, as a family chapel…
- Near Auchterarder
- 1 min walk from car park
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Whithorn Priory and Museum
Dumfries and Galloway
Whithorn was the location of the first recorded Christian church in Scotland: Candida Casa, the 'White/Shining House': built by Saint Ninian around…
- Near Newton Stewart
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Minor monument · Medieval
Clackmannan Mercat Cross
Clackmannanshire
Clackmannan’s early market cross stands beside a town court building and the Clackmannan Stone, a rare civic group tied to the town’s origins.
- Near Alloa
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Balbegno Castle
Aberdeenshire
This surviving seventeenth-century pigeon house preserves Balbegno Castle’s food infrastructure, from its crowstepped roof to a projecting masonry…
- Near Fettercairn
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Barnyards Of Findlater
Aberdeenshire
Findlater’s beehive pigeon house retains about 700 nesting boxes, making an otherwise modest estate building an unusually legible record of how the…
- Near Sandend
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Creich Castle
Fife
Creich’s 1723 pigeon house is an unusually formal castle lean-to, where twin chambers, rat-proofing and dormer entries make estate food production…
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Denbie
Dumfries and Galloway
Denbie’s dated 1775 pigeon house turns estate food supply into architectural display, combining an octagonal lantern, J C datestone and nesting box…
- Near Denbie
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Fetteresso Castle
Aberdeenshire
The sixteenth-century beehive pigeon house outlasts Fetteresso Castle’s dismantling, its three rat lines preserving the working estate landscape be…
- Near Stonehaven
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Kilravock Castle
Highland
Kilravock’s pigeon house, built to keep birds for winter meat, makes the estate’s long-running economy tangible within a building altered from medi…
- Near Cawdor
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Kirkgate, Chirnside
Scottish Borders
Three hundred and eighty-two nesting boxes in sixteen circular rows, inside a dovecot: a purpose-built pigeon house: that once served the home of D…
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Mains Of Edzell
Angus
Edzell’s square pigeon house, with diagonally opposed turrets and a later ruined extension, makes the working architecture and changing needs of th…
- Near Edzell
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Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Wormistone House
Fife
Wormiston’s early-seventeenth-century pigeon house preserves a more ambitious estate structure than most Fife doocots, with twin chambers, a vaulte…
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Minor monument · Medieval
Gate Piers And Twin Dovecots, East Lodge, Balcaskie House
Fife
Balcaskie’s paired dovecots turn an estate entrance into architecture, combining 1714–45 gate piers, bird houses and later Lorimer ironwork in one…
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross And Medieval Village, East Preston
Dumfries and Galloway
A plain sandstone cross marks the lost village of Preston, whose population fell from a settled community to one inhabitant by 1844.
- Near Newton Stewart
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Bank Street, Inverkeithing
Fife
Inverkeithing’s market cross, the stone cross marking a burgh’s right to hold a market, carries centuries of civic self-image: royal heraldry and a…
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Church Street, Macduff
Aberdeenshire
Macduff’s 1783 cross reassembled older fragments into a royal-burgh statement, its rider and inscriptions preserving the Earl of Fife’s civic ambit…
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Main Street, Longforgan
Perth and Kinross
Removed to the grounds of Castle Huntly at the end of the eighteenth century, and not put back on Main Street until 1989.
- Near Longforgan
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Market Square, Melrose
Scottish Borders
Melrose’s 1645 market cross combines a restored seventeenth-century shaft with a nineteenth-century base and a weathered unicorn finial carrying th…
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Old Rayne
Aberdeenshire
A granite market cross on five circular steps preserves Old Rayne’s status as a burgh of barony created in 1492.
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Saltoun Square, Fraserburgh
Aberdeenshire
A 1736 granite market cross in Fraserburgh retains its date, oval shaft and coat of arms in the centre of Saltoun Square.
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, The Cross, Culross
Fife
Culross’s market cross visibly joins a 1588 trading privilege to Edwardian civic revival, its original stepped base supporting a 1902 shaft, arms a…
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, The Cross, Doune
Stirling
The capital carries the arms of Moray and Campbell, two sundials and a lion: a good deal of information packed onto the top of one shaft.
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, The Square, Fettercairn
Aberdeenshire
A 1670 market cross moved from Kincardine to Fettercairn in 1730 carries an ell measure, sundials and the arms of Scotland and the Earl of Middleton.
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Mercat Cross, Kettins
Perth and Kinross
A stump of medieval shaft, two feet three inches high, with a font from before the Reformation set on top of it: two separate objects made into one…
- Near Kettins
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Ogston Market Cross, Michael Kirk, Gordonstoun
Moray
An incised hammer mark and a hole probably cut for the jougs: the iron collar in which offenders were chained: survive on a cross now standing in a…
- Near Elgin
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
Perth Mercat Cross, Fingask Castle
Perth and Kinross
A cross assembled out of loose window tracery, standing beside a font carried here from Kinnaird: both given nineteenth-century dates that the ston…
- Near Perth
- Easy path
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Minor monument · Medieval
The Old Market Cross, Greenlaw
Scottish Borders
Said to have been put up on the Market Green in 1609. It is now set against the west side of the church, off the green entirely.
- Near Greenlaw
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
6 Ellerdale Road
Greater London
Richard Norman Shaw built this house for himself, without a client to please, and used it to demonstrate the Queen Anne style he helped popularise…
- Near Hampstead
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey Gardens
Greater London
A community garden in Stratford grows vegetables and flowers directly above the buried gatehouse of a vanished medieval abbey (a self-governing mon…
- Near Stratford
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of Kells
County Meath
For centuries this monastery sheltered, and perhaps helped create, the Book of Kells -- one of the finest illuminated gospel books to survive from…
- Near Kells
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of St Mary, St Dogmaels
Pembrokeshire
The west wall and north cross-arm of a twelfth-century monastic house beside the Teifi, with a detached medieval infirmary nearby.
- Near St Dogmaels
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr
County Dublin
Once one of Ireland's wealthiest religious houses, its canons taxed every barrel of Dublin ale and ran the city's water supply: yet nothing of it s…
- Near Dublin
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of the Order of St Clare
city-of-london
The Abbey of the Minoresses of St Clare gave the Minories its name; after the Crown closed it in 1539, its chapel became Holy Trinity church and ot…
- Near London
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Abbot's Staith
North Yorkshire
Limestone walls near the river preserve Selby Abbey's old working edge. Abbot's Staith is a medieval staith, meaning a riverside landing or warehou…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Abbotsbury Abbey
Dorset
Stone fragments, a great barn and St Catherine's Chapel keep Abbotsbury Abbey visible in the Dorset village it once dominated. Abbotsbury Abbey was…
- Near Abbotsbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abbotskerswell Priory
Devon
A community of nuns fled revolutionary France, was exiled twice more, and only found permanent refuge here in a convent built with its own escape t…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aberdyfi Castle
Ceredigion
In 1216 this mound hosted the assembly at which Llywelyn the Great secured the submission of south Wales's rulers, a diplomatic turning point rathe…
- Near Glandyfi
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberedw Castle
Powys
The last place Llywelyn ap Gruffydd sheltered before his death in 1282: most of it later quarried away to make foundations for a railway.
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Abergavenny Bridge
Monmouthshire
Known as Tudor Bridge for the tradition that Jasper Tudor built it, the crossing also caught the eye of J. M. W. Turner, who painted it twice in th…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Abergavenny Castle
Monmouthshire
Abergavenny Castle is a major Marcher ruin, shaped by the 1175 killing of Welsh leaders, Glyndŵr’s revolt and a long afterlife as civic gardens and…
- Near Abergavenny
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Abernethy Round Tower
Perth and Kinross
One of only two Irish-style round towers in Scotland, the other at Brechin Cathedral.
- Near Abernethy
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberpergwm House
Neath Port Talbot
Aberpergwm House is a ruined Welsh country house tied to a long-lived Welsh-speaking gentry family, nineteenth-century historicist remodelling, war…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Aberysgir Castle
Powys
A Norman motte, the earthen mound a castle was raised on, without its bailey, the walled yard below the castle mound,, in the borderland counties t…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aberystwyth Castle
Ceredigion
A diamond-shaped Edwardian fortress that changed hands between Welsh princes and the English crown, then struck its own silver coinage for Charles…
- Near Aberystwyth
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Abingdon Abbey
Oxfordshire
Timber-framed abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) buildings and gateways still thread through Abingdon where the great church has vanished. Abin…
- Near Abingdon-on-Thames
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Fortified place · Medieval
Abinger Castle
Surrey
Excavation here recovered the actual postholes of the vanished timber tower and the bridge linking it to its bailey (the enclosed courtyard where t…
- Near Abinger Common
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Achallader Castle
Argyll and Bute
A single 1691 meeting in these ruins produced a treaty of bribes that were never paid and secret terms the negotiator later denied, brokered on the…
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Achanduin Castle
Argyll and Bute
A single 1304 land grant is the earliest written trace of a stronghold long credited to the Bishop of Argyll, though excavation has since pointed t…
- Near Lismore
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Acton Burnell Castle
Shropshire
Red sandstone walls still rise beside Acton Burnell's church and the great barn linked with Edward I's parliament. Acton Burnell Castle is a fortif…
- Near Acton Burnell
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Affeton Castle
Devon
A medieval gatehouse is all that survived when Civil War forces levelled the Stucley family's fortified manor - and it went on to become their fami…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Affleck Castle
Angus
Its interior has scarcely been touched since the 1700s: spy-hole, private chapel and mural bedrooms all still in place, making it one of the most c…
- Near Monifieth
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Sacred place · Medieval
Aghaboe Abbey
County Laois
One of its own monks became a canonised bishop who built Salzburg Cathedral: a direct medieval thread from a small Irish valley to the heart of the…
- Near Portlaoise
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aghalard Castle
County Mayo
A gallowglass stronghold that changed hands twice within months in 1596, its fate decided not by siege but by the rumour of Hugh Roe O'Donnell's ap…
- Near Westport
- Rough ground
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Airds Castle
Argyll and Bute
For a century after the Lordship of the Isles fell, this headland castle changed hands between an Ayrshire family and the MacDonalds of Dunnyveg: K…
- Near Carradale
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Alberbury Castle
Shropshire
Red sandstone fragments and earthworks sit close to the Welsh border, where the Severn routes once mattered intensely. Alberbury Castle was a medie…
- Near Alberbury
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Alberbury Priory
Shropshire
A house of seven monks that lost two priors to murder allegations within five years, and was dissolved a century before the Dissolution, the closur…
- Near Alberbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Albrighton Moat
Shropshire
A medieval moat that had silted up and been filled with rubble, refilled in 1992 by a BBC television programme and now an angling centre for disabl…
- Near Donington
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Alcester Abbey
Warwickshire
A Benedictine house of 1138 with estates as far off as Dorset, annexed by Evesham Abbey in 1467 and left with almost nothing to mark it.
- Near Alcester
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Aldermaston Lock
Berkshire
Its scalloped brick chamber still carries a single line of blue brick marking where a cheaper, lower wall once stood before 1984.
- Near Aldermaston
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aldford Castle
Cheshire
A scheduled Norman stronghold whose founder and true age are still disputed, remembered locally not by name but as Blobb Hill.
-
Settlement · Medieval
Alkmonton medieval settlement
Derbyshire
A leper hospital and a baron's chapel once stood here; both vanished, leaving only grassy platforms, sunken lanes and a recovered font as trace of…
- Near Bakewell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
All Saints Church, Segenhoe
Bedfordshire
Cobblestone walls raised soon after the Norman Conquest still stand, telling of a parish that outgrew its old church - yet never stopped burying it…
- Near Ridgmont
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
All Saints' Church, Llangar
Denbighshire
Its wall paintings show the seven deadly sins each riding an animal, a device found in only three churches in Britain, and its abandonment in 1856…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Allesley Castle
West Midlands
A single earthen mound and ditch: never excavated: is all that survives of a castle whose builder and century remain disputed, now listed on Englan…
- Near Coventry
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Allington Castle
Kent
Allington Castle is a layered Medway fortress whose unauthorised 12th-century origin, Tudor long gallery, Wyatt rebellion, long ruin and sensitive…
- Near Maidstone
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Alloa Tower
Clackmannanshire
Alloa Tower is one of Scotland’s earliest and largest tower houses, retaining its timber roof and battlements from a long Erskine family residence.
- Near Alloa
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Alnesbourne Priory
Suffolk
A small Augustinian house near Nacton above the Orwell, probably founded in the thirteenth century.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Alnwick Abbey
Northumberland
Alnwick Abbey’s surviving gatehouse gives tangible scale to a Premonstratensian community whose medieval hospitality served nobles, gentry and more…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Alnwick Castle
Northumberland
Alnwick Castle guards a crossing of the River Aln in Northumberland, its battlements crowned with carved stone figures: sentinels that have watched…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Alton Abbey
Hampshire
A monastery whose roots lay in the ports of Burma and India, caring for destitute seafarers long before it settled into a Hampshire hillside for ov…
- Near Alton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Alton Castle
Staffordshire
A Gothic Revival castle above the Churnet Valley, on ground fortified in timber since Saxon times.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Alvecote Priory
Warwickshire
A Benedictine house founded in 1159 as penance, according to the story attached to it, by a crusader who had accused his wife falsely and killed th…
- Near Alvecote
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Alvingham Priory
Lincolnshire
A priory, a monastery run by a prior, split down the middle by its own church wall, where canons and nuns lived under one roof but never met: Engla…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Amberley Castle
West Sussex
Amberley shows how a bishops’ medieval summer palace was turned into a formidable south-coast fortress in 1377, while its gatehouse, high curtain w…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Amesbury Abbey
Wiltshire
One of only four English houses of the Order of Fontevraud, and burial place of a queen consort and a captive princess of royal blood.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Amesbury Priory
Wiltshire
A royal nunnery where queens and princesses took the veil, run under a French order in which the resident monks answered to a prioress rather than…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ampleforth Abbey
North Yorkshire
A working Benedictine monastery whose community traces an unbroken line back to pre-Reformation (the sixteenth-century break with the Roman Church)…
- Easy path
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Andle Stone
Derbyshire
A prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) boulder scored with cup-and-ring carvings was later turned into a private war memorial, its…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Andover Priory
Hampshire
Andover's monks answered to a French abbey on the Loire, not an English house: a foreign tie that made it vulnerable and saw it suppressed in 1414,…
- Near Andover
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Anglesey Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A medieval priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: has its chapter house and monks' day room folded whole into a Jacobean-then-…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ankerwycke Priory
Berkshire
A small, poor house of Benedictine nuns whose 1197 case against a runaway sister reached the Pope himself, and whose site still bears a Tudor manor…
- Near Wraysbury
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Anstey Castle
Hertfordshire
Its own defenders were ordered to tear it down in 1218, and the stone went to repair the parish church next door, where the castle's crest still su…
- Near Hertford
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Apley Castle
Shropshire
A fortified manor of 1327 that became an Elizabethan mansion, was sacked in the Civil War, and ended up as the stable block of a house that has its…
- Near Hadley
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Appleby Castle
Cumbria
Four centuries under one family, then a rare-breeds farm run by an industrialist, and now a private house on the open market for millions: its owne…
- Near Appleby
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Appleby Friary
Cumbria
The friars who lived here left named patrons and a firm founding date in the record, yet the ground itself has vanished entirely: only a borrowed n…
- Near Appleby
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Appuldurcombe House
Isle of Wight
Appuldurcombe House is the shell of an ambitious Worsley Baroque mansion whose 18th-century architecture, Capability Brown landscape and celebrated…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Arbroath Abbey
Angus
In 1320 the Declaration of Scottish Independence: the Declaration of Arbroath: is believed to have been drafted here by Abbot Bernard, Chancellor o…
- Near Arbroath
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ardamullivan Castle
County Galway
Ardamullivan Castle is a restored six-storey O'Shaughnessy tower house whose surviving defensive features conceal rare late-medieval wall paintings…
- Near Portumna
- Some walking
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Ardboe High Cross
County Tyrone
At 5.6 metres, Ardboe High Cross is Northern Ireland’s tallest and most complete original high cross; its twenty-two biblical panels preserve the o…
- Near Cookstown
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ardchattan Priory
Argyll and Bute
Robert the Bruce is said to have held Scotland's last Gaelic-speaking parliament here in 1308, and local tradition credits its yews with furnishing…
- Near Bonawe
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ardee Castle
County Louth
At four storeys it is reckoned the largest fortified tower house surviving in Ireland or Britain, and it stayed in daily public use: as prison, the…
- Near Ardee
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ardfert Abbey
County Kerry
Nine tall lancet windows run along the south wall of the friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them)…
- Near Ardfert
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ardfinnan Castle
County Tipperary
Built in 1185 by Prince John alongside its sister fortress at Lismore, Ardfinnan is among the very first castles the English Crown ever raised on I…
- Near Clonmel
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ardley Castle
Oxfordshire
Raised without the king's licence during the Anarchy, it stood as an illegal fortress until a peace treaty condemned it by name to demolition.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ardvreck Castle
Highland
A broken keep on a spit of rock in Loch Assynt where a fugitive royalist commander was handed to his enemies in 1650, under circumstances still dis…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Arkin's Castle
County Galway
Arkin's Castle records the remaking of an Inishmore fortress from an O'Brien thirteenth-century structure into a Cromwellian garrison, now reduced…
- Near Athenry
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Armadale Castle
Highland
A Tudor-Gothic mock-castle built purely for show now stands roofless and abandoned, and in 2025 its entire estate went up for private sale.
- Near Armadale
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Armathwaite Castle
Cumbria
A 15th-century pele tower built by the Skeltons to watch the River Eden for Scottish raiders, later refaced into a classical mansion that still hid…
- Near Armathwaite
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Arnside Tower
Cumbria
A Scottish-style twin-height pele tower on English soil, raised against Border Reivers and now slowly falling to a collapsed wall and a century of…
- Near Arnside
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Aros Castle
Argyll and Bute
A single stronghold changed hands between three of the West Highlands' great dynasties in turn: MacDougall, MacDonald and Maclean: each forfeiture…
- Near Salen
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Arundel Castle
West Sussex
A medieval castle established by Roger de Montgomery in the eleventh century, damaged in the Civil War and remodelled twice over afterwards.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ascot d'Oilly Castle
Oxfordshire
Excavation here proved the mound was built around an already-standing tower, not the tower onto a ready-made mound: a rare, deliberately reversed m…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ascot Priory
Berkshire
The mother house of an entire Anglican sisterhood, founded to serve seafaring Devonport's poor before it ever stood in Berkshire woodland.
- Near Ascot
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ascott Earl Castle
Oxfordshire
A castle of timber tower, artificial mound and walled yard in the village of Ascott Earl.
- Near Ascott Earl
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ascott House
Buckinghamshire
A working hunting box quietly rebuilt over sixty years into one of the Rothschild family's great informal country houses, its rustic timbering deli…
- Near Ascott
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ashby de la Zouch Castle
Leicestershire
A late medieval tower house whose owner was executed before it was finished, then deliberately wrecked with gunpowder two centuries later: and whos…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ashdown Forest
East Sussex
A stone hand axe found near Gills Lap, thought to be about 50,000 years old, is the earliest known trace of human activity on Ashdown Forest: an an…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ashford Castle
County Galway
A stronghold built onto the edge of a monastic site in 1228 has been rebuilt by three ruling families into a five-star hotel that has hosted a king…
- Near Cong
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ashleworth Tithe Barn
Gloucestershire
A Grade II* survivor of the medieval tithe system, its owl holes and buttressed limestone walls still show how a Bristol abbey (a monastery headed…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ashley Castle
Hampshire
A castle knocked down by royal order in 1155 and rebuilt in stone half a century later under one of King John's most powerful (and most notorious)…
- Near Stockbridge
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ashridge Priory
Hertfordshire
A future queen was arrested here as a suspected traitor, and the order that built the place traced its odd double name to whispers of a French heresy.
- Near Hertford
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ashton Keynes Castle
Wiltshire
Locals call it The Battlefield, and nothing in the record says what battle: a ringwork, a castle enclosure ringed by a bank and built without a mot…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Askeaton Abbey
County Limerick
The east-bank ruin north of Askeaton combines a church with domestic ranges; records differ over which FitzGerald earl founded the Franciscan commu…
- Near Askeaton
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Askerton Castle
Cumbria
Its two crenellated towers were raised for comfort, not war: a rare case where a border stronghold's battlements were really about extra bedrooms.
- Near Askerton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aslockton Castle
Nottinghamshire
Aslockton Castle’s adapted castle mound and waterworks show how a Norman stronghold was recycled into a manor, fishponds and formal gardens over ce…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Astley Castle
Warwickshire
A fortified house rather than a true castle, home to Elizabeth Woodville before she became queen, gutted by fire in 1978 and rebuilt inside its own…
- Near Astley
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Astwell Castle
Northamptonshire
A single embattled gatehouse tower, its spiral stair still climbing to a castellated roof, is almost all that survives of a forty-room courtyard ma…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Athassel Priory
County Tipperary
At roughly 1.6 hectares, this is the largest medieval priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a religious communit…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Athcarne Castle
County Meath
Its tower house was signed away into the future King James II's own name after Cromwell seized it, and locals themselves gutted it for salvage in 1…
- Near Dunshaughlin
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Athelney Abbey
Somerset
Founded by King Alfred after his refuge in the Somerset marshes, this Benedictine abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) endured for centuries befo…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Athenry Abbey
County Galway
Athenry Abbey is a Dominican priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose substantial church and tombs preserve centuries of p…
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Athenry Castle
County Galway
A squat 1230s keep was raised into a soaring tower house within a generation: carved in a local style found nowhere else, at a ford the Bermingham…
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Athlone Castle
County Westmeath
A squat, much-rebuilt riverside stronghold that has guarded the Shannon crossing at Athlone for over eight centuries, from Gaelic timber fort to Na…
- Near Athlone
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Athlumney Castle
County Meath
A tower house and its Tudor mansion were burned not by an attacking army but by their own defenders, twice, rather than surrender the site intact.
- Near Navan
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Athy Priory
County Kildare
A Dominican house refounded twice after suppression, its friars returning in the 1620s and again in the 1750s to keep an unbroken thread running to…
- Near Athy
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Auckland Castle
County Durham
Twelve canvases of Jacob and his sons by Francisco de Zurbarán have hung in the Long Dining Room since 1756, and its converted great hall is rated…
- Near Bishop Auckland
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aughnanure Castle
County Galway
The only medieval castle in Connemara still intact enough to walk through, with a rare double bawn, a round watchtower, and carved grapevines in it…
- Near Oughterard
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Augill Castle
Cumbria
A Victorian fantasy of medieval architecture, Augill Castle passed through half a dozen owners in barely fifty years before finding its true callin…
- Near Brough
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Austin Friars, London
City of London
Thomas Cromwell built one of London's grandest private mansions on land seized from this friary (a community of friars, an order that lived among t…
- Near London
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Austin Friary, Cambridge
Cambridgeshire
Two Cambridge friars who once lived here, Robert Barnes and Myles Coverdale, went on to help drive the English Reformation, and the only book known…
- Near Cambridge
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Avebury Priory
Wiltshire
One of only two English cells of a Norman abbey: a monastery headed by an abbot: sending its rents and tithes back to Boscherville for four centuri…
- Near Avebury
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Axholme Charterhouse
Lincolnshire
Its last prior, Augustine Webster, chose the Tower of London and martyrdom over the Oath of Supremacy: a small Carthusian house whose ending produc…
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Axmouth Old Bridge
Devon
Believed to be the oldest surviving concrete bridge in England, it needed steel reinforcement bolted into its unreinforced spans decades after they…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aydon Castle
Northumberland
Aydon Castle is a rare fortified manor whose merchant-built stone house survived Scottish raids, capture, farming reuse, and later heritage protect…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ayton Castle, North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
A rare surviving pele tower in northern England, raised to guard a river crossing against Scottish raiders: and still holding a largely intact vaul…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Baconsthorpe Castle
Norfolk
Baconsthorpe Castle is a rare fortified manor whose gatehouses, moat, wool-processing range and gardens show how the Heydons turned status, sheep f…
- Near Baconsthorpe
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Badminton House
Gloucestershire
A private ducal seat whose Great Hall gave a global sport its name, while four centuries of rebuilding by Kent, Gibbs and the Somerset family layer…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Baginton Castle
Warwickshire
A castle with two names and almost no visitors, where the Earl of Northumberland was held after Hotspur's defeat at Shrewsbury in 1403.
- Near Baginton
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Baguley Hall
Greater Manchester
Baguley Hall is one of England’s oldest surviving timber great halls, preserving exceptionally large 14th-century timbers and the layered story of…
- Near Winchester
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Baile Hill
North Yorkshire
The last surviving trace of a twin-castle system William the Conqueror threw up on both banks of the Ouse within a year of taking York.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bailieborough Castle
County Cavan
A Plantation-era fortified house that shaped an entire Cavan town, then vanished so completely that a lakeside forest trail is now the only trace.
- Near Bailieborough
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Bakewell Bridge
Derbyshire
One of its five cutwaters still carries the stump of a medieval wayside cross, tying this working road bridge back to the market routes that once p…
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bakewell Castle
Derbyshire
Its very origin is disputed: was it a Saxon burh raised by Edward the Elder in 924, or a 12th-century Norman motte, the earthen mound a castle was…
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Balgonie Castle
Fife
Balgonie Castle shows five centuries of incremental change, from a 14th-century tower house to a restored residence within the remains of a 17th-ce…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballands Castle
Somerset
A surviving motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle), bailey (the defended yard attached to the mound) and encircling ditches…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinacarriga Castle
County Cork
Ballinacarriga Castle is a structurally sound sixteenth-century tower house that retains rare defensive details and a Sheela Na Gig high on its eas…
- Near Ballineen
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinafad Castle
County Sligo
A ten-man Elizabethan garrison post that survived two separate attacks in Ireland's turbulent seventeenth century, and today stands open, free and…
- Near Sligo
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballindalloch Castle
Moray
Continuously lived in by one family since 1546, its Z-plan tower survived a burning by Montrose's men and a feud that ended in murder at a neighbou…
- Near Ballindalloch
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinlough Castle
County Westmeath
One of a handful of Irish Catholic families still living in the same house they held since the seventeenth century, under a coat of arms whose foun…
- Near Delvin
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ballinskelligs Abbey
County Kerry
On the western shore of Ballinskelligs Bay, the ruined church, covered walkway and Prior's House of an Augustinian monastic house stand within a fe…
- Near Ballinskelligs
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ballintubber Abbey
County Mayo
Ballintubber's unusual continuity lies in its Catholic use: worship continued through the penal times even after fire, suppression and Cromwellian…
- Near Ballintubber
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ballyboggan Abbey
County Meath
A wooden cross drew pilgrims here for centuries and met a public burning in Trim in 1538, giving this ruined priory, a monastery headed by a prior,…
- Near Kildare
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballycar Castle
County Clare
A tower house so thoroughly erased that even the house later built on its footings was a roofless ruin by the 1890s: known today almost entirely th…
- Near Newmarket-on-Fergus
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballycowan Castle
County Offaly
A Gaelic tower house, an English fortified house, and a Cromwellian bombardment all marked the same ridge west of Tullamore within less than a cent…
- Near Tullamore
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyfounder Rath
County Down
Ballyfounder Rath preserves the compact earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) form of a ringfort on the Ar…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballygally Castle
County Antrim
Built by a Scottish settler in 1625, Ballygally is a sea-facing fortified house that resisted attacks in 1641 before becoming a hotel without losin…
- Near Larne
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballygunner Castle
County Waterford
A Georgian-fronted country house wrapped around medieval and 17th-century masonry, standing, by local belief, on the site of an earlier Viking stro…
- Near Waterford
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballylahan Castle
County Mayo
Only one of Ballylahan's twin towers survived a near-destruction in 1316, yet its bawn wall still shows the sloping base-batter of the Mac Siurtain…
- Near Castlebar
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyloughan Castle
County Carlow
Ballyloughan Castle is a County Carlow National Monument whose twin-towered gatehouse and high thirteenth-century walls preserve the outline of a s…
- Near Bagenalstown
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymalis Castle
County Kerry
Ballymalis Castle stands on the north bank of the River Laune, close to where the river meets the Gaddagh, on level ground about 4.3 km northwest o…
- Near Beaufort
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymoon Castle
County Carlow
Ballymoon Castle is a striking open-courtyard National Monument whose granite walls preserve a rare, possibly unfinished medieval castle plan near…
- Near Borris
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymore Castle
County Galway
A tower house built on a marriage settlement changed hands through Cromwellian confiscation and a Williamite siege, then quietly became a Georgian…
- Near Loughrea
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymote Castle
County Sligo
The most symmetrical of Ireland's keepless castles, closely paralleling Edward I's Beaumaris in Wales: and the last Norman castle ever raised in Co…
- Near Ballymote
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballynahinch Castle
County Galway
A cricketing Indian prince, a brewer, and an animal-welfare pioneer each owned this house in turn: a private demesne that has passed through more s…
- Near Cleggan
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballynahow Castle
County Tipperary
A five-storey tower still carries its full parapet defences intact: four evenly spaced machicolations and a walled secret chamber reached only thro…
- Near Clonmel
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyquirk
County Tipperary
What stands today is barely half the building: three vanished towers and a whole upper storey were stripped away in the nineteenth century, and an…
- Near Clonmel
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyshannon Castle
County Donegal
A vanished O'Donnell stronghold whose 1597 siege helped decide the fate of Gaelic Ulster, though not one stone of it now stands above ground.
- Near Ballyshannon
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Balmerino Abbey
Fife
Balmerino Abbey preserves rare Cistercian fabric on the Fife coast, including a vaulted chapter house, after centuries of destruction, residential…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Balsall Preceptory
West Midlands
One manor grew into an administrative hub controlling nine further Templar properties across Warwickshire, run by a community arrested to a man whe…
- Near Balsall Common
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Baltinglass Abbey
County Wicklow
A Cistercian church that once housed 36 monks and 50 lay brothers went on to mother its own daughter house at Jerpoint, spreading the order's stone…
- Near Baltinglass
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Balvaird Castle
Perth and Kinross
Carved heads support the roundels on the wall-walk, and the cap-house over the stair is a miniature tower house of its own: detail that may have be…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bamburgh Castle
Northumberland
Bamburgh Castle is a Northumberland coastal fortress whose Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, royal, and Armstrong layers span more than 1,500 years.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bampton Castle, Devon
Devon
A Norman motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) survived siege, a stone rebuild, and a licence to crenellate, yet stands tod…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bampton Castle, Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire
Two irreconcilable founding stories - a queen's earthwork (a mound or ditch formed by moving soil, not by building) of 1142 and an earl's licensed…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Banbury Castle
Oxfordshire
Its 1225–50 rebuild gave it an early concentric pentagonal plan: a design historians note otherwise belongs to later castles like Harlech and Beaum…
- Near Banbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Banc y Betws
Carmarthenshire
Nothing is recorded of who raised this earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) or why, yet at some nine metr…
- Near Carmarthen
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bangor Abbey
County Down
Bangor Abbey was an early Irish centre of strict monastic learning whose teachers, manuscripts and missionaries linked County Down to Europe.
- Near Bangor
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bar Convent
North Yorkshire
Its chapel hides a full dome beneath an ordinary slate roof and conceals eight separate escape routes: architecture built by nuns who lived under p…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barden Tower
North Yorkshire
A ruined 15th-century hunting lodge that, lacking any village to gather around, became the de facto centre of community life for the farms and haml…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bardney Abbey
Lincolnshire
A Mercian king gave up his crown to become abbot here, and the community he founded later held the disputed relics of a Northumbrian saint for two…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bardsey Island
Gwynedd
Bardsey Island is a remote Welsh pilgrimage island where a 6th-century monastic tradition, the legend of 20,000 saints, rare wildlife and dark-sky…
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bargate
Hampshire
A working medieval gatehouse that has served in turn as guildhall, prison, courtroom, police headquarters and gallery, still spanning Southampton's…
- Near Basingstoke
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bargy Castle
County Wexford
A working Norman keep still standing after eight centuries, its story tied to a rebel commander's execution, a Cromwellian confiscation, and the ch…
- Near Wexford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Barham Friary
Cambridgeshire
One of a small number of English Crutched Friars houses, its chapel of St Margaret quietly outlived the friary (a community of friars, an order tha…
- Near Barham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Barking Abbey
Greater London
For almost nine centuries its abbess outranked every other abbess in England, and the boy who fathered the Tudor dynasty was raised as a ward withi…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barland Castle
Powys
An early Norman castle of timber tower and walled yard near Old Radnor, known also as Bishopston Old Castle.
- Near Old Radnor
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Barlynch Priory
Somerset
An Augustinian priory reduced to fragments of wall in a farmhouse: with its best surviving glass several miles away in another church.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barnard Castle (castle)
County Durham
A Balliol-built stronghold that later became one of Richard III's favourite residences, and whose owner stripped it to repair Raby Castle.
- Near Barnard Castle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barnstaple Castle
Devon
Excavation beneath its earthen mound uncovered over a hundred early Christian graves, showing the Normans had raised their stronghold directly on t…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Barnstaple Priory
Devon
Its founder endowed the priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot, with Barnstaple's…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barnwell Castle
Northamptonshire
Barnwell Castle retains exceptional walls, towers and gatehouse from a thirteenth-century quadrangular stronghold with earlier Norman and Civil War…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Barnwell Priory
Cambridgeshire
An anonymous canon here chronicled the reign of King John, and in 1388 the site hosted the only Parliament ever held outside London or Westminster.
- Near Cambridge
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barry Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A wooden ringwall of the twelfth century rebuilt in stone, its gatehouse still standing two storeys high in a Barry suburb.
- Near Barry
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barryscourt Castle
County Cork
Barryscourt is a restored sixteenth-century tower-house complex that preserves the imprint of the Barrys, the Desmond Rebellions and a later recove…
- Near Carrigtwohill
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Basing House
Hampshire
A brick palace that once rivalled Hampton Court in scale was reduced to smoking rubble in a single afternoon in 1645, and villagers were then invit…
- Near Basingstoke
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Basingwerk Abbey
Flintshire
One of the best-preserved Cistercian domestic ranges in Wales: chapter house, dormitory and dining hall still legible around the covered monastery…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bass of Inverurie
Aberdeenshire
A wooden castle mound that once governed the whole lordship of the Garioch, its earthworks still holding an oak gangway and a 14th-century face-jug…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bath Abbey
Somerset
A parish church standing on the site of a former Benedictine monastery in the centre of Bath.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Battle Abbey
East Sussex
The high altar of its ruined church was built to stand on the exact spot where King Harold reputedly fell in 1066, turning a battlefield into a mon…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bayard's Cove Fort
Devon
One of the few English blockhouses whose eleven gunports still face the water they were built to sweep, English Heritage has already named it among…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bayham Old Abbey
East Sussex
Bayham’s finely carved ruins preserve a Premonstratensian abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) born from two failing monasteries, later reshaped…
- Near Lamberhurst
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bayle Museum
East Riding of Yorkshire
A single stone gatehouse carried a wooden castle, a priory's tolls and alms, a prison, a garrison and a town hall before becoming a museum of its o…
- Near Dunbar
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Baynard Castle, Cottingham
East Riding of Yorkshire
A double-ditched stronghold hosted a king twice within a century, then vanished so completely that within decades farmhouses stood inside its own e…
- Near Dunbar
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Baynard House, London
City of London
A brutalist telecoms tower standing directly over the buried remains of London's last riverside castle, and the rooftop where a Hollywood stunt fam…
- Near City of London
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Baynard's Castle
City of London
Two royal dynasties met their political end inside its walls: Lady Jane Grey's nine-day reign was formally ended here, and Richard III accepted the…
- Near London
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Beacon Hill Battery
Essex
Beacon Hill Battery is a layered defence of Harwich harbour, preserving Tudor, Napoleonic, Victorian and Second World War responses to the strategi…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beadlow Priory
Bedfordshire
A vanished Benedictine priory whose buildings disappeared so completely that by 1908 nothing stood above ground: its plan survives only because arc…
- Near Beadlow
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bear Place
Berkshire
A Georgian house built partly from the bones of the Elizabethan mansion it replaced: its vanished predecessor still traced by the moat beside it.
- Near Wargrave
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beaubec Abbey
County Meath
Historians have argued for a century over whether this monastery even existed at all, and it took a modern dig to give the argument physical ground…
- Near Navan
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beauchief Abbey
South Yorkshire
Historians once accused its founder of murdering Thomas Becket and building the abbey in penance: a claim later research quietly dismantled.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beaulieu Abbey
Hampshire
The only English abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) founded by King John, and populated not from a nearby house but by thirty monks sent direct…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumaris Castle
Isle of Anglesey
Beaumaris Castle is Edward I’s most symmetrical concentric fortress, designed to secure Anglesey after conquest but never completed; its sea-suppli…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumaris town walls
Isle of Anglesey
Beaumaris town walls show how Edward I’s initially unwalled colonial town responded to Owain Glyndŵr’s 1403 capture: a 15th-century circuit of ditc…
- Near Beaumaris
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumont Castle
Oxfordshire
A medieval castle at Mixbury, built either on a mound or as a circular banked enclosure.
- Near Mixbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Beaumys Castle
Berkshire
The 1347 raid that killed a nobleman, terrified a son of Edward III, and ended in a forced marriage is the best-documented event at this otherwise…
- Near Swallowfield
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beauvale Priory
Nottinghamshire
Beauvale is the best survivor of England’s late Carthusian expansion: a 1343 house established for a prior and twelve solitary monks.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beckford Priory
Worcestershire
Little survives above ground of the Augustinian priory itself: only a crypt beneath a country house that later served as a Catholic college and now…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bective Abbey
County Meath
Its 15th-century cloister is one of the best preserved in Ireland: and three centuries after the monks left, the ruins doubled as a medieval battle…
- Near Navan
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bedale Market Cross
North Yorkshire
Bedale Market Cross anchors the town’s medieval market charter, street pattern and civic gathering place in a rare Grade I scheduled monument (desi…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bedford Castle
Bedfordshire
For eight weeks in 1224 it withstood the concentrated military resources of the entire English crown, one of the longest and costliest sieges of th…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beeleigh Abbey
Essex
Beeleigh Abbey preserves a rare Premonstratensian foundation near Maldon, later transformed into a farmhouse and private residence while retaining…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Beeston Castle
Cheshire
A stronghold with no keep at all: its builder trusted a sheer sandstone crag and a ring of D-shaped towers to do a keep's job instead.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Begar Priory
North Yorkshire
A Carthusian cell whose ownership passed between a royal chantry, Eton College and a monastery of its own order long after its own community had va…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Belfast Castle
County Antrim
The name has outlived four separate castles on two sites: a Victorian mansion on Cave Hill inherited the title from a medieval stronghold fought ov…
- Near Belfast
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bellister Castle
Northumberland
Bellister Castle combines a ruinous medieval tower with a nineteenth-century castellated mansion, preserving nearly eight centuries of adaptation n…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Belmont Abbey, Herefordshire
Herefordshire
A Victorian Catholic revival church that briefly held a monastic cathedral chapter: an arrangement last seen in England at Canterbury, Winchester a…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Belmont Hall, Cheshire
Cheshire
A Palladian house completed in 1755 to a design begun by James Gibbs but finished after his death by an unknown hand, its bow windows and Rococo ce…
- Near Great Budworth
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Belsay Castle
Northumberland
Belsay Castle is a Grade I pele tower whose medieval defence became an attached manor, then a deliberately romantic folly within the Belsay estate.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Belvoir Castle
Leicestershire
Rebuilt at least four times on the same commanding ridge, the present castle is a Georgian fantasy of a medieval stronghold: yet it has housed one…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bembridge Fort
Isle of Wight
Bembridge Fort is a Palmerston-era command fort on the Isle of Wight, whose long military life spans invasion fears, submarine detection, air defen…
- Near Bembridge
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Benefield Castle
Northamptonshire
A minor ringwork: a castle enclosure ringed by a bank: whose garrison, serving the future Edward I, raided a neighbouring manor and stole a town's…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Benington Castle
Hertfordshire
One of at least 21 castles Henry II had torn down in 1177 - yet its earthworks survive because a Georgian house was later built to make use of them…
- Near Hertford
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bentley Priory
greater-london
A medieval Augustinian cell whose site is lost, a Soane mansion built over it, a dowager queen's deathbed, and the room where the Battle of Britain…
- Near Gloucester
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Benton Castle
Pembrokeshire
Two unequal round towers flanking an entrance above the wooded Eastern Cleddau, around a courtyard later taken into a private house.
- Near Burton
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Berden Priory
Essex
Berden Priory’s site preserves the memory of an Essex religious house through the later Grade II* timber-framed farmhouse at the centre of Berden P…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Berkeley Castle
Gloucestershire
The oldest continuously occupied castle in England still held by the family that rebuilt it in the 12th century, and the traditional scene of a kin…
- Near Gloucester
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Berkhamsted Castle
Hertfordshire
A wooden fort raised within weeks of the Norman Conquest grew into a royal residence and administrative seat of the Earldom of Cornwall, and later…
- Near Berkhamsted
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bermondsey Abbey
Greater London
A prince was born here and a discarded queen died here centuries later: royal ties that outlasted the buildings themselves, of which only a gatehou…
- Near Gloucester
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Berry Pomeroy Castle
Devon
A private fortress raised as late as the 1480s, then rebuilt inside its own walls as a four-storey Tudor mansion: two castles in one, sharing a sin…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Berwick Castle
Northumberland
Berwick Castle’s repeated Anglo-Scottish captures and railway-era dismantling make its fragmentary remains an unusually direct record of changing b…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Betchworth Castle
Surrey
A crumbled fortified medieval stone house north of Brockham, its corners strengthened in the eighteenth century.
- Near Betchworth
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Beverley Friary
East Riding of Yorkshire
The surviving range is the guesthouse of a Dominican priory that once stood at its maximum extent by 1400: the only fragment left after the rest wa…
- Near Dunbar
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Beverston Castle
Gloucestershire
A rare pentagonal castle, its bluish stone likely quarried alongside Calcot Manor's, that survived a 12th-century battle and a 17th-century siege a…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bewcastle Castle
Cumbria
Its dry moat still follows the ditch of the Roman fort it replaced, and a rigged football match here once became the trigger for a Border reiver am…
- Near Brampton
- Rough ground
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Bewell's Cross
Bristol
A boundary cross that doubled as Bristol's place of execution for centuries, where the condemned said a final prayer before being hanged on the hil…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bickleigh Castle
Devon
Bickleigh Castle layers a Norman chapel, fifteenth-century Courtenay mansion and Civil War destruction beside the Exe, with its gatehouse and walls…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bicknacre Priory
Essex
Bicknacre Priory records an Austin Canon foundation that grew from a hermitage, struggled financially and vanished before the Dissolution (Henry VI…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bicton Castle
Shropshire
An eleventh- or twelfth-century castle site at Bicton, where only the ditch and outer bank survive.
- Near Bicton
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Biddlesden Abbey
Northamptonshire
Biddlesden's documented history follows a small Cistercian house from a contested foundation through internal scandal, rebuilding and centuries of…
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Bidford Bridge
Warwickshire
An early fifteenth-century bridge, pulled down in 1644 to cover Charles I's retreat and rebuilt six years later at the county's expense.
- Near Bidford-on-Avon
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Biggleswade Castle
Bedfordshire
A castle whose stone was never dressed and whose walls were never built above earth: its entire form survives only as ditches and cropmarks along a…
- Near Biggleswade
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bilsington Priory
Kent
Bilsington Priory is a rare surviving Augustinian house in Kent whose 1253 foundation, local hospital and preaching role, early Dissolution (Henry…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bindon Abbey
Dorset
Bindon Abbey preserves the story of a Cistercian community that moved from a harsh coastal site to the Frome valley, thrived under royal patronage…
- Near Wool
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Binham Priory
Norfolk
Binham Priory combines a living parish church with major Benedictine ruins, including England’s earliest surviving Gothic window tracery: carved st…
- Near Binham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Birkenhead Priory
Merseyside
Birkenhead Priory is Merseyside’s oldest standing building, preserving a Benedictine foundation whose ferry rights helped connect the Wirral and Li…
- Near Birkenhead
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Birr Castle
County Offaly
A private family seat whose grounds held the largest telescope on Earth for seventy years, and now host a working node in a Europe-wide radio-astro…
- Near Birr
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bisham Abbey
Berkshire
Two foundations stood entwined here, a Templar manor and an Augustinian priory (a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot); when the…
- Near Bisham
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bishop's Palace, Llandaff
Cardiff
Its gatehouse echoes Caerphilly Castle so closely that the same master mason may have built both, tying a bishop's residence to Wales's greatest fo…
- Near Llandaff, Cardiff
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bishop's Palace, Paignton
Devon
Paignton’s Bishop’s Palace preserves the bishops of Exeter’s medieval manorial centre, including walls, a fourteenth-century tower and chapel fragm…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bishop's Waltham Palace
Hampshire
A Bishop of Winchester once hosted an emperor here to hammer out a European treaty, in a palace grand enough to entertain five English kings.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bishopton Castle
County Durham
Its motte: the earthen mound a castle was raised on: was one of only twenty English mounds core-sampled and radiocarbon-dated by archaeologists che…
- Near Bishopton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bitchfield Tower
Northumberland
Bitchfield Tower is a restored fifteenth-century pele tower whose attached manor and succession of owners chart five centuries of Northumberland es…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bixley medieval settlement
Norfolk
Bixley is one of East Anglia’s most extensive deserted medieval settlements, preserving earthworks that show how a small village near Norwich was o…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Black Castle, Bristol
Bristol
A pretend fortress built entirely from a factory's black waste slag, so convincingly castellated that a visiting Horace Walpole first mistook it fo…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Black Ladies Priory
Staffordshire
A house of Benedictine nuns founded in the mid twelfth century on the edge of Kiddemore Green.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Canterbury
Kent
Blackfriars Canterbury preserves rare fragments of a 1237 Dominican priory, a monastery run by a prior, that straddled the River Stour: its dining…
- Near Canterbury
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Gloucester
Gloucestershire
Britain's most complete surviving Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them) is not a rui…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Hereford
Herefordshire
A working Dominican priory: a monastery headed by a prior: reduced by Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s to a handful of walls, a…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Leicester
Leicestershire
A Dominican monastery built over a Roman townhouse whose mosaics rank among Britain's finest, and beside a mass grave now linked to an 11th-century…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Oxford
Oxfordshire
The community traces an unbroken teaching tradition older than Oxford's colleges, yet the building on St Giles' dates only to 1929: a 400-year gap…
- Near Oxford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Winchelsea
East Sussex
A royal foundation that shifted site twice before settling in the heart of Winchelsea, then vanished so completely that its stones were carried off…
- Near Winchelsea
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Blackness Castle
Falkirk
Blackness Castle is a Firth of Forth fortress transformed from Crichton residence and state prison into an advanced artillery work, prison and ammu…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bladon Castle
Derbyshire
A castle that was never meant to defend anything: its battlements front little more than a single long wall, built purely for effect.
- Near Bakewell
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Blaenavon Ironworks
Torfaen
An ironworks whose struggle with cheap, high-sulphur ore pushed forward the technology of ironmaking.
- Near Blaenavon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Blaenllynfi Castle
Powys
A privately owned ruined stone castle near Bwlch, probably of the early thirteenth century and captured several times.
- Near Bwlch
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Blair Castle
Perth and Kinross
The ancestral home of Clan Murray and historic seat of the Dukes of Atholl.
- Near Blair Atholl
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Blakeney Guildhall
Norfolk
Blakeney Guildhall preserves a rare fourteenth-century vaulted undercroft (the arched stone cellar beneath a building) near the quay, reflecting me…
- Near Blakeney
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blanchland Abbey
Northumberland
The monks prayed for a mist to hide them from Scottish raiders, got one, and then rang the bells in celebration.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bleddfa Castle
Powys
A castle of mound and courtyard near Llangunllo, known also as Bledeach or Bledvach.
- Near Llangunllo
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Blenkinsopp Castle
Northumberland
Blenkinsopp Castle captures the long conversion of a medieval border tower into a Victorian mansion, then a fire-damaged ruin with a surviving dome…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bletchingley Castle
Surrey
A Norman earthen castle above Bletchingley village, where the earthworks survived largely undisturbed beneath later woodland.
- Near Bletchingley
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bletsoe Castle
Bedfordshire
The birthplace, in 1441 or 1443, of Margaret Beaufort: mother of Henry VII and grandmother of the entire Tudor dynasty.
- Near Bletsoe
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blyth Priory
Nottinghamshire
A Benedictine monastery dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, founded in 1088 by Roger de Busli as an offshoot of a French house at Rouen.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blythburgh Priory
Suffolk
The lesser of the two churches at Blythburgh, and the one that did not survive.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bodelwyddan Castle
Denbighshire
A Tudor manor rebuilt twice over: once as Greek Revival, once as dramatic Gothick castle: before serving as a girls' school, a war hospital and a n…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bodiam Castle
East Sussex
Bodiam is the iconic English moated quadrangular castle, designed in 1385 for both defence and display and now conserved as a National Trust landmark.
- Near Bodiam
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Boghead (bastle)
Northumberland
Boghead is a rare, relatively unmodified border bastle (a fortified farmhouse of the Anglo-Scottish border, with livestock housed below) whose defe…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bolbec Castle
Buckinghamshire
A stronghold Hugh II de Bolbec had no right to build, raised without royal licence during a civil war and condemned by a pope before Cromwell finis…
- Near Whitchurch
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bolebroke Castle
East Sussex
A modest Tudor hunting lodge with an outsized claim to fame: reputedly the base from which Henry VIII pursued his courtship of Anne Boleyn.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bolesworth Castle
Cheshire
A castellated sandstone mansion remodelled by the architect of Portmeirion, still run by the family that bought it in 1856 and now known as much fo…
- Near Tattenhall
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bolingbroke Castle
Lincolnshire
A future king was born within these walls: Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, giving the ruin a direct line to the English crown.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bolsover Castle
Derbyshire
A working medieval stronghold was abandoned to ruin, then rebuilt from scratch in the 1600s as a fantasy of turrets and painted ceilings meant pure…
- Near Bakewell
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bolton Castle
North Yorkshire
A single family has held these walls since 1379: surviving a royal burning, Civil War slighting, and six months as prison to a captive Scottish queen.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Priory
North Yorkshire
A west tower begun in 1520 still stands two-thirds short of its planned height, beside a nave (the western body of the building, where the congrega…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bonawe Iron Furnace
Argyll and Bute
A charcoal-fired blast furnace that once employed 600 people to strip local woodland for fuel, shipping its pig iron south to Cumbria rather than f…
- Near Taynuilt
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bondgate Tower
Northumberland
Bondgate Tower is Alnwick’s surviving medieval gateway, turning a town-wall project of the Percy earls into a working feature of the modern street.
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bontnewydd Palaeolithic site
Denbighshire
The jaw and teeth of an eleven-year-old Neanderthal boy, found here, make this the only site in Britain with fossils of a classic Neanderthal.
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bordesley Abbey
Worcestershire
Founded during the civil war of the Anarchy and claimed by a rival for the English crown, this Cistercian ruin was also a medieval earl's burial pl…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Borthwick Castle
Midlothian
Borthwick Castle is an exceptionally complete 1430 Scottish tower house, associated with Mary, Queen of Scots and visibly marked by Cromwell’s 1650…
- Near Borthwick
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Borve Castle, Benbecula
Outer Hebrides
On the machair at the south-west tip of Benbecula, in the Western Isles, the ruined shell of a three-storey tower house stands with its north wall…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bossiney Castle
Cornwall
Bossiney Castle is a scheduled Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) whose private, largely unexcavated mound preserves the early…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Boston Priory
Lincolnshire
The foundations of the priory, a monastery run by a prior, lay hidden beneath the parish church for nearly six hundred years, surfacing only when r…
- Near Boston
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bothal Castle
Northumberland
Bothal Castle preserves a medieval gatehouse and curtain-wall fragments within a continuously adapted estate that passed from the Bertrams to the O…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bothwell Castle
South Lanarkshire
A large medieval castle on a high, steep bank above a bend in the Clyde, between Bothwell and Uddingston.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bottesford Preceptory
Lincolnshire
The Knights Templar's Lincolnshire estate has been reduced to a scatter of loose stones and a single cross-carved gravestone: the entire surviving…
- Near Bottesford
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bourn Windmill
Cambridgeshire
Reckoned the oldest surviving windmill in the United Kingdom, it stood empty and rotting until a public appeal in 2022 raised the final funds neede…
- Near Bourn
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bourne Abbey
Lincolnshire
Its church has served as Bourne's parish church continuously since the 1536 closure of the monasteries, and the abbey, a religious community led by…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bourne Castle
Lincolnshire
Bourne Castle survives as earthworks and moats in Wellhead Park, with survey evidence preserving the footprint of a long-lived medieval manor-castl…
- Near Bourne
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Bow Bridge, Cumbria
Cumbria
One of Cumbria's few surviving late medieval multi-span bridges, largely unaltered since the monks of Furness Abbey built it to serve a mill that b…
- Near Barrow-in-Furness
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bowes Castle
County Durham
An unusually rare hall-keep design, raised at royal expense against the threat from Scotland, seeded one of England's few deliberately planned medi…
- Near Bowes
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Bowes Railway
Tyne and Wear
The world's only operational preserved standard-gauge cable railway, built by George Stephenson in 1826 to bring Durham coal down to the Tyne.
- Near Springwell
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Boxgrove Palaeolithic site
west-sussex
The thinnest handaxes known from the entire Acheulean were made here, 480,000 years ago, and wear analysis says they were used for one thing: butch…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Boxgrove Priory
West Sussex
At the surrender there were nine religious in the house and forty-four other people: twenty-eight servants and eight children among them.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Boxley Abbey
Kent
Boxley Abbey was a Cistercian house linked with Thomas Becket and Richard I whose later notoriety centred on the Rood of Grace; its scheduled preci…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Boyle Abbey
County Roscommon
A daughter house of Mellifont whose ruined church still carries a squat crossing tower and carvings by the local "School of the West" masons.
- Near Boyle
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brackenbury Battery
Suffolk
A coastal battery built over by housing, remembered now for what it did in July 1939.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bradbourne Priory
Derbyshire
Three canons once ran outlying chapelries at Tissington, Brassington and Ballidon from this monastic cell, until a 1330 deal quietly folded it into…
- Near Bakewell
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bradford-on-Avon Tithe Barn
Wiltshire
A 14th-century monastic barn still roofed in its original 100 tons of stone tiles, built to store one nun's abbey (a self-governing monastery, its…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bradley Priory
Leicestershire
One of Leicestershire's smallest monastic houses: by 1535 it held only two canons, yet its priors sometimes doubled as heads of the far larger Leic…
- Near Nevill Holt
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Braemar Castle
Aberdeenshire
Built in 1628 to check the rising Farquharsons, burned by a Farquharson colonel sixty years later, and now restored and run entirely by local volun…
- Near Braemar
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bramber Castle
West Sussex
The ruins of a Norman castle of mound and walled yard, caput of the great feudal barony of Bramber, long held by the Braose family.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brampton Bryan Castle
Herefordshire
A three-week Civil War siege here was commanded by a woman, Brilliana Harley, whose defence of the castle became one of the conflict's best-documen…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brancepeth Castle
County Durham
A coal-mining fortune rebuilt this castle so thoroughly in the 1820s that its walls now read as Regency ambition wrapped around a Norman skeleton.
- Near Brancepeth
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brandon Castle
Warwickshire
A stone castle pulled down in 1265 because its owner backed the king: now low earthworks disappearing under scrub.
- Near Brandon
- Some walking
-
Settlement · Medieval
Breachacha crannog
Argyll and Bute
A drained loch bed south of Breachacha Castle on Coll still holds an artificial island whose stonework and mysterious dug pits have never been full…
- Near Arinagour
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Breadsall Priory
Derbyshire
A tiny Augustinian house that for two centuries sat under one family's thumb: and left behind a single 13th-century arch, now buried in a hotel's c…
- Near Bakewell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Breamore Priory
Hampshire
Its own last prior begged Thomas Cromwell for mercy, yet Breamore fell just below the financial threshold that doomed the smaller houses first: swe…
- Near Breamore
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Brechin Cathedral
Angus
A near-millennium-old round tower and an intricately carved Viking-age hogback stand beside a Gothic cathedral, forming one of Scotland's most comp…
- Near Brechin
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brecon Castle
Powys
A castle raised by Bernard de Neufmarché in 1093 and repeatedly attacked by Welsh forces.
- Near Brecon
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bredwardine Castle
Herefordshire
A Marcher stronghold fought over through the Anarchy and dismantled by royal order, its stone walls were later folded into a Tudor-era gabled house…
- Near Bredwardine
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Breedon Priory
Leicestershire
A parish church built from the remains of a vanished Augustinian monastery still holds the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon relief carving in Engl…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bridgend Priory
Lincolnshire
A modest Gilbertine house whose founding endowment bound its canons to keep a fenland causeway in repair: an obligation that outlasted the priory,…
- Near Horbling
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bridgetown Priory
County Cork
One of only two substantial Augustinian monasteries left standing in County Cork, its unusual H-shaped plan surviving because the west range was si…
- Near Castletownroche
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bridgnorth Castle
Shropshire
A castle founded by Robert de Bellême in 1101 that changed hands almost as soon as it existed.
- Near Bridgnorth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bridgwater Castle
Somerset
A castle that made the town rather than the other way round: and whose stone is still in the cellars of the Georgian streets built over it.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bridlington Priory
East Riding of Yorkshire
Bridlington Priory’s surviving nave: the western body of the building, where the congregation gathered: is the parish-church remnant of a vast Augu…
- Near Bridlington
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brimpsfield Castle
Gloucestershire
A rebel baron's stronghold, deliberately reduced to a mound and ditch after his execution in 1322: one of Gloucestershire's clearest physical trace…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Brimpsfield Priory
Gloucestershire
A Norman lord's endowment to a monastery across the Channel made Brimpsfield a casualty of England's wars with France, seized as an overseas religi…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Brinkburn Priory
Northumberland
A priory church whose roof fell in before 1700 and was put back in 1858: with most of its twelfth-century masonry still standing underneath.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bristol Castle
Bristol
A royal prison that once held a reigning king: Stephen of Blois was locked in its keep (the principal tower, built to be held even if the walls fel…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bristol Cathedral
Bristol
Its 14th-century choir has no clerestory at all: light floods in only through vast aisle windows the same height as the vault, a design the histori…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brixham Battery
Devon
Brixham Battery is an unusually complete emergency coast-defence site, where the hurried response to Dunkirk remains legible in guns, searchlights…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Broadholme Priory
Lincolnshire
One of only two Premonstratensian houses for women anywhere in England, its canonesses living and singing on this Lincolnshire site for nearly four…
- Near Broadholme
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Broadway Tower, Worcestershire
Worcestershire
Built as an ornamental beacon for a countess, the tower went on to house a private printing press, a Pre-Raphaelite retreat, and a Cold War listeni…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brodick Castle
North Ayrshire
A Norse-named stronghold on the Clyde approaches, seized and re-seized by Norwegian kings, Bruce's lieutenants, Campbell raiders and Cromwell's gun…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bromfield Priory
Shropshire
A college of canons founded before 1061, which lost half its land between 1066 and 1086: and whose church is still the parish church.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bromholm Priory
Norfolk
Bromholm Priory was a Grade I Cluniac house near Bacton, famed for a claimed relic of the True Cross that made it a major medieval pilgrimage desti…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bromley-by-Bow
Greater London
Its priory, a monastery headed by a prior, had a chapel that outlived the nunnery itself by four centuries, surviving as the district's parish chur…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bronllys Castle
Powys
A fortress towards Talgarth, first raised in timber by Richard Fitz Pons in or soon after 1100.
- Near Bronllys
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bronsil Castle
Herefordshire
A moated manor house whose owner won royal licence twice to fortify it, only for Civil War flames and a 1991 scaffolding collapse to leave it a bro…
- Near Eastnor
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bronwydd Castle
Ceredigion
A Victorian fantasy of a castle, built to look centuries older than it was, now a shell that has collapsed within living memory.
- Near Llangynllo (Llangunllo)
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Brooke Priory
Rutland
A priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: kept for three canons, which a bishop called a scandal to the neighbourhood in 1…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brough Castle
Cumbria
A Norman keep raised inside a Roman fort, burned twice by its own owners and rebuilt each time: its ruin traces four centuries of one family's grip…
- Near Brough
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brougham Castle
Cumbria
A single stronghold layered over Roman, medieval and Romantic history, whose ruined keep (the principal tower, built to be held even if the walls f…
- Near Penrith
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Broughty Castle
Dundee City
Broughty Castle guards the mouth of the River Tay and shows five centuries of adaptation: a late-medieval tower house repeatedly reshaped for artil…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brownsea Castle
Dorset
Brownsea Castle began as Henry VIII’s artillery fort guarding Poole Harbour and evolved through centuries of residential rebuilding into a National…
- Near Poole
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bruisyard Abbey
Suffolk
A religious house at Bruisyard, founded by Maud of Lancaster and Lionel of Antwerp in the 1360s.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bruton Abbey
Somerset
A religious house in Bruton, founded around 1127 and closed in 1539.
- Near Bruton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bryn Amlwg Castle
Shropshire
A twelfth- or thirteenth-century castle site beside the England–Wales border, with earthworks still visible.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bryn Bras Castle
Gwynedd
Bryn Bras Castle is a Grade II* neo-Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Gothic) country house whose theatrical 1830s architecture,…
- Near Llanrug
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Buckenham Castle
Norfolk
Buckenham Castle preserves an unusually early circular keep, a planned village created to serve it, and a long record of aristocratic inheritance e…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Buckfast Abbey
Devon
Buckfast Abbey is a rare monastic site with Anglo-Saxon origins, a wealthy medieval Cistercian phase, Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the mona…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Buckland Abbey
Devon
Buckland Abbey is an unusually intact Cistercian church converted into a house, where the monastic foundation, Grenville and Drake ownership, and N…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Buckland Priory
Somerset
The only house the Knights Hospitaller kept for women in England. They stopped appointing preceptors to it after 1433.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Buckton Castle
Greater Manchester
Buckton Castle is one of north-west England’s earliest stone castles, a short-lived 12th-century hilltop enclosure whose buried walls and gatehouse…
- Near Carrbrook
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Buddugre Castle
powys
A castle put on a ridge top where a Norman would have chosen the valley: one reason it is credited to a Welsh king rather than a marcher lord.
- Near Llanddewi Ystradenny
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Bugsworth Basin
Derbyshire
A derelict tramway-canal interchange rebuilt over three decades by volunteers alone, now a rare surviving example of a working limestone transhipme…
- Near Bakewell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Buildwas Abbey
Shropshire
A Cistercian house whose abbots doubled as royal agents in Ireland and Wales, undone across two centuries by extortion, a murdered abbot, Welsh rai…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Builth Castle
Powys
Edward I's first castle in Wales, built in 1277 and since dismantled to its mound and earthworks.
- Near Builth Wells
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Buittle Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Buittle combines a major Galloway motte-and-bailey castle complex, with an earth mound and an enclosed yard, with evidence of occupation from the M…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bulford Kiwi
Wiltshire
Cut by bored, riot-prone New Zealand troops waiting for a ship home in 1919, it survives as Wiltshire's only hill figure that is neither a white ho…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bullington Priory
Lincolnshire
Bullington Priory was a Gilbertine double house of canons and nuns whose endowments and surviving charter series illuminate medieval Lincolnshire m…
- Near Bullington
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bungay Castle
Suffolk
A castle at a bend in the River Waveney, built by Roger Bigod around 1100.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bungay Priory
Suffolk
A Benedictine nunnery founded by a countess on her own marriage lands, whose church still serves Bungay as its parish church.
- Near Bungay
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bunratty Castle
County Clare
Bunratty Castle is a major fifteenth-century Irish tower house whose successive fortifications reveal Norman, Gaelic, Confederate and modern herita…
- Near Bunratty
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Burbage Edge
Derbyshire
Beneath its heather moorland lie the buried remains of a colliery worked for nearly three centuries, protected as a Scheduled Monument (legally pro…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burford Priory
Oxfordshire
A Cotswold country house built over a medieval hospital has sheltered a Jacobean Speaker of the Commons, a community of Anglican monks and nuns, an…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burgate Wood
Suffolk
A medieval circular bank-and-ditch castle enclosure, inside a thirty-hectare biological site of special scientific interest.
- Near Burgate
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burleigh Castle
Perth and Kinross
A fifteenth- and sixteenth-century castle just outside Milnathort, north of Kinross.
- Near Kinross
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burnchurch Castle
County Kilkenny
Burnchurch Castle is an unusually complex Irish tower house, where a six-storey core, round gate turret and dense network of mural rooms preserve a…
- Near Callan
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burncourt Castle
County Tipperary
A fortified house so lavish it needed twenty-six gables and seven chimneys: burned by its own mistress in 1649 rather than surrendered to Cromwell'…
- Near Cahir
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burneside Hall
Cumbria
One of a pair of fortified pele towers now half-lost, its survivor tree-ring dated to show a Tudor-era rebuild hidden inside a medieval shell: and…
- Near Kendal
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burnham Abbey
Buckinghamshire
A community of Augustinian nuns founded in 1265 still occupies the site today, under a different order but the same name and the same walls.
- Near Burnham
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burnham Norton Friary
Norfolk
Burnham Norton Friary was the first Carmelite monastery founded after the order’s expulsion from Mount Carmel, and its gatehouse, precinct wall, ch…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Burradon Tower
Tyne and Wear
A fireplace carries the date 1633 and the initials LO. The tower was later swallowed into a farm building.
- Near Burradon
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burriscarra Abbey
County Mayo
Founded for one religious order in 1298, the priory was formally reassigned to another by papal decree in 1413: a rare, dated paper trail for a sma…
- Near Claremorris
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burrishoole Friary
County Mayo
Founded without papal consent in 1469, the friary needed a formal pardon from Rome seventeen years later: a rare, documented case of a foundation o…
- Near Newport
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burscough Priory
Lancashire
Burscough Priory was an Augustinian house and major Stanley burial place whose surviving crossing piers preserve the outline of a lost monastic chu…
- Near Burscough
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burt Castle
County Donegal
A sixteenth-century O'Doherty stronghold built to a Scottish Z-plan design, it became the launchpad and then the last redoubt of a rebellion that c…
- Near Burt
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burton Abbey
Staffordshire
A monastery founded by St Modwen and refounded under an abbot in 1003 by the thegn Wulfric Spot.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burton in Lonsdale Castle
North Yorkshire
A royal garrison list from the 1130s survives for this small Yorkshire stronghold, naming the very soldiers who held it - a level of detail few min…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burwell Castle
Cambridgeshire
A siege ended not by a breached wall but by a stray crossbow bolt: the earthworks left behind are the abandoned first draft of a Norman stronghold…
- Near Burwell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bury Castle, Greater Manchester
Greater Manchester
Bury Castle preserves the foundations of a late-medieval moated manor whose destruction after Bosworth shows the direct consequences of the Wars of…
- Near Bury
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bury Manor
Gloucestershire
Its castellated walls are barely two centuries old, but the cellars beneath them are a genuine survival from a 13th-century manor house on the same…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bury Mount
Northamptonshire
A Norman motte-and-bailey, a timber tower on an earth mound with a walled yard beside it, raised during the Anarchy on ground already defended agai…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bury St Edmunds Abbey
Suffolk
In October 1327 monks walked into the parish church, threw off their habits to show armour underneath and took hostages. The townspeople burned the…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bushmead Priory
Bedfordshire
Only the refectory, where a small Augustinian community ate, and its kitchen survive, roofed by a rare king-post timber frame that has stood since…
- Near Bushmead
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Butley Priory
Suffolk
An Augustinian house founded by Ranulf de Glanville in 1171 and suppressed in 1538.
- Near Butley
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Buttevant Franciscan Friary
County Cork
A friary porch that once doubled as the town's law court: leases signed, marriages contracted, fealty sworn: until a Parliamentarian army burned th…
- Near Buttevant
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Byland Abbey
North Yorkshire
Its ruined west front still holds half a stone rose window that inspired York Minster's own, and a monk here wrote down twelve ghost stories now re…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bytham Castle
Lincolnshire
Bytham Castle preserves the earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) footprint of a probable early Norman hil…
- Near Castle Bytham
- Some walking
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Bytham River
Suffolk
A great Pleistocene river of central England, destroyed by ice about 450,000 years ago: and, since the mid-2010s, argued not to have existed at all.
- Near Mildenhall
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bywell Castle
Northumberland
Bywell Castle preserves the imposing gatehouse of an unfinished Neville project, overlooking the Tyne and retaining a direct link to the Wars of th…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Caen Hill Locks
Wiltshire
Sixteen locks climb a hillside in an unbroken straight line, their oversized sideways pounds built purely to store enough water to keep the flight…
- Near Devizes
- Some walking
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Caer Llugwy
Conwy
A Roman fort in the Llugwy valley where a later courtyard building may preserve the story of a garrison becoming a roadside posting station.
- Near Capel Curig
- Some walking
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Caerwent Training Area
Monmouthshire
A Cold War rocket-motor works turned Gulf War ammunition depot, its 400-odd bunkers now awaiting new life as a British Army barracks.
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cahir Abbey
County Tipperary
A working priory, a monastery headed by a prior, whose altar end, tower and covered walkway survive largely intact from three separate building cam…
- Near Cahir
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
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…
-
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
-
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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Calder Abbey
Cumbria
A refounded Savigniac house that turned Cistercian, its ruined crossing tower still standing beside a private house built into the monks' own domes…
- Near Egremont
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Caldey Priory
Pembrokeshire
A twelfth-century island priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: that never held more than a handful of monks, and whose c…
- Near Caldey Island
-
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
-
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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Caldwell Priory
Bedfordshire
A priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose canons armed a royal siege, fought a bishop's tithe collectors for two centurie…
- Near Bedford
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Calke Priory
Derbyshire
A priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot, whose canons left for Rep…
- Near Bakewell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Callan Augustinian Friary
County Kilkenny
Callan Augustinian Friary preserves a late-medieval observant foundation and its celebrated stone seats for clergy beside a holy well whose local h…
- Near Callan
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Calwich Abbey
Staffordshire
A priory of about 1130, then a country house, then another rebuilt in 1849: each demolished for the next, with Handel and Rousseau among the guests.
- Near Ellastone
- Some walking
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cambridge Blackfriars
Cambridgeshire
A medieval friary (a community of friars, an order that lived among the towns instead of apart from them) suppressed in 1538 and built over by a Ca…
- Near Cambridge
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Cambridge Museum of Technology
Cambridgeshire
This former municipal pumping station preserves an unusually complete account of how Cambridge handled sewage, refuse and public health from the la…
- Near Cambridge
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cambridge Whitefriars
Cambridgeshire
A single garden wall in a Cambridge college is all that remains visible of a Carmelite friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked…
- Near Cambridge
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cammeringham Priory
Lincolnshire
Two rival Norman abbeys fought over ownership of this small house for decades: a dispute settled only in 1192: and today its entire physical trace…
- Near Cammeringham
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Campsey Priory
Suffolk
A house of Augustinian canonesses at Campsea Ashe, south-east of Wickham Market.
- Near Campsea Ashe
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Canon Island Abbey
County Clare
Canon Island Abbey preserves the ruins of an Augustinian community on the Shannon, tracing a medieval foundation, devastation, dissolution (Henry V…
- Near Inis Cealtra
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Canons Ashby Priory
Northamptonshire
A single parish church is nearly all that remains visible of a four-century Augustinian priory, a monastery run by a prior, yet a licensed watercou…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Canonsleigh Abbey
Devon
Canonsleigh Abbey preserves the fragmentary remains of a Devon religious house that changed from an Augustinian priory, a monastery headed by a pri…
- Some walking
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Canterbury Cathedral
Kent
Canterbury Cathedral is England’s historic primatial church: founded in 597, transformed by Thomas Becket’s 1170 martyrdom and the resulting pilgri…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Canute's Palace
Hampshire
A late-Norman merchant's hall on Southampton's waterfront, saddled by a Victorian antiquarian (an early collector-scholar of antiquities, working b…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Capel Lligwy
isle-of-anglesey
A roofless twelfth-century chapel on Anglesey whose purpose was never recorded, carrying an unusual sixteenth-century south chapel with a burial va…
- Near Moelfre
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cardigan Priory
Ceredigion
A Benedictine cell whose ownership was fought over by two English abbeys, then reused across nine centuries as mansion, poet's home and hospital.
- Near Cardigan
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Carfax Conduit
Oxfordshire
A Jacobean water-engineering marvel whose ornate centrepiece was dismantled and rebuilt whole in a country park, while its humble spring-house stil…
- Near Oxford
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carlingford Abbey
County Louth
Twin fifteenth-century towers turned a quiet Dominican church into something closer to a fortress, and the friars kept a claim on it, on and off, f…
- Near Carlingford
- Easy path
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carlisle Cathedral
Cumbria
England's second-smallest ancient cathedral holds the country's largest and most complex Flowing Decorated Gothic window, a rarity from an Augustin…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carlisle Dominican Friary
Cumbria
A vanished friary whose foundations, once dug into, turned out to sit directly on top of Roman Carlisle: one plot of ground holding two buried towns.
- Near Carlisle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carlisle Franciscan Friary
Cumbria
One of a small number of Franciscan houses built inside a cathedral city, standing beside Carlisle Cathedral for three centuries before the Dissolu…
- Near Carlisle
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carmelite Friary, Winchester
Hampshire
One of only four mendicant orders licensed to settle in medieval England, the White Friars kept a house in Winchester for two and a half centuries…
- Near Winchester
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Carreg Coetan Arthur
pembrokeshire
An early farming-period chambered tomb whose capstone and uprights preserve a small but legible piece of Pembrokeshire’s ancient funerary landscape.
- Near Newport
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carrow Abbey
Norfolk
Carrow Abbey preserves a Benedictine nunnery’s unusually detailed history of female governance, legal dispute and financial recovery, followed by d…
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Carswell Medieval House
Pembrokeshire
A Grade II* listed stone ruin of a medieval tenant farm at Penally, near St Florence.
- Near Penally
- Some walking
-
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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cartmel Priory
Cumbria
When Henry VIII's commissioners came to demolish the priory, the parish church alone survived: saved only because villagers petitioned to keep thei…
- Near Cartmel
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cartmel Priory Gatehouse
Cumbria
One of only two structures left standing from an entire monastic complex, it escaped demolition at the Reformation, the sixteenth-century break wit…
- Near Cartmel
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cary Castle
Somerset
A castle a king abandoned the siege of Bristol to attack: and starved out rather than broke into.
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Castle Acre Priory
Norfolk
Castle Acre Priory is a major Cluniac ruin whose relocation from the castle, direct link to Burgundy, mid-fourteenth-century legal adaptation and r…
-
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…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Castle Bridge
Warwickshire
A single sandstone arch of 1790–93, built by act of Parliament to move Warwick's river crossing 400 metres upstream of the medieval one.
- Near Warwick
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Castle Coole
Fermanagh
Castle Coole is one of Ireland's most complete neo-classical estates, where a late-eighteenth-century mansion, concealed service system and layered…
- Near Enniskillen
- Easy path
-
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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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 · 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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Castle Semple Collegiate Church
Renfrewshire
A church served by a college of priests, near the eastern end of Castle Semple Loch.
-
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,…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Castledermot Abbey
County Kildare
Castledermot Abbey preserves the site of an early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) monastery and a later Francisc…
- Near Castledermot
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Castlelyons Friary
County Cork
A friary founded by Anglo-Norman lords, dissolved by Henry VIII, handed on to an earl's daughter, then revived for the Dominicans: its stones chang…
- Near Castlelyons
- 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 · 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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Castleton Medieval Hospital
Derbyshire
Nothing above ground survives to name it, yet the buried footings of a medieval hospital still lie protected under the turf at Castleton.
- Near Bakewell
-
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
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Catcliffe Glass Cone
South Yorkshire
The oldest surviving glass cone in Western Europe, one of only four such furnaces left standing in Britain and the sole survivor in England outside…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Catesby Priory
Northamptonshire
A Northamptonshire nunnery whose prioress, Margaret Rich, was sister to a canonised archbishop, and whose confiscated land later passed to the fami…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Catholic National Library
Hampshire
Its 70,000 volumes were saved from being scattered in 1997 by a campaign of Catholic writers and noblemen, then found refuge for seven years inside…
- Near Farnborough
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Catley Priory
Lincolnshire
A vanished double house of nuns and canons that once held an entire island, a parish church, and grazing for four hundred sheep: now reduced to a s…
- Near Walcott
- Easy path
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Cefn Caves
Denbighshire
Four linked passages cut by a long-vanished course of the River Elwy have yielded human and animal bone reaching back to the Old Stone Age, among t…
- Rough ground
-
Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Cefn Golau Cholera Cemetery
Blaenau Gwent
Cefn Golau Cholera Cemetery is the only surviving cholera cemetery in South Wales, preserving the human cost of three nineteenth-century epidemics…
- Near Tredegar
- Rough ground
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Cementation Furnace, Sheffield
South Yorkshire
The last of Sheffield's hundreds of cone-shaped steel furnaces to survive with its structure intact, a solitary reminder of an industry that once r…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Cenarth Bridge
Carmarthenshire
A late-Georgian river crossing built with two deliberate holes through its stonework, letting floodwater pass rather than overwhelm it: a trick its…
- Near Cenarth
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Cerne Abbas Giant
Dorset
The Cerne Giant is one of England’s best-known hill figures, a monumental chalk image whose striking design and unresolved origins continue to driv…
- Near Cerne Abbas
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cerne Abbey
Dorset
Cerne Abbey was a major Benedictine house founded in 987, whose surviving guest house, porch, barns and gatehouse fabric preserve a millennium of m…
- Near Cerne Abbas
- Easy path
-
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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chacombe Priory
Northamptonshire
A minor Augustinian house whose closing is caught in the visiting commissioner's own uneasy words: and whose burial ground held three generations o…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chapel Finian and Chapel Finian Well
Dumfries and Galloway
Only the foundations remain of Chapel Finian, a small chapel built between the 10th and 11th centuries on an old raised beach at Corwall Port, on t…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chapel of St Fyndoca
Argyll and Bute
A carved grave-slab bearing arms for a galley and a boar's head ties this island ruin to the Campbells of Lochow, in a graveyard still used eight c…
- Near Cladich
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chapel of St Non
Pembrokeshire
Roofless walls facing the coast south of St Davids, beside a holy well, on ground tradition names as a birthplace.
- Near St Davids
- Easy path
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Charterhouse, Kingston upon Hull
East Riding of Yorkshire
A working almshouse since the 14th century, its chapel holding the tomb of a duke whose widow, Alice Chaucer, insisted he be buried here rather tha…
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chatteris Abbey
Cambridgeshire
One of a small number of English monasteries built specifically for Benedictine nuns, and one where parish worship inside the abbey (a religious co…
- Near Chatteris
-
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.
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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
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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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chertsey Abbey
Surrey
A Benedictine monastery at Chertsey, dedicated to St Peter.
- Near Chertsey
- Easy path
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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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Cathedral
Cheshire
A working cathedral built in three distinct campaigns over five centuries, its Norman core still visible beneath a Gothic rebuild that took more th…
- Easy path
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Chester High Cross
Cheshire
A cross smashed by Parliamentarian soldiers in the Civil War, its scattered pieces quietly preserved for three centuries before being reassembled a…
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Chester New Bridge
County Durham
A worn parapet inscription still marks Charles Swinburne's Leap, the fatal fall of a horse and rider, on a crossing whose own age is disputed by tw…
- Near Chester-le-Street
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Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Priory
Cheshire
Chester Priory records the presence of a Benedictine community of nuns in medieval Cheshire, even though the available account preserves only its p…
- Near Chester
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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
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Chichele College
Northamptonshire
Its walled garden, laid out in 1425, is a rare survival from an English monastic-era foundation, and the chapel it once served is still used for co…
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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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chichester Cathedral
West Sussex
The seat of the Bishop of Chichester since 1075, when the bishopric was moved into the city.
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Chichester Guildhall
West Sussex
Not a guildhall at all. It is the east end of a Franciscan church, and one of the very few such buildings in England still under a roof.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chicksands Priory
Bedfordshire
One of only ten English religious houses where nuns and canons lived side by side: later a Cold War listening post hidden inside a medieval priory,…
- 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
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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
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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…
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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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chipley Priory
Suffolk
A taxation roll of 1291 puts this small religious house at under £5 a year. By 1455 the buildings were ruins, and a stone coffin from the site now…
- Near Poslingford
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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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Christ Church, Oxford
Oxfordshire
The only academic institution in the world that is also a cathedral, Christ Church became simultaneously a college chapel and a bishop's seat by ro…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Christ the King, Cockfosters
Greater London
Its plain reinforced concrete design is one of England's earliest buildings shaped by the continental Liturgical Movement, raised for a monastic co…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Christchurch Castle
Dorset
Christchurch Castle preserves Norman control of a key river crossing, with ruined keep walls and the adjacent Constable’s House forming an exceptio…
- Near Christchurch
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Christchurch Priory
Dorset
Christchurch Priory is one of England’s longest parish churches, preserving a thousand-year sequence from Saxon church through Augustinian priory t…
- Near Christchurch
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church Island (Valentia Harbour)
County Kerry
On the south-west shore of a one-acre island in Valentia Harbour stands an ogham stone inscribed not only with letters but with a Maltese cross, a…
- Near Valentia
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Mary and All Saints, Whalley
Lancashire
Whalley’s Grade I church links Anglo-Saxon crosses, a thirteenth-century parish church and an exceptional collection of medieval and later furnishi…
- Near Whalley
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Morwenna and St John the Baptist, Morwenstow
Cornwall
Cornwall's most northerly parish church combines Norman fabric, Parson Hawker's harvest tradition and a churchyard shaped by the wreck of the Caled…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Peter, Holton-le-Clay
Lincolnshire
A carved wooden mouse on the altar rail, a Saxon tower arch, and a separately scheduled medieval cross all survive within one small parish churchyard.
- Near Holton-le-Clay
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Church of the Holy Rude
Stirling
One of only three churches still in use in Britain where a monarch has been crowned: and for 280 years it was two churches, divided by a wall down…
- Near Stirling
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cilgerran Castle
Pembrokeshire
Two stone towers crowning the gorge above the Teifi, the surviving core of a castle begun in banked earth.
- Near Cilgerran
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cirencester Abbey
Gloucestershire
A 1254 valuation put its income from nineteen granted churches alone at £350 a year, over half a million pounds today, funding one of England's mos…
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cirencester Castle
Gloucestershire
Historians still dispute whether Cirencester Castle survived beyond 1142 at all, turning the fortress's very ending into contested history rather t…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
City of Caves
Nottinghamshire
City of Caves lets visitors enter Nottingham’s soft sandstone history, where chambers served medieval workers, later tanners, and Second World War…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clane Friary
County Kildare
A single ruined church holds two religious lives at once: an early Gaelic monastery that hosted a national synod, and a Franciscan house of friars…
- Near Clane
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clara Castle
County Kilkenny
Clara Castle is a remarkably complete Kilkenny tower house whose original doors, oak beams, painted chamber and sophisticated security fittings mak…
- Near Clara
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clare Abbey
County Clare
Clare Abbey was County Clare’s largest Augustinian house, a riverbank monastery whose founding, battle history, architecture and later dissolution…
- Near Ennis
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clare Castle
Suffolk
A ruined castle raised by Richard Fitz Gilbert soon after the Conquest, its mound and yard later rebuilt in stone.
- Near Clare
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clare Island Abbey
County Mayo
Cistercian monks rarely painted their walls, yet here dragons, a harper and grazing stags survive, and tradition ties the canopied tomb within to G…
- Near Clare Island
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clare Priory
Suffolk
The first house of the Augustinian Friars in England, established in 1248 on the bank of the Stour.
- Near Clare
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Sacred place · Medieval
Claregalway Friary
county-galway
A 24-metre tower, church ruins and the remains of community buildings record the long life of a Franciscan house at Claregalway.
- Near Claregalway
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Clarendon Palace
Wiltshire
It was here in 1164 that Henry II drafted the Constitutions of Clarendon, a challenge to Church authority whose fallout led to Becket's murder six…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clattercote Priory
Oxfordshire
This Oxfordshire monastery began life as a hospital for the sick, and a manor house has occupied its cleared ground since the seventeenth century.
- Near Clattercote
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clawdd-du
Monmouthshire
Clawdd-du preserves Monmouth’s medieval outer defence for Overmonnow: a broad, potentially floodable ditch and palisade that protected a Welsh-side…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Claxton Castle
Norfolk
Claxton Castle is a rare Norfolk brick-castle ruin whose paired fourteenth-century licences to crenellate, later dismantling for Claxton Hall, surv…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Claypotts Castle
Dundee City
Claypotts Castle is one of Scotland’s best-preserved sixteenth-century Z-plan tower houses, combining a compact domestic residence with a striking…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Clayton Hall
Greater Manchester
Clayton Hall is a rare surviving medieval moated manor in Manchester, preserving a 15th-century wing, the Clayton–Byron–Chetham story and a volunte…
- Near Winchester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cleeve Abbey
Somerset
In 1400 the abbot and three of his monks were reported to the government for leading a band of 200 robbers attacking travellers.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clerkenwell Priory
Greater London
Headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller in England for four centuries, and the site where Richard III publicly abandoned his plan to marry his own…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clifden Castle
County Galway
Its 1935 transfer to a cooperative left the castle jointly owned by dozens of tenant families, an unusually communal ending for a Gothic Revival ge…
- Near Clifden
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clifford Castle
Herefordshire
The mistress of a king, an abducted heiress forced into marriage, and a Marcher lord who made a royal messenger eat his own writ all passed through…
- Near Hereford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clifton Castle
North Yorkshire
The present Grecian house was built from the very stone of the medieval stronghold it replaced, leaving only a single fragment of castle wall as wi…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clitheroe Castle
Lancashire
Its keep (the principal tower, built to be held even if the walls fell) is the second smallest surviving stone-built keep in England, yet from this…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cloghan Castle (County Cork)
County Cork
A tower house stranded on its own island in a lough deep enough for whales, abandoned so completely that its final chief's death simply erased it f…
- Near Clonakilty
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clonard Abbey
County Meath
A single monk's cell beside the Boyne grew into the school that trained several of the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, and for a century was the seat o…
- Near Clonard
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clonbrock Castle
County Galway
A fire-gutted Georgian mansion and a 15th-century tower house share one estate held by a single family for nearly four centuries, from Irish gentry…
- Near Ahascragh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clones Abbey
County Monaghan
A round tower missing the doorway arch typical of its age, a two-faced high cross, and a sarcophagus reputed to hold the founder's remains: survivo…
- Near Clones
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Sacred place · Pictish & early medieval
Clonmacnoise
County Offaly
A river crossing where the Slighe Mhór met the Shannon drew high kings, scholars and craftsmen from across Europe for centuries, leaving Ireland's…
- Near Clonmacnoise
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Clontuskert Abbey
County Galway
Its 1471 west doorway is the site's most distinctive surviving feature, at the monastic house ruled for centuries by one family.
- Near Loughrea
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clonyn Castle
County Westmeath
A Victorian baronial fantasy raised over a medieval stronghold, this castle later sheltered Holocaust orphan children before returning to private h…
- Near Delvin
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cloonigny Castle
County Galway
The stonework of its O'Kelly tower house has vanished to foundations, yet the moat that defended it: two banks, a ditch and a separate earthen moun…
- Near Athenry
- Some walking
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Clopton Bridge
Warwickshire
Fourteen pointed arches over the Avon at the Saxon ford that named Stratford: one of them deliberately destroyed in 1642 to stop Cromwell's army.
- Near Stratford-upon-Avon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clopton House
Warwickshire
Ambrose Rookwood, one of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators, was living here in 1605.
- Near Stratford-upon-Avon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cloughoughter Castle
County Cavan
The last Confederacy stronghold to surrender, in 1653: with the cannon damage that took it still visible on the walls.
- Near Killeshandra
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clun Castle
Shropshire
Many of its arrowslits are fakes. The great tower looks formidable and could easily have been undermined.
- Near Clun
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clyne Castle
Swansea
Built in 1791, remodelled repeatedly, and said to have received Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill and Edward VIII as guests of the Vivian family.
- Near Blackpill
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Clytha Castle
Monmouthshire
A grief-built folly on a Monmouthshire hilltop, its roofless round tower deliberately left as an empty shell purely to balance the view from a dist…
- Easy path
-
Settlement · Medieval
Coates medieval settlement
Lincolnshire
Its parish church holds Lincolnshire's only surviving 15th-century rood screen, a rare survival in a village otherwise reduced to earthworks, two f…
- Near Coates
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Cockermouth Castle
Cumbria
Built partly from stone lifted out of the Roman fort at Papcastle, the castle has stayed in one family's hands since the 18th century and part of i…
- Near Cockermouth
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Cockersand Abbey
Lancashire
A single vaulted chapter house, still roofed and intact, is all that remains standing of what was once the third-richest abbey (a religious communi…
- Near Cockerham
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cockham Wood Fort
Kent
Cockham Wood Fort is a visible Medway shoreline defence built after the 1667 Dutch raid, marking the shift from Upnor Castle to a stronger protecti…
- Near Hoo St Werburgh
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cockle Park Tower
Northumberland
Cockle Park Tower is a Grade I listed fifteenth-century tower house whose hunting-lodge origins and machicolated bartisans survive within Newcastle…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cockroad Wood Castle
Somerset
A castle with two baileys and a motte, the earthen mound a castle was raised on, standing seven metres high: and appearing in no document at all.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Codnor Castle
Derbyshire
A crumbling keep on the Erewash valley's edge once anchored the Grey dynasty that produced Lady Jane Grey, and a 2007 dig pulled a gold coin of Hen…
- Near Bakewell
-
Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Coetan Arthur
Pembrokeshire
A six-metre capstone resting on a single upright near St Davids Head, its chamber of the first farming age collapsed.
- Near St Davids
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Coggeshall Abbey
Essex
Coggeshall Abbey is a major surviving Cistercian landscape, where chapel, undercroft: the vaulted storage space beneath a building: and vast tithe…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Coity Castle
Bridgend
Its round inner ward still traces the shape of a Norman ringwork rebuilt three times over: by conquest, by siege, and by a Tudor family turning a f…
- Near Coity
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Colchester Castle
Essex
Colchester Castle is Europe’s largest surviving medieval keep, built by the Normans directly on the podium of Britain’s largest Roman temple.
- Easy path
-
Settlement · Medieval
Cold Hanworth medieval settlement
Lincolnshire
A whole vanished village survives in the ground here: house plots, a curving street and open-field furrows still traceable beside the church that a…
- Near Cold Hanworth
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cole Park
Wiltshire
A royal Tudor stud-farm built on the bones of a monastic deer-park, its moat still tracing ground the Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) of Mal…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
College of All Saints, Maidstone
Kent
Maidstone’s College of All Saints preserves the surviving buildings of a 1395 ecclesiastical college whose Perpendicular architecture, gatehouse an…
- Near Maidstone
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Colne Priory
Essex
Colne Priory was the de Vere family’s long-lived mausoleum and a Benedictine house whose buried remains still surface beneath the lawns of its late…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Colwyn Castle
Powys
A castle destroyed by a Welsh prince, rebuilt under a king who stayed two seasons to watch the work, and rebuilt again eleven years later.
- Near Builth Wells
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Combermere Abbey
Cheshire
A rendered Gothic facade hides a genuine 1502 monastic roof timber frame: one of only three surviving hammerbeam roofs in Cheshire, still standing…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Comlongon Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Comlongon Castle is an exceptionally complete south-west Scottish tower house, where Murray lordship, rich internal defensive detail and a later ba…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Compton Castle
Devon
Compton Castle combines a medieval manor, Tudor defensive front and the long Gilbert family history within a still-occupied National Trust property.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cong Abbey
County Mayo
A High King built his last home here and died within its walls, and its greatest treasure, the Cross of Cong, took its name from this riverside rui…
- Near Cong
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Conisbrough Castle
South Yorkshire
A private tower built to flaunt rank rather than defend it: six buttresses ring the drum-shaped keep in a design found nowhere else in England.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Conishead Priory
Cumbria
A medieval hospital reborn three times over: as an Augustinian priory, a vast Victorian mansion, and a miners' convalescent home: before becoming,…
- Near Ulverston
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Conwy Castle
Conwy
Conwy Castle is an exceptionally complete Edwardian fortress and royal residence, built with its walled town during the conquest of Wales. Its abbe…
- Near Conwy
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Conwy town walls
Conwy
Conwy’s town walls form one of Europe’s most complete medieval defensive circuits, built with the castle to enclose Edward I’s new town.
- Near Conwy
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cook Street Gate
West Midlands
One of only two of Coventry's original twelve medieval town gates to survive: and the only one a road still runs through.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cookhill Priory
Worcestershire
A Cistercian nunnery so poor it was repeatedly excused royal taxation now survives as a farmhouse holding a recording studio and a tax case that re…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Coolhull Castle
County Wexford
A tower house and hall house fused into a single building, still guarded by a murder-hole and a corner bartizan: a defensive pairing that survives…
- Near Wellingtonbridge
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cooling Castle
Kent
Cooling Castle is an innovative 14th-century Thames-estuary fortress, unusually built for gunpowder weapons and arranged as two independently defen…
- Near Cooling
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Coombe Abbey
Warwickshire
Coombe is Warwickshire’s largest medieval Cistercian house, whose unusual survival inside a Tudor country house lets the monastery’s fabric remain…
- Near Coombe Fields
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Corbridge Vicar's Pele
Northumberland
Corbridge Vicar’s Pele is a compact defensive vicarage built with stone from nearby Roman Coria, linking medieval border security directly to the t…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Corby Castle
Cumbria
Behind its confident Regency facade survives a 13th-century Salkeld tower and a cluster of Grade I listed follies: caves, a cascade, a garden templ…
- Near Carlisle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Corcomroe Abbey
County Clare
Corcomroe Abbey is a Cistercian ruin in the Burren whose exceptional Gothic carving, royal tomb and long record of monastic adaptation show how a r…
- Near Ballyvaughan
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Corfe Castle
Dorset
Corfe Castle is an exceptional early stone Norman fortress whose royal rebuilding, Lady Mary Bankes’s Civil War defence and Parliamentarian demolit…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Corgarff Castle
Aberdeenshire
Burned three times over two centuries in family feuds and Jacobite risings, the tower was finally rebuilt as a government barracks to police the pa…
- Near Corgarff
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cornworthy Priory
Devon
Cornworthy Priory preserves the record of an Augustinian nunnery whose post-Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) esta…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cotherstone Castle
County Durham
A small County Durham motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongside) whose remaining m…
- Near Cotherstone
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cotton Fort
Dorset
Cotton Fort marks a now-lost coastal defence at Melcombe, where scarce evidence preserves the outline of an early modern rampart (the raised bank t…
- Near Weymouth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Coventry Castle
West Midlands
A royal prisoner and a monastery's expulsion both happened on this one plot: the castle itself is gone, but its surviving tower still carries both…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Coverham Abbey
North Yorkshire
A knight's stone effigy still leans against a garden wall here, carved with a stag hunt at his feet: the last fragment of a community twice founded…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Coxford Priory
Norfolk
Coxford Priory is a small but legible Augustinian foundation whose move from East Rudham to Coxford records how a twelfth-century community reshape…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Craggaunowen
County Clare
Craggaunowen combines a sixteenth-century tower house with an open-air archaeological museum, using reconstructed Irish buildings and boats to inte…
- Near Quin
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Craig-y-Nos Castle
Powys
An opera singer's private estate with its own theatre, its own railway carriage and its own electricity: later a tuberculosis sanatorium for sixty…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Craigievar Castle
Aberdeenshire
A merchant's Baltic trading fortune built a seven-storey pink tower whose plasterwork ceilings rank among Scotland's finest, and whose silhouette r…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Craigmillar Castle
City of Edinburgh
Craigmillar Castle is one of Scotland's best-preserved medieval castles, combining a Preston tower house and defensive courtyards with the pivotal…
- Near Edinburgh
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Crail Castle
Fife
Crail Castle survives mostly as a moat and a short wall, but its records connect a vanished royal castle to the early history of one of Fife’s medi…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Craswall Priory
Herefordshire
Built for the Order of Grandmont in the 1220s, Craswall Priory's surviving ruins are now so fragile that Historic England lists them among heritage…
- Near Craswall
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Crathes Castle
Aberdeenshire
Beneath a 16th-century Burnett tower house lies Warren Field, where pits dug some 10,000 years ago form what analysis in 2013 identified as the wor…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Crayke Castle
North Yorkshire
A 15th-century tower house whose foundations conceal a monastic site and a motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth m…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Creake Abbey
Norfolk
Creake Abbey is a Grade I Augustinian ruin where an almshouse became an abbey, medieval charitable care endured, and a 1506 epidemic abruptly ended…
- Near North Creake
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Creevelea Abbey
County Leitrim
The last Franciscan friary, a house of friars, founded in Ireland before Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries later ran a hedge school where pio…
- Near Dromahair
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cresswell Castle
Pembrokeshire
Three buildings on the bank of the River Cresswell that once made a fortified manorial complex around a rectangular court.
- Near Carew
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cresswell Pele Tower
Northumberland
Cresswell Pele Tower is a well-preserved three-storey response to Border Reiver risk whose defensible stair, altered access, and recent new roof ma…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Crewkerne Castle
Somerset
A hilltop called a castle since 1839, which may be a Norman motte, a manor house, or somebody's folly.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Criccieth Castle
Gwynedd
Criccieth Castle is a Welsh-built coastal stronghold later adapted by Edward I, where a nearly full-height twin gatehouse overlooks the ruins of a…
- Near Criccieth
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Crichton Castle
Midlothian
Crichton Castle preserves the rise and fall of two powerful Scottish families, a Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the monasteries)-era…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Crickhowell Castle
Powys
Ruined castle walls on a spur above Crickhowell, at the meeting of a stream and the River Usk.
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Crinan Canal
Argyll and Bute
Fifteen locks and two burst reservoirs of history connect Loch Gilp to the Sound of Jura, sparing ships the long, exposed passage around the Mull o…
- Near Crinan
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Crooke Preceptory
County Waterford
A ruined church whose thick, shell-flecked mortar and chiselled quoins still show the hand of masons working for an order that once held both Templ…
- Near Waterford
- Some walking
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Crossraguel Abbey
South Ayrshire
A ruined Cluniac monastery near Maybole that still keeps its church, covered walkways and dovecote.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Crowland Abbey
Lincolnshire
A hermit's cell on a Fen island grew into a Benedictine house that produced a disputed medieval chronicle, a skull-relic stolen and later returned…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Croxden Abbey
Staffordshire
The monks of this abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot, barricaded themselves inside for sixteen weeks in 1319 against their own patron, and paid…
- Near Croxden
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Croxton Abbey
Leicestershire
An abbot of Croxton embalmed King John's body in 1216 and buried his heart in the abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) church, a rare dire…
- Near Croxton Kerrial
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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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Building or ruin · Medieval
Curtain Theatre
Greater London
The Curtain Theatre was London’s second playhouse and a leading Shakespearean venue, now archaeologically revealed as a rectangular theatre whose s…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cwmhir Abbey
Powys
An abbey: a monastery headed by an abbot: begun on a cathedral's scale and abandoned once its nave, the long western body of the church, was up. It…
- Easy path
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cymer Abbey
Gwynedd
Cymer Abbey is a modest Cistercian foundation at the meeting of waters, whose plain surviving church reveals both regional monastic life and the pr…
- Near Dolgellau
- Easy path
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Dacre's Cross
North Yorkshire
Dacre’s Cross preserves a fifteenth-century object whose contested history keeps the Battle of Towton, chapel, boundary and memorial traditions in…
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dale Abbey (ruin)
Derbyshire
Three separate colonies of canons failed to survive here before Dale finally took root in 1204: and the chronicler who later told its story hid his…
- Near Bakewell
-
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
-
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…
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Daresbury (Mersey flat)
Cheshire
A sunken 18th-century sailing barge in a Cheshire lock is the only known pre-1840 survivor of a boat type that once worked every waterway in northw…
- Near Chester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dartford Priory
Kent
Dartford Priory was a royal Dominican nunnery whose foundation after Crécy and conversion into Henry VIII’s palace place it at the intersection of…
- Near Dartford
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dartmouth Friary
Devon
Dartmouth Friary’s short life reveals a medieval dispute over worship, land and authority as Dartmouth’s residents sought a church nearer the water…
- Easy path
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Davington Priory
Kent
Davington Priory preserves an unusually continuous monastic landscape where a Benedictine nunnery’s Norman nave (the main western space where the c…
- Near Faversham
-
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
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Deddington Castle
Oxfordshire
Extensive banks and ditches, all that survives of an eleventh-century timber castle.
- Near Deddington
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Deeping St James Priory
Lincolnshire
A small Benedictine cell whose parish church still stands as Grade I listed, though every trace of the monastic buildings themselves has vanished.
- Near Deeping St James
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Deer Abbey
Aberdeenshire
Its earlier community is the one recorded in the margins of the Book of Deer, one of Scotland's oldest surviving manuscripts, making this ruin a ra…
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Denbigh Friary
Denbighshire
A Carmelite friary, a house of friars who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them, whose walls survived Henry VIII's closure of…
- Near Denbigh
- Rough ground
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Derby Blackfriars
Derbyshire
A Dominican priory, a monastery headed by a prior, patronised by kings for three centuries now lies beneath a Derby nightclub, its cellars said to…
- Near Bakewell
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Derrynaflan Church
County Tipperary
An early-medieval island monastery, buried in a Tipperary bog for over a thousand years, that gave up one of Ireland's finest hoards of gold and si…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Devenish Island
County Fermanagh
At its peak this remote lough island held as many as 1,500 monastic scholars, and its round tower, carved crosses and Viking-era history still stan…
- Near Enniskillen
- Some walking
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dieulacres Abbey
Staffordshire
A Cistercian monastery founded by Ranulf, Earl of Chester at Poulton and moved near Leek in 1214.
- Near Leek
- Some walking
-
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…
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dísert Óengusa
county-limerick
A 20-metre round tower and a ruined church mark a small religious settlement whose story reaches from an early founder tradition to restoration in…
- Near Limerick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dodford Priory
Worcestershire
A modest Augustinian house so reduced by 1464 that a single canon remained, later reborn as a Chartist land colony for working-class smallholders.
- Some walking
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dominican Friary, Winchester
Hampshire
One of the earliest Dominican houses established in England, founded within a few years of the order's first arrival on English soil: though nothin…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Donegal Abbey
County Donegal
A Franciscan foundation of the O'Donnell rulers, destroyed in 1601 but whose friars later created the Annals of the Four Masters.
- Near Donegal
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Donnington Friary
Berkshire
At its 1538 suppression the last two friars here are recorded as having relabelled their own order, quite possibly to help secure their pensions.
- Near Donnington
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dorchester Abbey
Oxfordshire
A parish church built as a Norman abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) on the site of a Saxon cathedral, its rich 1330 sanctuary and Jesse…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dore Abbey
Herefordshire
A Cistercian church built to rival the great abbeys of France now survives folded inside a small parish church, its 13th-century transepts and colu…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dornoch Cathedral
Highland
Burned by feuding clansmen in 1570 and rebuilt on a narrower plan in the 1830s, it still holds the graves of earls, dukes and the bishop-saint who…
- Near Dornoch
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Dove Bridge
Staffordshire
Four pointed medieval arches and two rounded later ones, on a crossing used since before Domesday - and since the 1970s it has carried nothing but…
- Near Doveridge
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dovecote, Angle
Pembrokeshire
A rare surviving example in Wales of a Cornish-type circular dovecote: a 15th-century pigeon house of sandstone, its walls still holding hundreds o…
- Near Angle
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dover Priory
Kent
Dover Priory was a major Benedictine house whose church, scriptorium and hospitality shaped medieval Dover; its surviving refectory (the monks' din…
- Near Dover
- Easy path
-
Settlement · Medieval
Down Barns Moated Site
Greater London
Excavated twice in the twentieth century, the finds from the site still contradict themselves: pottery once read as Saxon is now judged prehistoric…
- Near Northolt
- Some walking
-
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
-
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…
-
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
-
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…
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dromiskin Monastery
County Louth
A round tower, high cross and ruined church survive together on one small site: rare continuity for a monastery plundered by Vikings and Irish raid…
- Near Dromiskin
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Drumbo round tower
County Down
Drumbo round tower preserves a rare early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) lookout and monastic remnant, with tim…
- Near Downpatrick
-
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
-
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…
-
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
-
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…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Duck Bridge
North Yorkshire
Duck Bridge is a likely fourteenth-century River Esk crossing whose 1717 rebuilding gave it its enduring name and whose listed sandstone form and c…
- Easy path
-
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…
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dudley Priory
West Midlands
A Cluniac house whose 1939 excavation left medieval floor tiles exposed at ground level in a public park, still walked past daily.
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Duiske Abbey
County Kilkenny
Duiske Abbey is one of Ireland's greatest Cistercian churches, restored as Graiguenamanagh's parish church while retaining medieval stonework, tile…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dunblane Cathedral
Stirling
A cathedral whose nave stood roofless for nearly three centuries: and which holds the finest medieval woodwork in Scotland after King's College, Ab…
- Near Dunblane
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dunbrody Abbey
County Wexford
One of the longest church buildings in medieval Ireland at 59 metres, its bell tower was built by threading new piers alongside the old transept (t…
- Near New Ross
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Dundas Aqueduct
Somerset
The first canal structure in Britain to be scheduled, in 1951 - and by 1954 it was leaking so badly it had to be closed.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Dundonald Castle
South Ayrshire
A fourteenth-century royal residence on a hill between Kilmarnock and Troon.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dundrennan Abbey
Dumfries and Galloway
Dundrennan Abbey is a remarkably legible Cistercian ruin whose disciplined Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Gothic) architecture…
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dunkeld Cathedral
Perth and Kinross
A cathedral begun in 1260 and finished in 1501, standing on a Columban monastery whose reused red sandstone still shows as a streak across the east…
- Near Dunkeld
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dunmore Abbey
County Galway
A community said to trace back to a saint's 5th-century mission became an Augustinian friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rathe…
- Near Tuam
- Easy path
-
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
-
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…
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dunstable Friary
Bedfordshire
A rare medieval jewel: a gold and enamel swan badge: came out of the ground here, one of the most celebrated small finds ever recovered from an Eng…
- Near Dunstable
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dunstable Priory
Bedfordshire
In 1533 the Lady Chapel of this Augustinian priory hosted the ruling that ended Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, a quiet Bedfordshire…
- Easy path
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dunster Priory
Somerset
Monks and parishioners shared one church and quarrelled over it, so a carved screen was built across the middle to divide the building in two.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dupath Well
Cornwall
Dupath Well is a nearly intact late-medieval holy well house where a granite chapel-like structure protects a spring once associated with healing.
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dureford Abbey
Hampshire
A monastery whose four centuries were marked less by prayerful calm than by lightning strikes, armed invasions and a patron who murdered his own ab…
- Near Rogate
- Easy path
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Durham Priory
County Durham
One of the great Benedictine houses of northern England, Durham Priory guarded the shrine of Saint Cuthbert and grew wealthy enough to rival the Bi…
- Near Durham
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Durrow Abbey
County Offaly
A monastery that produced one of the earliest fully decorated Gospel books and recorded Europe's only known eyewitness sighting of the 1054 supernova.
- Near Tullamore
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Duxford Chapel
Cambridgeshire
A lone medieval chapel that outlived the hospital it served, then spent two centuries as a barn before restoration saved it.
- Near Whittlesford
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Eamont Bridge (structure)
Cumbria
Built in 1425 on the promise of religious indulgences, this humpbacked sandstone bridge over the Eamont survived a near-fatal battering by Storm Fr…
- Near Penrith
- Easy path
-
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
-
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…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Easby Abbey
North Yorkshire
Its finest woodwork was carried off to Richmond at the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s), yet six generations of o…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Easebourne Priory
West Sussex
Founded before 1238 for a prioress and ten canonesses. Its claustral remains are now inside a Grade I listed house.
- Near Easebourne
- Easy path
-
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
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
East Farleigh Bridge
Kent
East Farleigh Bridge is a rare Grade I listed and scheduled medieval River Medway crossing whose four-arch ragstone structure, cutwaters and long a…
- Near East Farleigh
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
East Pool mine
Cornwall
A major Cornish copper and tin mine whose preserved beam engines make its long struggle with underground water visible within a World Heritage mini…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eastcotts Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) thrown up on the Greensand Ridge to watch the Ouse valley below, now reduced…
- Near Cardington
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eastington Manor Tower
Pembrokeshire
A medieval fortified house built against the threat of pirates now stands as the last survival of a village largely swallowed by an oil refinery.
- Near Rhoscrowther
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eastnor Castle
Herefordshire
A Regency fantasy of a medieval border stronghold, built by the architect of the British Museum and still the private home of the family that commi…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eaton Socon Castle
Cambridgeshire
A hastily raised civil-war stronghold whose earthworks still trace a Norman ringwork: a castle enclosure ringed by a bank, built without a motte: b…
- Near Eaton Socon
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ecclesfield Priory
South Yorkshire
A Yorkshire monastic chapel survived the closure of the monasteries disguised as a farmhouse, with its medieval fabric still intact behind a sevent…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eccleshall Castle
Staffordshire
A bishop's castle taken in 1643 to find its defenders drunk or in the taverns and the bishop dead of a heart attack.
- Near Eccleshall
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Edburton Castle Ring
West Sussex
A protected castle site on Edburton Hill, with earthworks dating from soon after 1066.
- Near Edburton
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Iron Age
Edinburgh Castle
City of Edinburgh
One of Scotland's most important strongholds and a seat of royal power for centuries, Edinburgh Castle claims to be the most besieged place in Grea…
- Near Edinburgh
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Edington Priory
Wiltshire
A bishop's private chantry for his family's souls grew within seven years into a full monastic house, and its church still stands complete and in d…
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Edisford Bridge
Lancashire
Nine stone spans of mismatched ages and shapes, straddling the Ribble on a course fixed since at least 1339 and painted by Turner before 1799.
- Near Clitheroe
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Edlingham Castle
Northumberland
Edlingham Castle is a compact fortified manor guarding a western approach to Alnwick, where a cracked but substantial solar tower preserves the cha…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Edmond Castle
Cumbria
A country house reshaped twice by the Smirke architects, then pressed into service sheltering Czech wartime refugees and holding delinquent boys as…
- Near Penrith
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Edzell Castle and Garden
Angus
Its walled garden is carved with the only known Scottish set of relief panels depicting planetary deities and the liberal arts, a Renaissance survi…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Egglestone Abbey
County Durham
A White Canons' house so poor it struggled to keep even twelve monks, yet its rebuilt church still stands on the Tees bank a century after its firs…
- Near Barnard Castle
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Egmere medieval settlement
Norfolk
Egmere is a scheduled deserted medieval village near Walsingham, where population decline, a ruined church, manor garden, village platforms and fis…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Egremont Castle
Cumbria
Its market tolls are said to have funded the founding of St Bees Priory - a castle whose revenue helped build one of Cumbria's great religious houses.
- Near Egremont
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Eilean Donan Castle
Highland
The castle photographed on countless shortbread tins is barely a century old: a 1930s recreation of a stronghold the Royal Navy blew apart in 1719.
- Near Inverness
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Elcho Castle
Perth and Kinross
Nearly burned in 1773 by a crowd who found it full of grain being held back for export during a famine.
- Near Rhynd
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Elder Well
Staffordshire
A spring in a metre-square sandstone box, dressed yearly with flowers and branches, and reckoned a cure for the eyes since Robert Plot listed it.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Elibank Castle
Scottish Borders
A 1511 royal charter tied one family's right to farmland to a promise to build in stone, and the Italianate terraced gardens later raised here rank…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ellerton Priory (Swaledale)
North Yorkshire
Ellerton Priory is a rare Swaledale Cistercian-nuns’ site whose uncertain foundation, 1342 Scottish destruction, revealing 1536 dissolution (Henry…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ellesmere Castle
Shropshire
A Norman motte, the earthen mound a castle was raised on, that passed between English kings and Welsh princes for sixty years: and now has a bowlin…
- Near Ellesmere
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Elmley Castle (castle)
Worcestershire
A Norman stronghold whose ownership passed by marriage into the Earls of Warwick, on ground that may already have carried a defended hilltop settle…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Elsdon Castle
Northumberland
Elsdon Castle is Northumberland’s best-preserved medieval castle site, retaining a large mound and enclosed yard on a natural hill spur despite aba…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Elstow Abbey
Bedfordshire
A Norman nunnery founded by a niece of William the Conqueror whose abbesses fought lawsuits, defied bishops, and left a parish church built from th…
- Near Elstow
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Elsyng Palace
Greater London
Henry VIII visited this brick palace more often than almost any other house not his own, yet its location was lost for over three centuries until d…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Eltham Palace
Greater London
Eltham Palace combines a great medieval royal hall with one of Britain’s finest Art Deco homes, preserving the shift from Plantagenet and Tudor cou…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Elvaston Castle
Derbyshire
A Gothic Revival mansion remodelled by James Wyatt now stands empty on England's at-risk register, its 20-year romantic garden once hailed as a 'Go…
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ely Castle
Cambridgeshire
A grassy mound beside the cathedral is all that survives of the stronghold William the Conqueror threw up to break the last English resistance hold…
- Near Ely
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ely Cathedral
Cambridgeshire
A Norman crossing tower collapsed in 1322 and was replaced not with another square tower but with a unique timber-and-stone octagon, still held up…
- Near Ely
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
English Bicknor Castle
Gloucestershire
Held by one of the Anarchy's most powerful magnates, this castle escaped the destruction that levelled many others in that civil war: a survivor wi…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ennis Friary
County Clare
Ennis Friary is a National Monument whose Franciscan ruins preserve six centuries of O'Brien patronage, Gaelic education, Reformation (the sixteent…
- Near Ennis
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Enniscorthy Castle
County Wexford
A Norman keep at the head of the River Slaney that changed hands between Norman lords, a Gaelic dynasty, Elizabethan planters, Cromwellian troops a…
- Near Enniscorthy
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Errew Abbey
County Mayo
A monastery said to have drawn 1,400 students from across Europe once stood on this Lough Conn peninsula, and its story survives chiefly through th…
- Near Ballinrobe
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eshott Hall
Northumberland
Eshott Hall layers a little-known moated medieval manor beneath a later Palladian house, linking fortified residence, Northumberland estate history…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Esker Friary
County Galway
Four centuries of continuous religious life under one roof: Dominican novitiate, diocesan seminary, then Redemptorist monastery: ending only in 2022.
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Etal Castle
Northumberland
Etal Castle is a strategically placed medieval border fortress whose capture by James IV in 1513 and surviving tower show the costs of the Anglo-Sc…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ethie Castle
Angus
A working seat still lived in by a clan chief, Ethie carries the Trafalgar arms of an admiral earl and the murdered cardinal who once held it.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Everdon Priory
Northamptonshire
Its monks were formally investigated by the Crown in 1329 for turning justice into profit, and the priory, a monastery run by a prior, ended up own…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Evesham Abbey
Worcestershire
Simon de Montfort, the baron whose death reshaped England's parliamentary history, lies buried near the high altar of a Benedictine house that was…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Evesham Bell Tower
Worcestershire
The only fragment of Evesham Abbey the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) left wholly intact, saved from demolition…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ewenny Priory
Vale of Glamorgan
Called the most complete and impressive Norman ecclesiastical building in Glamorgan: and defended like a castle, on the site its founder first mean…
- Near Ewenny
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ewloe Castle
Flintshire
Built not by an English king but by Welsh princes, its D-shaped keep sits on a rock outcrop rather than projecting from a wall: a design choice wit…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ewyas Harold Castle
Herefordshire
A castle raised before the Norman Conquest itself: one of only a handful of pre-1066 fortifications built in England, on a site later remade three…
- Near Ewyas Harold
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Exeter Cathedral
Devon
Exeter Cathedral is a thousand-year religious and architectural landmark, renowned for its Roman-to-Gothic history, medieval vaulting, misericords,…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Exeter Greyfriars
Devon
Exeter Greyfriars documents a Franciscan community present in the city from before 1240 until the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monaster…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eye Castle
Suffolk
A Norman castle on its mound at Eye, sacked and largely destroyed in 1265.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Eye Priory
Suffolk
Excavation in 1926 showed the buildings here were put up as a deliberate copy of the mother house in Normandy. A ninth-century seal-die of Bishop A…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eynsford Castle
Kent
Eynsford Castle preserves an unusually early Norman stone enclosure built over an Anglo-Saxon elite residence, with later hall, curtain wall and mo…
- Near Canterbury
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Eynsham Abbey
Oxfordshire
A Thames-side abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) founded by royal licence in 1005, briefly annexed to a Lincolnshire house before return…
- Near Eynsham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Eyrecourt Castle
County Galway
Its carved baroque staircase, one of the most exuberant pieces of 17th-century woodwork to survive, was sold in 1927 and now stands in a Detroit mu…
- Near Eyrecourt
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Fair Oak Lodge
Hampshire
A country house has been renamed, rebuilt, converted to a convent and finally turned into a school, while an unproven local tradition ties the grou…
- Near Winchester
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Falkland Palace
Fife
Falkland Palace is a major Scottish royal residence where a medieval hunting castle became a French Renaissance court, retaining the world’s oldest…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Farewell Priory
Staffordshire
Founded for male hermits and then given away to a community of women by the same bishop who had just endowed it.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Faringdon Castle
Oxfordshire
A Norman castle outside the market town, raised by Robert, Earl of Gloucester.
- Near Faringdon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Farleigh Hungerford Castle
Somerset
A wife strangled her first husband and burned his body in the castle oven; a later lord starved his own wife in one of the towers. Both stories are…
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Farndon Bridge
Wrexham
Built by Chester monks in 1339, this red sandstone crossing still carries live traffic between England and Wales: one of only a handful of medieval…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Farnham Castle
Surrey
A bishop's stronghold occupied almost continuously for 800 years, from a Norman motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) throu…
- Near Farnham
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fast Castle
Scottish Borders
Once known as Fause (False) Castle for the lights its defenders hung to lure ships onto the rocks below, this stronghold made deception part of its…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fatlips Castle
Scottish Borders
A reivers' watchtower above the Teviot whose unlikely name is said to record an indecorous greeting for visitors, later reborn as a Lorimer-designe…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Feartagar Castle
County Galway
Feartagar Castle is a compact five-storey Burke tower house whose defensive details and intact internal stairs preserve the working form of a late-…
- Near Oughterard
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Featherstone Castle
Northumberland
Featherstone Castle combines a fourteenth-century pele tower with a large Gothic country house, tracing a border manor’s adaptation through estate,…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Felley Priory
Nottinghamshire
Felley turns a tiny Augustinian community into a living landscape: monastic origins underlie the house and gardens visitors see today.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fenny Castle
Somerset
A castle on the only high ground for miles, whose builder is unknown: and where quarrymen once found twenty skeletons older than the castle itself.
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ffynnon Beuno and Cae Gwyn Caves
Denbighshire
Stone tools recovered here, worked around 36,000 BC, gave archaeologists one of the first confirmed links between Ice Age hunters and the mammoth a…
- Near Denbigh
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fiddaun Castle
County Galway
Fiddaun is a mid-sixteenth-century O'Shaughnessy tower house whose notably intact inner bawn wall preserves the relationship between a defensive to…
- Near Gort
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Finavon Castle
Angus
Finavon Castle combines the ruins of a 17th-century L-plan tower-house with excavated evidence of a larger medieval predecessor, preserving a long-…
- Near Finavon
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Finchale Priory
County Durham
A Grade I listed Benedictine priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: by the River Wear, developed from the hermitage of St Godr…
- Near Durham
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fincharn Castle
Argyll and Bute
Known by three names and fought over twice in a single generation, its ruin marks a stronghold that changed hands between Scottish, English and Heb…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Findlater Castle
Aberdeenshire
Besieged by Norwegian invaders in the 1260s and by Mary, Queen of Scots' own army in 1562, after a family plot to imprison and displace its own lai…
- Near Cullen
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Fineshade Priory
Northamptonshire
A single stable block is all that survives of a monastic site rebuilt as a country house, then demolished twice more, most recently in 1956.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
FitzHarris Castle
Oxfordshire
One of Oxfordshire's earliest Norman earthworks, raised within a generation of the Conquest and now watched over as ground at risk from the very vi…
- Near Abingdon-on-Thames
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Flamborough Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
Flamborough Castle’s Danish Tower preserves the small but evocative remains of a medieval Constable family manor, later reduced to a farm building…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Flanesford Priory
Herefordshire
A Grade I listed monastic refectory: the monks' dining hall: that outlived its priory: a monastery headed by a prior: by farming, then by holiday l…
- Near Goodrich
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Flaxley Abbey
Gloucestershire
A Cistercian house founded, tradition holds, on the very spot its founder's father was killed hunting: and one of the rare abbeys that lived on as…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Flint Castle
Flintshire
The first stone raised in Edward I's Iron Ring, its isolated corner keep is a design unmatched anywhere else the king built in Britain.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Flitcham Priory
Norfolk
Flitcham Priory records a medieval religious foundation in Norfolk associated with Sir Robert III Aguillon, preserving a named link between local l…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Flitwick Castle
Bedfordshire
A Norman lord's timber stronghold, raised over a dispossessed Saxon estate, now survives only as a grass-covered mound on a village green.
- Near Flitwick
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Floors Castle
Scottish Borders
A family record stretching from medieval Reiver land to French tapestries brought from a New York estate: one house rebuilt twice over three centur…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Folkestone Castle
Kent
Folkestone Castle’s surviving Norman banks were investigated by Augustus Pitt Rivers in 1878, in work claimed as Britain’s first scientific excavat…
- Near Canterbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Folkingham Castle
Lincolnshire
Folkingham Castle was the administrative centre of a Norman barony, retaining a castle mound-and-yard form later reshaped by the Beaumont family.
- Near Folkingham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fonmon Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A castle whose thickest wall faces the side hardest to attack: and whose early history has had to be read out of its masonry rather than its docume…
- Near Fonmon
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ford Castle
Northumberland
Ford Castle occupies a shallow River Till crossing where repeated Anglo-Scottish conflict turned a Heron fortress into a rebuilt Gothic mansion and…
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Ford Moss
Northumberland
Ford Moss combines a deep raised peat bog with woodland, wildlife, a scheduled monument (legally protected as a site of national archaeological imp…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Forde Abbey
Dorset
Forde Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation transformed after 1539 into a privately owned house, retaining major monastic rooms, an important gar…
- Near Thorncombe
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Fore Abbey
County Westmeath
One of the largest surviving groups of Benedictine ruins in Ireland grew directly out of a 7th-century Gaelic monastery whose founder is still cred…
- Near Mullingar
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Fort George
Highland
Completed in 1769 at more than double its original budget, it is one of the most sophisticated artillery fortifications ever built in Europe: and i…
- Near Ardersier
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fort Paull
East Riding of Yorkshire
A pentagonal Palmerston Fort rearmed across four centuries of coastal defence, from Tudor guns to an Arctic convoy magazine to a museum that housed…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fotheringhay Castle
Northamptonshire
A royal birth and a queen's execution happened within the same walls: Richard III was born here in 1452, and Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded here…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Fountains Abbey
North Yorkshire
Fountains Abbey grew from an expelled group of York monks into England’s richest Cistercian house; its ruins, water management and later parkland m…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Fountains Mill
North Yorkshire
Described as the most substantial Cistercian mill to survive anywhere, its gritstone walls carry three centuries of monastic milling, then sawing a…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Framlingham Castle
Suffolk
A Norman castle destroyed by Henry II after the revolt of 1173, then rebuilt by the Bigods.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Franciscan Friary, Lichfield
Staffordshire
A Grey Friars' house given oaks by two kings and dissolved in 1538: its only standing fabric now attached to the city library.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Franciscan Friary, Southampton
Hampshire
The friars left almost nothing standing of their church, yet the pipe network they built to bring fresh water into the town still marks the ground…
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Fritchley Tunnel
Derbyshire
Believed to be the oldest surviving railway tunnel in the world, its stonework still carries the soot, tool-marks and sleeper-scars of the horse-dr…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Frithelstock Priory
Devon
Frithelstock Priory preserves the history of an Augustinian foundation, its Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s)-era…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Frodsham Castle
Cheshire
A castle so thoroughly erased that its walls now form the cellars of the house that replaced it: a stronghold known more through inheritance disput…
- Near Chester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Furness Abbey
Cumbria
For three centuries this was the second-richest Cistercian house in England after Fountains, ruling Man and its bishops from a red sandstone valley…
- Near Barrow-in-Furness
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Fyvie Castle
Aberdeenshire
Four towers raised by five different families across six centuries turn one facade into a physical timeline - a royal courtroom, a Civil War battle…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gallarus Castle
County Kerry
A mural stairway rises through the thickness of the east wall of Gallarus Castle, climbing to vaulted ceilings on the third and fourth floors of th…
- Near Dingle
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gallen Abbey
County Offaly
A monastery twice devastated by Munster kings and twice rebuilt, its surviving grave slabs span four centuries, and ownership passed from an Irish…
- Near Ferbane
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gannocks Castle
Bedfordshire
Its name promises a castle but hides a Norman fortified manor house, possibly raised over a Viking stronghold tied to a ninth-century battle for Te…
- Near Tempsford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Garbally Castle
County Galway
A tower house razed within five years of its completion, then re-inhabited three centuries later by an evicted family with nowhere else to shelter.
- Near Ballinasloe
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Garendon Abbey
Leicestershire
A Georgian mansion was built directly across the footprint of the vanished abbey church, its drains reusing the monks' own sewer: two buildings, fo…
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Garway Dovecote
herefordshire
A circular Knights Hospitaller dovecote of 1326 with nineteen rows of nesting boxes, rebuilt on a Templar original and called by some the finest me…
- Near Hereford
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Gautries Rake
Derbyshire
Scheduled in 2013, the rake preserves an intact surface record of a lead vein worked as a single open trench rather than through scattered shafts a…
- Near Bakewell
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gidleigh Castle
Devon
Gidleigh Castle is a rare fortified manor on Dartmoor’s edge, combining a fourteenth-century Prouz residence with later collapse, conservation and…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Gidlow Hall
Greater Manchester
Gidlow Hall preserves the moated, partially surviving home of an Aspull family recorded from the 13th century, with visible fabric from its 1574 re…
- Near Aspull
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Minor monument · Medieval
Giggleswick Market Cross
North Yorkshire
Giggleswick Market Cross preserves the village’s late-medieval market status and, through later relocation and competing local traditions, captures…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gilling Abbey
North Yorkshire
A monastery founded as blood-price for a murdered king: the weregild for Oswine of Deira paid not in silver but in stone and prayer.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gilling Castle
North Yorkshire
Its Elizabethan Great Chamber was stripped for shipment to a Hollywood mogul's castle in 1930, then spent decades in storage before returning intac…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gisborough Priory
North Yorkshire
Gisborough Priory was a wealthy Augustinian foundation rebuilt after catastrophic fire and then dismantled at the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glamis Castle
Angus
One family, the Lyons, has held this Strathmore estate since the 1370s, and its rooms have hosted a murdered king, a woman burned for witchcraft, a…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glandyfi Castle
Ceredigion
Ceredigion's only castellated Georgian country house, built as a Gothic Revival fantasy for a family whose fortunes came from local industry.
- Near Glandyfi
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glanworth Abbey
County Cork
A Dominican priory whose true founding date is disputed: left out of the order's own 1300 catalogue, which points to an origin nearer 1475 than the…
- Near Fermoy
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Glasgow Cathedral
Glasgow City
One of only two medieval Scottish cathedrals: alongside St Magnus in Orkney: to survive the Reformation (the sixteenth-century suppression of monas…
- Near Gloucester
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glasney College
Cornwall
Glasney College was medieval Cornwall's leading clerical and literary institution, and its destruction severed a major formal base for Cornish-lang…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glastonbury Abbey
Somerset
Monks dug up King Arthur here in 1191, seven years after a fire destroyed the abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot, and pilgrim numbers collapsed.…
- Near Glastonbury
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gleaston Castle
Cumbria
Four sandstone-dressed towers still stand around a limestone enclosure abandoned within a century of being built, left untouched by any later rebui…
- Near Ulverston
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glenarm Castle
County Antrim
Glenarm Castle layers a thirteenth-century Bisset capital with the MacDonnell family’s 1636 estate, a long-lived centre of power on the Antrim coast.
- Near Glenarm
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glenbuchat Castle
Aberdeenshire
In 1948 a local club bought the surrounding parkland just so the castle's setting would stay intact: a community rescue of a landscape, not the bui…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glendalough
County Wicklow
A single monastic settlement produced two cathedrals' worth of ruins, a 30-metre round tower, and a saint's cave-retreat, all set between two glaci…
- Near Glendalough
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glenluce Abbey
Dumfries and Galloway
Glenluce Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation in Galloway whose post-Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the monasteries) seizure, Ken…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glenquin Castle
County Limerick
Glenquin Castle's square limestone tower rises six storeys beside the R515, about 2.4 kilometres west of Killeedy in County Limerick. The structure…
- Near Ballingarry
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Glenstal Abbey
County Limerick
A castle built new in the 1830s to look medieval later became a working Benedictine monastery whose monks charted commercial chant albums and sang…
- Near Murroe
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glin Castle
County Limerick
The Georgian house at Glin is one family's third seat on this spot by the Shannon: 700 unbroken years of the Knights of Glin, from tower house to h…
- Near Glin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glinsk Castle
County Galway
A mid-seventeenth-century Galway tower house, reputedly Ireland's last castle, whose intact defensive and domestic features survive despite an earl…
- Near Glinsk
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glossop Castle
Derbyshire
A Norman stronghold raised by William Peverel on a ridge already old with Celtic use: the same builder responsible for Peveril Castle a dozen miles…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Glottenham Castle
East Sussex
Glottenham Castle preserves the earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) trace of a thirteenth-century moated…
- Near Battle
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gloucester Castle
Gloucestershire
A Plantagenet prisoner with a rival claim to the crown was once held within it: yet the castle was so thoroughly erased that its foundations lay bu…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gloucester Cathedral
Gloucestershire
Its cloisters hold the earliest fan vaulting raised anywhere in England, built on wealth that pilgrims brought to the shrine of a murdered king.
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Goldcliff Priory
Newport
A Benedictine house whose monks wore white, not black, and whose farmland foundations still trace a 37-metre range beside a double-banked earthwork…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Goodrich Castle
Herefordshire
A square Norman keep survives at the heart of a fully concentric castle whose design influenced later English building, and which fell only after a…
- Near Hereford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Goodrich Court
Herefordshire
A vanished antiquarian (an early collector-scholar of antiquities, working before modern archaeology)'s fantasy castle, built to outstare a real me…
- Near Hereford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gorton Monastery
Greater Manchester
Gorton Monastery is Edward Welby Pugin’s major Gothic Revival friary, a house of friars who worked among townspeople, church, saved from derelictio…
- Near Gorton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grace Dieu Abbey, Monmouth
Monmouthshire
Grace Dieu was the last Cistercian foundation in Wales: a poor, repeatedly displaced abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) whose attacks, royal ti…
- Near Dingestow
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grange Abbey
County Dublin
The modest ruin preserves how the monastic farm of All Hallows served an estate community, then became a site of repeated conservation and archaeol…
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Grange Castle
County Kildare
Grange Castle preserves a protected tower house whose Irish name recalls the monastery’s outlying farm, making its setting as meaningful as its sur…
- Near Kildare
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grangefertagh
County Kilkenny
Grangefertagh layers a sixth-century foundation, a 31-metre round tower and a later Augustinian church around one of Kilkenny’s most unusual mediev…
- Near Johnstown
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Granuaile's Castle
County Mayo
One of only a handful of surviving strongholds of Gráinne Ní Mháille, the O'Malley seafarer whose Atlantic reach earned her the name of Ireland's p…
- Near Clare Island
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gravesend Blockhouse
Kent
Gravesend Blockhouse was a key Henry VIII Device fort protecting London’s Thames approach with Tilbury, and its changing guns, platforms and eventu…
- Near Gravesend
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Fortified place · Medieval
Great Ashfield Castle
Suffolk
An earth mound 130 feet across the base and 24 feet high, with a surrounding ditch that some investigations suggest was added later.
- Near Great Ashfield
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Great Barford Bridge
Bedfordshire
A single crossing shows nearly six centuries of continuous change in one structure: medieval stonework widened first in timber, then rebuilt in bri…
- Near Great Barford
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Great Barford Castle
Bedfordshire
A Norman timber stronghold that quietly became a farm: its motte, the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle, and bailey, the defended y…
- Near Great Barford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Great Canfield Castle
Essex
Great Canfield Castle’s surviving earthworks preserve a lowland Norman motte-and-bailey (a Norman earth-and-timber castle, a tower on a mound besid…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Great Coxwell Barn
Oxfordshire
A working monastic barn from the 1290s survives almost complete, its timber roof still resting on the same pairs of posts a Cistercian granger once…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Limber Preceptory, Limber Magna
Lincolnshire
A quiet Lincolnshire farm site passed in turn through Cistercian, Templar and Hospitaller hands before ending as a Pelham family holding: three cen…
- Near Great Limber
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Limber Priory, Limber Magna
Lincolnshire
A Lincolnshire manor and church handed by charter to a Norman abbey, then sold on two centuries later to a Coventry priory: its status as priory or…
- Near Great Limber
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Malvern Priory
Worcestershire
Its 15th-century stained glass forms the largest surviving display of its kind in England, saved partly through the patronage of a man who had help…
- Easy path
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Settlement · Medieval
Great Manson Farm, Monmouth
Monmouthshire
Great Manson Farm is an active sheep farm whose three listed buildings preserve a late-medieval hall adapted as a barn, an eighteenth-century farmh…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Wilbraham Preceptory
Cambridgeshire
A working parish church still carries a hidden Templar tombstone beneath its tower and a Templar cross on its outer wall, physical survivals of a p…
- Near Great Wilbraham
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Sacred place · Medieval
Great Yarmouth Grey Friary
Norfolk
Great Yarmouth Grey Friary preserves Grade I fragments of a Franciscan house founded around 1226, whose covered walkway survived through later reus…
- Near Great Yarmouth
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Fortified place · Medieval
Greenan Castle
South Ayrshire
A sixteenth-century tower on a headland fortified since before the Romans, and the place a Kennedy set out from on the morning he was murdered.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greenfield Priory
Lincolnshire
Two generations of the Barons Welles were buried here, while surviving bishops' records lay bare a small nunnery repeatedly failing to keep its own…
- Near Aby
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Greenhalgh Castle
Lancashire
One of the last two Royalist strongholds left standing in Lancashire, held through a bitter siege until May 1645, its towers pulled down soon after…
- Near Garstang
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Greenknowe Tower
Scottish Borders
Built for comfort rather than combat, its four-storey L-plan shell still carries an original iron yett, corbelled turrets and a kitchen with meat h…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gregans Castle
County Clare
A Cromwellian land grant handed the O'Lochlainn chief's tower house to the Martyn family, whose descendants steered the estate through farming decl…
- Near Gort
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gresham Castle
Norfolk
Gresham Castle is a moated fortified manor whose disputed fifteenth-century possession, vividly recorded in the Paston Letters, connects Norfolk ea…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Gresley Priory
Derbyshire
A small Augustinian house so thinly staffed it once had only four canons, yet its church survived the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the mona…
- Near Bakewell
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars Church, Reading
Berkshire
A church that has been a friary, a town hall, a poorhouse, a house of correction and a jail before ever returning to worship: the only Franciscan c…
- Near Reading
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Bedford
Bedfordshire
Two rival medieval sources credit different founders: one a noblewoman, one a knight: and its church became the resting place of a medieval baron o…
- Near Bedford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Beverley
East Riding of Yorkshire
A Franciscan friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the streets rather than behind walls) rebuilt on a knight's money after…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Canterbury
Kent
England’s first Franciscan friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them) preserves rare traces of medi…
- Near Canterbury
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Coventry
West Midlands
A single medieval spire still rises where an entire Franciscan priory once stood: the only fragment to survive dissolution, a Victorian rebuilding,…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Leicester
Leicestershire
A car park in Leicester concealed an undisturbed medieval church floor for centuries: including the grave of a king whose bones were long rumoured,…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Lincoln
Lincolnshire
A single friary building carried four wholly different institutions across seven centuries: friary, grammar school, Mechanics' Institute, and count…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, London
City of London
A friary (a community of friars, an order that lived among the towns instead of apart from them) church so richly endowed by queens that it became…
- Near City of London
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
Greyfriars reveals medieval Nottingham’s lost Franciscan presence: a church rebuilt in stone for nearly a century, now erased beneath Broadmarsh.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Stamford
Lincolnshire
A royal cortège carrying the exhumed Duke of York rested here in 1476, and the friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the s…
- Near Stamford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Winchelsea
East Sussex
One of England's best-preserved Franciscan friary, a religious house for a preaching order, stands beside a Gothic country house raised four centur…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Greystoke Castle
Cumbria
A working private estate rather than a ruin, Greystoke traces an unbroken line of ownership back to a wooden tower raised within a year of the Norm…
- Near Penrith
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Greystone Bridge
Cornwall
Greystone Bridge is a rare surviving medieval Tamar crossing: a four-arch, Grade I listed bridge whose narrow carriageway still demands careful mod…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Groby Castle
Leicestershire
A 1960s excavation found a stone tower built inside the earthen mound itself: evidence this ruined Leicestershire manor was once important enough f…
- Near Groby
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Fortified place · Medieval
Grosmont Castle
Monmouthshire
One of only three castles ever bound into a single Marcher lordship, its stone hall building was modelled so closely on a lord's residence in Dorse…
- Near Grosmont
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Grovebury Priory
Bedfordshire
One of only four English houses of the Order of Fontevrault, and the only one entirely destroyed by a sand quarry: rescued from oblivion by a decad…
- Near Leighton Buzzard
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Sacred place · Medieval
Guildford Black Friary
Surrey
The graves of plague victims, buried together in communal pits beneath the choir, are among the clearest human traces excavation found only a metre…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Guildford Castle
Surrey
A Norman keep that became a royal palace under Henry III, painted green with gold and silver stars: then quietly served two centuries as the shared…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Gwrych Castle
Conwy
Gwrych Castle is a Grade I listed Gothic Revival country house whose dramatic nineteenth-century design, Kindertransport refuge and near-loss befor…
- Near Conwy
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gwydir Castle
Conwy
Gwydir Castle is a fortified Tudor manor in the Conwy valley whose reused abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) fabric and powerful Wynn fa…
- Near Conwy
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Gybson's Conduit
Norfolk
Gybson’s Conduit is a scheduled Early Renaissance water monument in Norwich, showing how Robert Gybson turned a public spring into a display of civ…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Gylen Castle
Argyll and Bute
A tower house burnt in a single 1647 siege and left roofless for nearly 360 years, until a worldwide clan fundraising effort helped bring the ruin…
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hadleigh Castle
Essex
Hadleigh Castle is a Thames-side royal fortress whose dramatic ruins record medieval power, Edward III’s architectural ambition, long-term coastal…
- Some walking
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Hafotty
gwynedd
A mid-fourteenth-century hall house on Anglesey, first built in timber and re-cased in stone, still in Bulkeley hands after five centuries and carr…
- Near Llanddona
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hagnaby Abbey
Lincolnshire
A widow's grief founded it, Becket's memory named it, and eight decades of dependency ended in full abbey status: a rare, well-documented Premonstr…
- Near Hagnaby
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Sacred place · Medieval
Hailes Abbey
Gloucestershire
A phial said to hold Christ's blood turned this Cistercian house into a major pilgrimage site: its exposure as a fake later helped seal the abbey (…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hailes Castle
East Lothian
Hailes Castle is a riverside Hepburn stronghold whose fourteenth-century towers, chapel and service rooms record border warfare and late medieval l…
- Near Dunbar
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hailes Castle, Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire
A stronghold raised for one purpose and cleared for another: reinforced during the Anarchy, then likely dismantled within a century to make room fo…
- Easy path
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Hale Duck Decoy
Cheshire
One of England's few surviving duck decoys still holding its original form: five pipes radiating from a central pond in a pentagon shape used to tr…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hales Castle
Somerset
A Norman ringwork above Frome whose bailey was never finished: built to hold a river and a Roman road.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Halesowen Abbey
West Midlands
Its manorial court rolls survive in unusual depth, recording three centuries of tenants openly defying a monastic landlord: a rare surviving voice…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hallaton Castle
Leicestershire
Hallaton Castle survives as a remarkably large castle mound and enclosed yard, preserving a Norman estate centre long after its buildings disappeared.
- Near Hallaton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Haltemprice Priory
East Riding of Yorkshire
A powerful baron moved an entire monastery two miles across country to outwit English inheritance law, and its farmhouse successor still stands, re…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Halton Castle
Cheshire
A castle that hosted a king, imprisoned Catholic recusants, and ended its working life as a Georgian courtroom now serving pints as The Castle pub.
- Near Runcorn
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Halton Castle, Northumberland
Northumberland
Halton Castle preserves a four-storey pele tower beside Hadrian’s Wall, adapted through manor-house rebuilding into the long-held residence of the…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ham Castle
Worcestershire
A hoard of gold and silver, hidden in an earlier alarm and forgotten, lay buried beneath the vaults of this Worcestershire stronghold until a 17th-…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hampstead Norreys Castle
Berkshire
A chalk mound long mistaken for a prehistoric (before written records reached Britain) burial mound turned out, on closer inspection, to be the ear…
- Near Hampstead Norreys
- Some walking
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Crossing or structure · Medieval
Hampton in Arden packhorse bridge
West Midlands
At under six feet wide and still standing after five centuries, it is reckoned the longest surviving packhorse bridge in England.
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Hangman's Wood and Deneholes
Essex
Hangman’s Wood combines ancient oak woodland, more than seventy former chalk- and flint-mining shafts and Essex’s most important underground bat hi…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hangthwaite Castle
South Yorkshire
A grass-grown mound and its water-filled ditch are all that remain of a Norman lord's stronghold, abandoned within two centuries for a fortified ho…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hanley Castle (castle)
Worcestershire
The fortress that gave a Worcestershire village its name has vanished so completely that a stand of conifers and a dry ditch are all that mark wher…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Harbottle Castle
Northumberland
Harbottle Castle is a Coquet Valley border stronghold repeatedly captured, rebuilt, and used by March wardens, with a direct connection to the Tudo…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hardham Priory
West Sussex
A house of Black Canons in the water meadows of the Arun, whose refectory: the monks' dining hall: survives because somebody turned it into a farmh…
- Near Hardham
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Harewood Castle
West Yorkshire
Put up for sale in 1656 as 'an upstanding source of stone and timber'. Turner painted it several times in 1797.
- Near Harewood
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Harlech Castle
Gwynedd
Harlech Castle is Edward I’s sea-supplied Welsh stronghold, later Owain Glyndŵr’s headquarters and the last mainland Royalist fortress to surrender…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Harlowbury
Essex
Harlowbury brings together an abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot)-founded manor, Harlow’s oldest standing building and a wider arch…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Harlsey Castle
North Yorkshire
Hidden within Grade II* farm buildings, Harlsey preserves fifteenth-century keep fabric, barrel-vaulted rooms and a chimney remnant shaped by centu…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Harrold Priory
Bedfordshire
A small nunnery whose own chartulary preserves an unusually candid account of medieval convent life, ending in a disputed 1535 visitation letter al…
- Near Harrold
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hartland Abbey
Devon
Hartland Abbey carries the history of an Augustinian foundation established in the twelfth century through dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hartlebury Castle
Worcestershire
A working bishop's palace for nearly 800 years, whose Civil War siege ditch lay hidden until cropmarks revealed it in 2022: history still surfacing…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hartlepool Abbey
County Durham
A double monastery of monks and nuns led by two of early Northumbria's most influential abbesses, its cemetery is the most thoroughly excavated of…
- Near Hartlepool
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hartley Castle
Cumbria
A stronghold whose owner was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason, later rebuilt as an Elizabethan house on the Scottish Marches, then quarried…
- Near Kirkby Stephen
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hartshill Castle
Warwickshire
Excavated in 2000 without archaeological supervision, and robbed of curtain wall in 2016. Ten thousand years earlier people came here for flint.
- Near Hartshill
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hastings Castle
East Sussex
A castle raised in days on the eve of 1066 and then, for seven centuries since, slowly surrendered to the sea that made the town below it worth def…
- Near Hastings
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hastings Priory
East Sussex
One of the few English monasteries driven from its home not by dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) or fire but by th…
- Near Hastings
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hatfield Peverel Priory
Essex
Hatfield Peverel Priory links a pre-Conquest religious foundation, a Benedictine cell of St Albans and a long post-Dissolution (Henry VIII's closur…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Haugham Priory
Lincolnshire
A tiny Norman-endowed cell whose three-century fate was decided by war, not by monks: passed between king, bishop and rival religious house before…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Haughley Castle
Suffolk
A medieval castle in the village north-west of Stowmarket.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Haughmond Abbey
Shropshire
A ruined Augustinian monastery near Shrewsbury, probably of the early twelfth century and long tied to the FitzAlans.
- Near Shrewsbury
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Haughton Castle
Northumberland
Haughton Castle turns a thirteenth-century tower house, once ruined and vulnerable to reivers, into a Grade I listed North Tyne mansion shaped by J…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Haverfordwest Castle
Pembrokeshire
A castle holding an isolated ridge-end position in the middle of the town.
- Near Haverfordwest
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Haverfordwest Priory
Pembrokeshire
A religious house on the banks of the Western Cleddau, its setting shaped by the river.
- Near Haverfordwest
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Haverholme Priory
Lincolnshire
Haverholme Priory preserves the layered story of a Gilbertine double monastery, later Gothic country house and listed ruin, connecting medieval rel…
- Near Lincoln
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Haw Hill
Northumberland
Haw Hill is the mound of Morpeth’s first castle, preserving the original de Merlay motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hawarden Castle (18th century)
Flintshire
A plain Georgian mansion built for a country baronet was later reworked into a castellated Gothic house and became the home where Britain's four-ti…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hawkesyard Priory
Staffordshire
A Dominican house under a prior, built between 1896 and 1914 off Armitage Lane, with its church of St Thomas.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hawridge Court ringwork
Buckinghamshire
One of only around 200 surviving ringworks in Britain, its oval bank and ditch still rise almost to their original height, entrance causeway intact.
- Near Hawridge
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hay Castle
Powys
Attacked and burnt at least five times in three centuries, gutted by fire twice in the twentieth, and opened to the public for the first time in it…
- Near Hay-on-Wye
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hay Tump Castle
Powys
The first castle at Hay, raised within five years of the Battle of Brecon: now a mound beside a cattle market.
- Near Hay-on-Wye
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hayton Castle
Cumbria
A working farmhouse today, the castle carries a shield and inscribed stone slab reading its Musgrave owners' devotion in Latin, and a tradition tha…
- Near Carlisle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hazleton Abbey
Gloucestershire
A twelfth-century Cistercian foundation so troubled by water shortage that the monks abandoned it for Tetbury within years, leaving only a barn beh…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Healaugh Park Priory
North Yorkshire
A working farmhouse near Tadcaster still carries the bones of an Augustinian priory, a monastery run by a prior, inside its walls, its descent trac…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Heaton Castle
Northumberland
Heaton Castle preserves fragmentary evidence of a de Grey quadrangular castle destroyed in a Scottish raid and adapted into a bastle (a fortified f…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hedingham Castle
Essex
Hedingham Castle contains one of England’s best-preserved Norman keeps, where an exceptional ashlar (smooth-dressed stone laid in even courses)-fac…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Heighley Castle
Staffordshire
Held for Charles I, destroyed by Parliament in the 1640s, and now on the Heritage at Risk Register in very bad condition, privately owned and closed.
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Helmsley Bridge
North Yorkshire
The oldest bridge still standing over the River Rye, its narrow medieval arch surviving inside a structure later doubled in width to carry modern t…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Helmsley Castle
North Yorkshire
Helmsley Castle reveals nearly five centuries of adaptation: a Norman timber stronghold rebuilt in stone, reshaped into a Tudor mansion, damaged in…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hemyock Castle
Devon
Hemyock Castle preserves the remains of a late medieval quadrangular castle whose short working life, Civil War use and later rebuilding make its d…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hen Domen
Powys
The first Montgomery Castle, abandoned when its replacement was built a mile away: which is why its timber buildings could be excavated at all.
- Near Hendomen
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hen Gwrt Moated Site
Monmouthshire
A moat built with no defensive purpose at all now guards nothing but empty grass: every trace of the bishops' manor and the Herberts' hunting lodge…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Henderskelfe Castle
North Yorkshire
A four-towered medieval castle that vanished so completely beneath a stately home's gardens that its exact plan was only recovered by television ar…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hereford Castle
Herefordshire
A royal stronghold besieged and recaptured across three centuries of English and Welsh conflict, reduced now to a park lawn crossed by a Nelson mon…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hereford Cathedral
Herefordshire
Its library holds the largest surviving collection of chained books in the world, alongside the Mappa Mundi, a circa-1300 map of the known world dr…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hermitage Castle
Scottish Borders
A single Border stronghold ties together a witchcraft forfeiture, Mary Queen of Scots' most reckless ride, and generations of Douglas and Hepburn p…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Herstmonceux Castle
East Sussex
Herstmonceux is one of England’s earliest major brick castles, repeatedly transformed from fifteenth-century display residence to ruined shell, obs…
- Near Hastings
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hertford Castle
Hertfordshire
A working Tudor gatehouse still stands over a site that held two kings as prisoners and sheltered a queen who died within its walls.
- Near Hertford
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hethpool House
Northumberland
Hethpool House combines an Edwardian country house on Admiral Lord Collingwood’s former seat with the remains of a fourteenth-century pele tower in…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hever Castle
Kent
Hever Castle combines medieval defences with the Boleyn family story, including Anne Boleyn’s early life and Henry VIII’s later ownership.
- Near Hever
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hewelsfield Motte
Gloucestershire
No masonry survives here at all: only earth and a buried ditch mark a Norman stronghold raised over an emptied, then resettled, village.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hexham Abbey
Northumberland
Hexham Abbey is a 1,300-year religious site where Wilfrid’s Roman-material Saxon crypt survives beneath a later Augustinian church that became Hexh…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Heynings Priory
Lincolnshire
Its last prioress surrendered a house so poor from its very founding that the exact site of its buildings has since been lost, leaving only a farm…
- Near Knaith
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hickling Priory
Norfolk
Hickling Priory was a wealthy Augustinian house with holdings across thirty-two Norfolk parishes, whose collapse after plague and dissolution (Henr…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
High Bridge, Lincoln
Lincolnshire
The oldest bridge in Britain still carrying standing buildings: a working row of Tudor shops perched on stonework raised eight and a half centuries…
- Near Lincoln
-
Fortified place · Medieval
High Head Castle
Cumbria
A medieval pele tower rebuilt as a Georgian mansion in the 1740s, gutted by fire in 1956, and now being reroofed wing by wing in a slow private eff…
- Near Ivegill
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Highclere Castle
Hampshire
A Victorian remodelling by the architect of the Houses of Parliament sits over a working estate where Howard Carter's patron once lived, and where…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hillsborough Castle
County Down
Hillsborough Castle is Northern Ireland’s official royal and government residence, where a Georgian country house became a setting for constitution…
- Near Hillsborough
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hinckley Priory
Leicestershire
A tiny alien priory, a monastery run by a prior, whose loyalty to a Norman abbey, a monastic house under the rule of an abbot, made it a casualty o…
- Near Hinckley
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hinton Priory
Somerset
A Carthusian house founded because the monks found their first site insufficiently solitary: and named God's Place.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Hinton Waldrist Castle
Oxfordshire
A modest Thames-valley motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower raised on a mound with a walled court beside it) where Mary de Bohun…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hitchin Priory
Hertfordshire
A Palladian-fronted hotel wraps around a genuine medieval cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central courtyard) garth, its blocked m…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hobs Moat
West Midlands
A fortified manor house reduced to bare earthworks, its true age still argued over: traditionally 12th century, yet the pottery and stonework found…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Hobson's Conduit
Cambridgeshire
A working four-way water-splitting system engineered in 1610 still carries chalk-spring water through open street gutters past Cambridge's oldest c…
- Near Cambridge
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hoddom Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Hoddom Castle is a large Annandale tower house whose Marian-era sieges, later courtyard expansion and surviving watchtower show how Border fortific…
- Near Ecclefechan
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Holdgate Castle
Shropshire
A Domesday castle that housed a college of clergy for over a century: and whose one surviving tower is now part of a farmhouse.
- Near Holdgate
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Holford Hall
Cheshire
Holford Hall is a rare surviving fragment of a richly decorated 1601 timber-framed manor, still standing within its moated setting beside the separ…
- Near Plumley
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Holland House
Greater London
Holland House is a rare London ruin where a Jacobean country estate, a 19th-century Whig intellectual salon and the destructive legacy of the Blitz…
- Near Kensington
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holmcultram Abbey
Cumbria
Founded on land that belonged to Scotland before England reclaimed it, the abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) was raided by Robe…
- Near Abbeytown
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Holt Castle
Wrexham
Barely a fragment of its sandstone base survives, yet Holt once formed a five-towered, moat-ringed pentagon on the Dee: fierce enough in appearance…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Sepulchre Priory, Thetford
Norfolk
Holy Sepulchre Priory preserves the only surviving English remains of a Canons of the Holy Sepulchre priory, linking a fourteenth-century Thetford…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Abbey, Lough Key
County Roscommon
A canon-scribed chronicle of Irish history and the tomb behind one of Connacht's best-known tragic love stories both survive on this one small lake…
- Near Boyle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Church, Cork
County Cork
A single-parish campaign of ordinary Corkonians, spread across sixty years and a famine, finally raised a tapering Gothic spire on marshy quayside…
- Near Cork
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Church, Westbury on Trym
Bristol
Its 10th-century Benedictine community, briefly reformed by Bishop Oswald, was the seed from which Ramsey Abbey grew after Oswald relocated its mon…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Trinity Priory
City of London
A queen's own foundation that grew powerful enough for its prior to sit as an Alderman of London, yet vanished so completely that only a few pointe…
- Near London
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holy Well, Malvern
Worcestershire
Believed to be the site of the world's oldest commercial water-bottling operation, with production recorded here since 1622 and revived again in 2009.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holyrood Abbey
City of Edinburgh
Holyrood Abbey is Edinburgh's ruined royal abbey, founded by David I and central to Scottish parliaments, coronations and palace life before a cata…
- Near Edinburgh
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hope Castle
County Monaghan
A Georgian mansion that passed from a Welsh baron to a diamond-owning banking dynasty to a royal duke, only to be gutted by an arson attack after d…
- Near Monaghan
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hope Church of All Saints
Kent
This Romney Marsh church ruin offers physical evidence of a lost medieval parish and possible deserted village, now interpreted through a sculpture…
- Near New Romney
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hopton Castle
Shropshire
A castle midway between Knighton and Craven Arms, a ruin since the early eighteenth century and since partly repaired.
- Near Hopton Castle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hore Abbey
County Tipperary
The last Cistercian house founded in Ireland before the monasteries closed under Henry VIII, Hore Abbey sits beside a ridge whose medieval cathedra…
- Near Cashel
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hornby Castle, Lancashire
Lancashire
A single peer's forgotten warning about the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 links this Lune Valley house directly to the most notorious conspiracy in Englis…
- Near Hornby
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hornby Castle, North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
A Yorkshire seat passed by marriage through five families in six centuries, from the St Quintins to the Dukes of Leeds, before three-quarters of th…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hornby Priory
Lancashire
A small Premonstratensian cell answering to Croxton Abbey nearly 150 miles away, its founding credited across three generations of one family befor…
- Near Hornby
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Horsford Castle
Norfolk
Horsford Castle is a low but significant castle mound and enclosed yard whose post-Conquest foundation, deliberate placement in pastureland, linked…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Horsley Priory
Gloucestershire
A tiny Norman-founded cell built for just a prior, a monk and a chaplain, traded between two mother houses and then erased from record before 1380…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Horston Castle
Derbyshire
A royal stone castle reduced to a single overgrown keep by centuries of quarrying: and now formally listed among England's heritage most at risk of…
- Near Bakewell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hospital of St John the Baptist, High Wycombe
Buckinghamshire
A 12th-century almshouse chapel became, without ever moving site, the seedbed of a Royal Grammar School still teaching boys eight centuries later.
- Near High Wycombe
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Howley Hall
West Yorkshire
The ruins of an Elizabethan country house between Batley and Morley, scheduled since 1997.
- Near Morley
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hoxne Priory
Suffolk
Built at what was held to be the place where Edmund, king of East Anglia, was martyred. The chapel came first, around 950, and a priory: a monaster…
- Near Hoxne
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hull Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
An entire Tudor artillery fortress, built partly with stone stripped from dissolved monasteries, has vanished beneath a working dockyard, leaving o…
- Near Beverley
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hulne Priory
Northumberland
Hulne Priory is a rare Northumberland Carmelite foundation whose substantial ruins combine contemplative friary, a religious house for the order, l…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hulton Abbey
Staffordshire
A former monastery in Stoke-on-Trent, now protected by law for its archaeology.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Humberston Abbey
Lincolnshire
A rare case where a bishop's own 1422 testimony ties an English abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot)'s monks directly back to a name…
- Near Humberston
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Hundatorra
Devon
Hundatorra is a rare Dartmoor landscape where Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) settlement, a medieval farming hamlet and…
- Near Exeter
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Huntingdon Castle
Cambridgeshire
A royal stronghold once held by the kings of Scotland themselves, deliberately torn down on Henry II's orders after a rebellion: leaving only its m…
- Near Huntingdon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Huntington Castle
Herefordshire
A Marcher stronghold that changed hands by conquest, marriage and royal seizure for two centuries, ending as a ruin still listed at risk today.
- Near Huntington
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Huntingtower Castle
Perth and Kinross
The Ruthven name was suppressed by Act of Parliament in 1600, and the castle had to be renamed. It had been Ruthven Castle for centuries.
- Near Perth
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hurley Priory
Berkshire
A Norman priory church still in parish use stands beside a working medieval dovecote, barn and inn: a rare case where almost every part of a monast…
- Near Hurley
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hurst Castle
Hampshire
A single shingle spit carries four centuries of continuous coastal defence, from Henry VIII's Device Fort to Victorian rifled monster guns to Secon…
- Near Milford-on-Sea
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hyde Abbey
Hampshire
A Winchester prison's foundation trenches once turned up stone coffins, a gilded crozier and the disturbed grave of England's most famous early kin…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Hygga House Dovecote, Trellech
Monmouthshire
This unusually complete late-sixteenth-century dovecote preserves the scale and organisation of a gentry estate, and scholars identified it as one…
- Near Trellech
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Hylton Castle
Tyne and Wear
A castle datable only by the coats of arms carved along its west front.
- Near Sunderland
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ightham Mote
Kent
Ightham Mote is an exceptionally complete medieval moated manor, whose inward-facing courtyard plan and original features reveal how a defended hou…
- Near Ightham
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ince Manor
Cheshire
One of only two surviving monastic manor buildings left in Cheshire, its stone hall and cottages saved from ruin by a 1990s-2002 restoration after…
- Near Ince
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Inch Castle
County Donegal
Built by a son-in-law for his own father-in-law, the ruin sealed a marriage alliance between two of Gaelic Ulster's most powerful clans: and is sti…
- Near Inch
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Inchcolm Abbey
Fife
Inchcolm Abbey is Scotland’s most complete surviving monastic complex, preserving an Augustinian island community whose buildings also reveal the F…
- Near St Andrews
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Inchmacnerin Abbey
County Roscommon
A monastery reputedly founded by Columba on its own island in Lough Key, later refounded as an Augustinian priory, a monastery headed by a prior an…
- Near Roscommon
-
Settlement · Medieval
Ingarsby
Leicestershire
One of England's best-preserved deserted medieval villages, its earthworks tracing streets abandoned when the abbey (a religious community led by a…
- Near Hungarton
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Inishkeel
County Donegal
A monastery reachable only by a sandy tidal path once held the bell of its founding saint: now in the British Museum, an ocean's width from the rui…
- Near Glenties
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Inishmaine Abbey
County Mayo
Refounded for an Augustinian community of nuns after 1223, on the site of a seventh-century monastic foundation, this Lough Mask ruin was later dis…
- Near Lough Mask
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Inishmurray
County Sligo
A monastery founded by Saint Columba's own confessor, raided twice by Vikings, then resettled, farmed and finally evacuated entire in 1948: the isl…
- Near Sligo
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Inislounaght Abbey
County Tipperary
Its dismantled stone still stands elsewhere: reused in Clonmel's Main Guard and in local mills: while the abbey (a religious community led by an ab…
- Near Clonmel
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Inkberrow Castle
Worcestershire
A castle raised sometime under the Angevin kings and pulled down within a lifetime: its true walls now reduced to a moat whose very origin is dispu…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Innes Chonnel Castle
Argyll and Bute
A rival Highland clan once held this island fortress against Robert the Bruce himself, and a captive heir to the Lordship of the Isles later spent…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Inveraray Castle
Argyll and Bute
One of the first Gothic Revival buildings anywhere, raised by a Highland clan chief to replace a medieval stronghold rather than restore it.
- Near Inveraray
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Inverlochy Castle
Highland
A 13th-century stone quadrangle that has kept the same four corner towers and curtain wall since it was built, having hosted two battles without ev…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Inverness Castle
Highland
The red sandstone towers standing today are the third castle on this cliff: successor to a fortress whose 1428 parley ended with fifty Highland chi…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Iona Nunnery
Argyll and Bute
The ruined church, cloister and domestic ranges of the Iona Nunnery stand in a walled precinct beside Baile Mor, the only village on the island of…
- Near Baile Mor
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ipswich Blackfriars
Suffolk
A Dominican house founded by Henry III in 1263 and dissolved in 1538, the second of three friaries in the town.
- Near Ipswich
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Irthington Castle
Cumbria
For over a century and a half an earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) near Irthington served as the admin…
- Near Irthington
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Isert Kelly Castle
County Galway
A 21-metre tower house that survived a burning, a Cromwellian confiscation and centuries of weather largely intact, its 1604 fireplace still bearin…
- Near Athenry
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Isleham Priory Church
Cambridgeshire
A Norman monastic chapel of about 1100 survives almost untouched because it spent centuries disguised as a barn, not because anyone set out to pres…
- Near Isleham
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ivychurch Priory
Wiltshire
A religious house whose ruined cloisters gave Sir Philip Sidney the setting to write much of his Arcadia, before nearly all of it was pulled down i…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ixworth Priory
Suffolk
The east range survives almost complete inside a house called Ixworth Abbey. Stone from the ruins went into Hengrave Hall in the early sixteenth ce…
- Near Ixworth
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Jacob's Well, Bristol
Bristol
Scholars still argue whether this stone chamber served as a Jewish ritual bath or a place to cleanse the dead: either way it would be unique in Eng…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Jerpoint Abbey
County Kilkenny
Jerpoint Abbey is a richly carved Cistercian ruin whose cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central courtyard) figures and tomb sculp…
- Near Thomastown
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Jervaulx Abbey
North Yorkshire
Its ruins were deliberately left unweeded and ivy-clad as a Picturesque garden feature, making Jervaulx the rare Cistercian ruin never stripped bar…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Jewel Tower
Greater London
The Jewel Tower is one of Westminster’s rare medieval survivors: built for Edward III’s personal treasure, later used for Lords’ archives and offic…
- Near Westminster
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Jigginstown Castle
County Kildare
Jigginstown is Thomas Wentworth’s unfinished red-brick royal house for Charles I, its surviving lower floors recording ambition halted by execution…
- Near Naas
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
John O'Gaunt's Castle
North Yorkshire
Buried footings and a ditched platform preserve the plan of a royal hunting lodge later granted to John of Gaunt, one of the most powerful men in f…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Johnstown Castle
County Wexford
A Norman tower house rebuilt as a Gothic Revival fantasy, then handed to the State by its last family in place of death duties and turned into a wo…
- Near Wexford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Jordan's Castle, Wellow
Nottinghamshire
Jordan’s Castle is a modest arrangement of banks and ditches with a royal story: Henry III repeatedly stayed at the manor before it received a lice…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Keele Preceptory
Staffordshire
A Templar estate given by Henry II, seized on a papal bull in 1307, and finally handed to the Hospitallers in 1342.
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Keld Heads Mine
North Yorkshire
A derelict lead-mining complex whose 3.3-kilometre smelting flue, built to appease angry farmers, once made it the most advanced lead mine in the c…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kellie Castle
Fife
Kellie Castle brings together a 14th-century Fife tower house and an exceptional Arts and Crafts revival, preserving Lorimer family art, interiors…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kells Priory
County Kilkenny
Kells Priory is one of Ireland's largest medieval monuments, where defensive towers wrap an Augustinian precinct so completely that the religious h…
- Near Kells
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kemeys Inferior Motte
Newport
Kemeys Inferior Motte is a scheduled medieval earthwork (a bank or ditch dug and heaped from the ground itself, with no masonry) above the Usk whos…
- Near Langstone
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kendal Castle
Cumbria
The presumed birthplace of a Tudor queen turned out to be a myth, yet the roofless drumlin-top ruin still holds the story of the family that produc…
- Near Kendal
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kenfig Castle
Bridgend
A once-elegant Norman keep sacked by the Welsh at least six times now lies almost entirely swallowed by sand dunes, with only its tower's crown bre…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kenilworth Castle
Warwickshire
Kenilworth’s surviving keep, lake defences and palace ruins tell an exceptional story of a Norman fortress repeatedly remade for royal war, courtly…
- Near Kenilworth
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kepier Hospital
County Durham
A medieval Durham hospital founded for poor people, rebuilt beside the Wear and later dissolved, with its gatehouse and hospital landscape still su…
- Near Durham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kersey Priory
Suffolk
Founded as a hospital, converted into a monastery, and dissolved in 1443: nearly a century before the Dissolution: with the property handed to King…
- Near Kersey
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kerswell Priory
Devon
Kerswell Priory preserves a small medieval religious foundation whose disputed affiliation, alien-priory history, dissolution (Henry VIII's closure…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Kew Palace
Greater London
Kew Palace preserves the modest Dutch House at the heart of a lost royal complex, connecting George III’s family life, architectural experiments an…
- Near Kew
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Kexby Old Bridge
North Yorkshire
Closed to motor traffic since 2017 flood damage, this crossing carried the York-to-Hull road for six centuries and now survives as a scheduled monu…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Keynsham Abbey
Somerset
An abbey: a monastery headed by an abbot: endowed with 24,520 acres and quarried so thoroughly afterwards that in places the digging reached bedrock.
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Kibworth Harcourt Mill
Leicestershire
Kibworth Harcourt Mill is Leicestershire’s only surviving post mill, preserving early-18th-century machinery, millstones and 264 graffiti marks; it…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kidwelly Castle
Carmarthenshire
A square inner bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) of four round towers within a semi-circular outer wall, fought over by Welsh princes…
- Near Kidwelly
- Some walking
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Carved stone · Medieval
Kilberry Sculptured Stones
Argyll and Bute
The Kilberry Sculptured Stones preserve medieval cross-slabs and grave markers from a parish church destroyed in the 17th century, keeping a disper…
- Near Kilberry
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilbolane Castle
County Cork
A moated Norman-style stronghold built centuries after the Normans themselves arrived, tying a Cloyne bishop's estate to Cromwellian destruction an…
- Near Kilworth
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcash Castle
County Tipperary
A ruined tower house beside a wrecked church and a Butler mausoleum, made famous not by battle but by an eighteenth-century Irish lament still sung…
- Near Clonmel
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilchousland Chapel
Argyll and Bute
One of only a handful of Scottish chapels dedicated to St Constantine, a shadowy royal-saint whose cult is otherwise scarce in the historical record.
- Near Campbeltown
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilchurn Castle
Argyll and Bute
On a rocky peninsula at the north-eastern end of Loch Awe, the ruined shell of Kilchurn Castle rises around a five-storey tower house first raised…
- Near Dalmally
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcoe Castle
County Cork
A West Cork tower house that fell last in Munster after Kinsale, then rose again under an actor's six-year restoration in ochre limewash.
- Near Schull
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcolman Castle
County Cork
A ruined tower house in the Cork countryside where a refugee English poet spent ten years writing the epic that shaped English literature, before w…
- Near Clonakilty
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilconnell Abbey
County Galway
A ruined Franciscan house whose church and eastern convent range survived into the twentieth century almost intact, even though the community that…
- Near Ballinasloe
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilcooly Abbey
County Tipperary
Its chancel (the eastern end of the church, holding the altar) holds the effigy tomb of knight Piers Fitz Oge Butler, carved with ten apostles by t…
- Near Thurles
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilcrea Castle
County Cork
A fifteenth-century MacCarthy stronghold whose moat was later cut through by a Victorian railway line, its ruins now standing on a working cattle f…
- Near Cork
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilcrea Friary
County Cork
Kilcrea preserves an unusually complete Franciscan friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the streets rather than behind wa…
- Near Cork
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kildare Abbey
County Kildare
For centuries its abbess held a rank of honour acknowledged by every other abbess in Ireland, and its scribes and metalworkers produced manuscripts…
- Near Kildare
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kildermot Abbey
County Mayo
A ruined lakeside priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey, a larger monastery, whose recovered holy water fonts are…
- Near Ballinrobe
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kildrummy Castle
Aberdeenshire
A shield-shaped fortress whose sieges shaped a kingdom: from the capture and execution of Robert the Bruce's brother in 1306 to a countess's defian…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilgobbin Castle (Dublin)
County Dublin
A tower house built for a ten-pound bounty on the edge of the Pale, sacked within a generation, and left standing on only two of its four walls.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killahara Castle
County Tipperary
A single tower house carries the whole arc of Tipperary's post-medieval story: clan lordship, Cromwellian dispossession, famine eviction and a 1920…
- Near Thurles
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Killarney Franciscan Friary
County Kerry
A working Franciscan house barely 160 years old that has trained novices from Ireland, Britain, Germany, Holland, Sweden and Canada, and still carr…
- Near Killarney
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killeen Castle, Castlegar
County Galway
A working tower house of the Blakes, one of Galway's fourteen merchant tribes, still standing as a private home while the grander mansion built bes…
- Near Galway
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killeen Castle, Dunsany
County Meath
One family, Cusack then Plunkett by marriage, held this site for almost 800 years, from a Norman tower to the golf course that brought the Solheim…
- Near Dunsany
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Killeshin Church
County Laois
The doorway inscription names Diarmait Mac Murchada, the Leinster king whose later appeal to Anglo-Norman lords would reshape Ireland's history.
- Near Carlow
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killiney Castle
County Dublin
Five names in three centuries: Mount Malpas, Roxborough, Loftus Hill, Killiney Castle, Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel: track one building's slow slide fr…
- Near Killiney
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killua Castle
County Westmeath
A tower added on a whim of fashion in the 1820s still stands over an estate that once stretched to 9,000 acres, and a stone obelisk nearby claims t…
- Near Clonmellon
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Killyleagh Castle
Down
Killyleagh unites a Strangford Lough stronghold with four centuries of Hamilton occupation, Civil War damage and Lanyon’s deliberately Loire-like n…
- Near Killyleagh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilmacduagh monastery
County Galway
A cathedral seat reduced to seven scattered ruins in a single field, crowned by a round tower that leans further from true than almost any other in…
- Near Gort
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilmahew Castle
Argyll and Bute
A roofless tower house north of Cardross that gave its name to eighteen generations of Napiers, among them the shipbuilding dynasty that built the…
- Near Cardross
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilmalkedar
County Kerry
A hole pierces the east wall of the chancel (the part of a church around the altar) at Kilmalkedar, low and narrow. Local tradition gives it a name…
- Near Dingle
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilmory Castle, Bute
Argyll and Bute
Its nickname, Crowner's Castle, preserves the memory of a hereditary legal office: coroner of Bute: held by one family for generations.
- Near Meikle Kilmory
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilree
County Kilkenny
Kilree preserves an early Christian enclosure, a distinctive round-tower foundation and a richly carved high cross, while local tradition and the a…
- Near Callan
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kiltartan Castle
County Galway
Kiltartan Castle preserves a late-thirteenth-century riverside tower house, its partial medieval fabric shaped by ruin during the Cromwellian conqu…
- Near Gort
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kilton Castle
North Yorkshire
Rebuilt in stone around 1190 without a keep, Kilton may be the first castle in northern England built that way: a design choice, not a deficiency,…
- Rough ground
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilve Chantry
Somerset
A chantry founded to pray for one man's soul, which became a barn, then a smugglers' store, and burned down in 1848 to hide the brandy.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kilwinning Abbey
North Ayrshire
Kilwinning’s ruined monastery once held revenues from fourteen parishes, granges and baronial jurisdiction, leaving an unusually wide medieval impr…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kimbolton Castle
Cambridgeshire
A Norman stronghold turned ducal palace, remodelled by Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, whose fenland damp is said to have hastened the death of a discarded…
- Near Kimbolton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kinalehin Friary
County Galway
Ireland's only Carthusian monastery once stood here, a solitary order that left almost no other trace on the island before Franciscans remade the s…
- Near Gort
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kindlestown Castle
County Wicklow
A late hall house whose ownership swung between Anglo-Norman knights, Gaelic raiders and an earl across three centuries, its ruined shell still tra…
- Near Wicklow
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Building or ruin · Medieval
King Charles's Castle
Cornwall
King Charles's Castle is a Tudor artillery fort on Tresco whose flawed high position exposed the limits of sixteenth-century coastal defence, befor…
- Near New Grimsby
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Castle (Carlingford)
County Louth
A D-shaped stronghold whose east and west wings were raised two generations apart, yet still reads as a single act of control over Carlingford's ha…
- Near Carlingford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Castle (Limerick)
County Limerick
Beneath the Norman stonework lie the remains of a Viking stronghold founded in 922 and unearthed in 1900: a thousand years of contest for the Shann…
- Near Limerick
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
King John's Palace
Nottinghamshire
King John’s Palace gives Clipstone’s sheep-grazed ruins an outsized story of royal hunting, Parliament, and the last illness of Eleanor of Castile.
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Fortified place · Medieval
King John's Palace, Southampton
Hampshire
A merchant's wine store became a fortress by royal order, and its blocked archways may hold Britain's earliest surviving gunports.
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
King Richard III Visitor Centre
Leicestershire
A Victorian schoolhouse built directly over a king's grave: the exact spot where DNA finally solved a five-century mystery in 2012.
- Near Leicester
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Building or ruin · Medieval
King Street, Bristol
Bristol
Laid out on reclaimed marshland in 1650, the street still carries one of Bristol's densest runs of 17th-century merchant houses, several built usin…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
King's Castle, Ardglass
Down
King’s Castle is Ardglass’s largest medieval stronghold, its nineteenth-century reconstruction still serving a daily purpose as a nursing home afte…
- Near Ardglass
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
King's Langley Priory
Hertfordshire
A Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them) founded on a king's battlefield vow and twin…
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Sacred place · Medieval
King's Mead Priory
Derbyshire
The only Benedictine nunnery in medieval Derbyshire, its prioresses fought off a rival abbot's control and a bailiff's threats to defend their inde…
- Near Bakewell
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Tomb or burial place · Medieval
King's Quoit
Pembrokeshire
A late Stone Age burial chamber on high ground above Manorbier Bay, five miles east of Pembroke.
- Near Manorbier
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingerby Castle
Lincolnshire
A motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) and bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) castle burnt on King John's or…
- Near Kingerby
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kings Langley Palace
Hertfordshire
A vanished royal residence of the Plantagenet kings survives only underground, its walls entirely gone but its footprint still protected in law.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingsgate Castle
Kent
Built as a stable block in the 1760s, Kingsgate Castle’s rapid ruin and conversion into 32 flats expose the fragility of fashionable Gothic display.
- Near Broadstairs
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingsgate, Winchester
Hampshire
One of only two medieval gates left standing in Winchester, it carries a working parish church built into its own fabric: a gateway and a place of…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingsley Castle
Cheshire
Kingsley Castle is a compact scheduled medieval motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) whose artificial black-soil mound sur…
- Near Kingsley
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kingswear Castle
Devon
Kingswear Castle is one of Britain’s earliest purpose-built artillery forts, guarding Dartmouth harbour across the Dart and later adapted from mili…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kingswood Abbey
Gloucestershire
Its abbey church vanished so completely that no one knows exactly where it stood: only a lavishly carved gatehouse survived the Dissolution (Henry…
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kington Castle
Herefordshire
A border stronghold fought over by three of Herefordshire's most powerful families before King John razed it in a single act of vengeance in 1215.
- Near Hereford
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kington St. Michael Priory
Wiltshire
Its last Prioress, Dame Marie Denys, stepped into the role at the very moment Thomas Cromwell's commissioners began dismantling England's monasteri…
- Near Kington St Michael
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kinlough Castle
County Mayo
A Burke tower house whose slit loops and drawbar-slotted door still speak to the priorities of its builders, deepened rather than replaced by a 157…
- Near Ballina
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kinnersley Castle
Herefordshire
An Elizabethan skin conceals a Marcher castle begun under Henry I, and inside survives a solar ceiling of gilded green men and serpent hounds among…
- Near Kinnersley
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kinnitty Castle
County Offaly
A working hotel built on ground rebuilt or replaced at least four times since 1213, its present owners include a founding member of the Wolfe Tones.
- Near Kinnitty
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kintbury Abbey
Berkshire
Two attempts to establish a religious house here, two centuries apart, left only paperwork behind: no abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) walls…
- Near Kintbury
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Kinwarton Dovecote
Warwickshire
A potence: a pivoted ladder that swings round the interior: still lets a keeper reach every nesting box. The building still houses doves.
- Near Kinwarton
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kirby Bellars Priory
Leicestershire
Kirby Bellars Priory preserves the transformation of Roger de Beler’s chantry college into an Augustinian house with wide parish responsibilities,…
- Near Kirby Bellars
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
Kirby Hall
Northamptonshire
A house begun to a French pattern book in 1570 that became one of England's earliest Elizabethan prodigy houses, then was slowly stripped and aband…
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirby Knowle Castle
North Yorkshire
Behind its Elizabethan stonework lies a real fugitive story: in 1597 a government searcher combed the house's vaults and secret passages and captur…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kirby Muxloe Castle
Leicestershire
Kirby Muxloe is a rare, well-documented unfinished late-medieval castle whose decorative brick gatehouse and water-filled moat reveal elite ambitio…
- Near Kirby Muxloe
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kirkham Priory
North Yorkshire
A rare, near-complete English Gothic gatehouse survives here, and the ruins later trained the armoured divisions that stormed the D-Day beaches.
- Easy path
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirkoswald Castle
Cumbria
A licensed medieval stronghold whose finest fittings were stripped out and carried off wholesale to another castle, leaving only the moat and a lon…
- Near Kirkoswald
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Kirkstall Abbey
West Yorkshire
A ruined Cistercian house founded about 1152, now standing in a public park on the north bank of the Aire.
- Near Leeds
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kirkstead Abbey
Lincolnshire
Kirkstead Abbey preserves the fragment and earthworks of a major Cistercian foundation from Fountains Abbey, whose 1537 suppression followed the Li…
- Near Woodhall Spa
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kirtling Tower
Cambridgeshire
A brick Tudor gatehouse is all that survives of a house that was once the largest in Cambridgeshire and a likely wellspring for both Spenser's poet…
- Near Kirtling
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Fortified place · Medieval
Kisimul Castle
Outer Hebrides
In 2001 the chief of Clan MacNeil leased Kisimul Castle to Historic Scotland for 1000 years, for an annual rent of £1 and a bottle of whisky. The a…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Knaresborough Castle
North Yorkshire
A queen gave birth within its walls assisted by a relic said to be the Virgin's girdle, and a royal mistress later inherited the ruins outright.
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Knaresborough Priory
North Yorkshire
England's only Trinitarian priory: a monastery headed by a prior: in Yorkshire grew up around a fugitive hermit's riverside cave, even though its f…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Knepp Castle
West Sussex
A motte castle: the earthen mound a castle was raised on: probably founded by William de Braose, still hosting reigning monarchs in the fourteenth…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Knights Templar Church, Dover
Kent
This rare round-plan church makes the uncertainty worth seeing: its architecture keeps the Templar legend alive while records point instead toward…
- Near Dover
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Fortified place · Medieval
Knockin Castle
Shropshire
Knockin Castle preserves the earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks and ditches rather than built up in stone) memory of a level-ground forti…
- Near Knockin
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Knockmoy Abbey
County Galway
Its chancel once held one of only four surviving medieval tempera wall-paintings in Ireland: a rarity conservators have worked to protect since the…
- Near Tuam
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kyme Priory
Lincolnshire
A community of twelve Augustinian canons that clung to its way of life so hard it paid the Crown as much as it earned rather than close early: and…
- Near Lincoln
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lackeen Castle
County Tipperary
A modest tower house in a quiet Tipperary townland turns out to be the hiding place of one of Ireland's oldest surviving illuminated manuscripts, t…
- Near Borrisoleigh
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Lacock Abbey (monastery)
Wiltshire
A single noblewoman's grief founded a working nunnery of landowners' daughters that ran sheep flocks 2,000 strong and kept its own scriptorium: not…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lambton Castle
County Durham
A Victorian-era vision of a Norman stronghold, built by a future governor-general of Canada and still the private seat of an earldom nearly two cen…
- Near Chester-le-Street
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lampeter Castle
Ceredigion
A Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) beside a key Welsh trade route, whose surviving mound records a frontier castle fiercely…
- Near Lampeter
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Lamphey Bishop's Palace
Pembrokeshire
A ruined medieval complex that served high-ranking clergy, known also as Lamphey Court.
- Near Lamphey
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lancaster Castle
Lancashire
One office held courtroom, garrison and gaol together for eight centuries, trying the Pendle witches in 1612 and sending some 265 people to the gal…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lancaster Priory
Lancashire
Its oak choirstalls, carved in 1340, are the third oldest in England, and beneath the chancel (the part of a church around the altar) lie the burie…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Landguard Fort
Suffolk
A fort at the mouth of the Orwell outside Felixstowe, built to guard the river entrance.
- Near Felixstowe
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lanercost Priory
Cumbria
Its walls were built from plundered Hadrian's Wall stone, including Roman inscriptions, and its monks wrote the Lanercost Chronicle, a key source f…
- Near Brampton
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Langley Abbey
Norfolk
Langley Abbey preserves a Premonstratensian foundation where church and barn ruins, earthworks and fish ponds reveal the wider working landscape of…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Langley Castle
Northumberland
Langley Castle is a restored fourteenth-century upper-floor hall house whose fire-damaged ruin, twentieth-century rescue, and remarkable garderobes…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Langley Priory
Leicestershire
For a few decades in the late 1200s the nuns here tried to pass themselves off as Cistercians rather than Benedictines, purely to dodge a tithe bil…
- Near Leicester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Langney Priory
East Sussex
Langney Priory is the surviving grange of Lewes Priory: a working agricultural estate whose threatened fabric preserves the economic infrastructure…
- Near Eastbourne
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lapley Priory
Staffordshire
A late Anglo-Saxon monastery dependent on the Benedictine house of Saint-Remi at Reims.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Latton Priory
Essex
Latton Priory preserves the footprint of a small moated Augustinian house whose church and cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's centra…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Laugharne Castle
Carmarthenshire
A single stronghold at Laugharne hosted a royal peace treaty, a rebel's costly defeat, and the writers who shaped modern Welsh literature.
- Near Laugharne
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Launceston Castle
Cornwall
Cornwall's Norman administrative castle, whose high tower, deer park and long prison afterlife make it a record of power, display and confinement.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Launde Abbey
Leicestershire
The chapel's monument to Gregory Cromwell, son of Henry VIII's chief minister, was singled out by Nikolaus Pevsner as one of the purest early Renai…
- Near Launde
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Launde Priory
Leicestershire
The Tudor secretary who dismantled England's monasteries kept this one for himself, building his family's manor house directly over the vanished ch…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lavendon Abbey
Buckinghamshire
Its buildings have vanished completely, yet the abbey (a religious community led by an abbot)'s earthworks, field system and two fishponds survive…
- Near Lavendon
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lavendon Castle
Buckinghamshire
A pipe roll of 1192–3 is the only documentary trace of this vanished stronghold: its motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle)…
- Near Lavendon
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lavenham Priory
Suffolk
Henry VIII's Comptroller is said to have fined the owner the equivalent of a million pounds for displaying too much ostentatious wealth.
- Near Lavenham
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Laxton Castle
Nottinghamshire
Laxton preserves two unusually complete Norman castle courts, making its earthworks a rare long-term archaeological laboratory rather than a merely…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lea Castle
County Laois
Lea Castle’s river-crossing stronghold held Richard de Burgh prisoner in 1294–95, making its powerful four-storey tower a witness to medieval Irish…
- Near Portarlington
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Leap Castle
County Offaly
Restored from a 1922 burning by two generations of private owners, the castle stands on ground in continuous use since the Iron Age: long before th…
- Near Clonmel
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lechlade Priory
Gloucestershire
Its hospital wing survives disguised as a riverside pub - one of the few tangible links to a priory, a monastery run by a prior, whose real busines…
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Leckwith Bridge
Cardiff
A working medieval bridge still carrying goods vehicles after five centuries, built alongside: not replaced by: its 1935 concrete successor.
- Near Leckwith, Cardiff
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leechwell
Devon
Totnes’s Leechwell preserves a long healing tradition around three springs, while its lanes, troughs and rediscovered immersion pool show how water…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Leeds Castle
Kent
Leeds Castle’s island setting contains more than a millennium of Kent history, from a Saxon stronghold to royal residence and public charitable trust.
- Near Leeds
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lees Priory
Derbyshire
Its blurred status between a dependent monastic cell and a formally styled priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usually smaller than an abbey,…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leez Priory
Essex
Leez Priory combines an Augustinian foundation with a major Tudor mansion, retaining monastic drains, ponds and walls within a Grade I-listed Essex…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Legbourne Priory
Lincolnshire
A small nunnery whose one detailed record survives almost by accident: a bishop's 1440 inspection that caught its prioress entertaining relatives o…
- Near Lincoln
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester Abbey
Leicestershire
Leicester Abbey was the county’s wealthiest Augustinian house, home to Henry Knighton’s chronicle and the place where Cardinal Wolsey died in 1530.
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Leicester Castle
Leicestershire
A working Great Hall, a mound, a ruined gatehouse and a chapel together trace nine centuries of continuous use, from Norman stronghold to Crown Cou…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester Friars of the Sack
Leicestershire
One of only a handful of English houses of the Friars of the Sack, a mendicant order so obscure that its Leicester friary (the base of a mendicant…
- Near Leicester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester's Church, Denbigh
Denbighshire
A vast Elizabethan preaching-house left roofless when its patron's money and his only son both ran out: the sole attempt at a new Protestant cathed…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Leighlinbridge Castle
County Carlow
Leighlinbridge Castle records eight centuries of defence beside the Barrow, a river whose name also survives in prehistoric burial mounds: from pre…
- Near Leighlinbridge
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lenton Priory
Nottinghamshire
Lenton’s Cluniac monastic house connected Nottingham with France, Peak District wealth, royal travel and a major market before Henry VIII’s closure…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leominster Abbey
Herefordshire
An abbess abducted from her own convent in 1046 and a prayer book copied almost entirely by an anonymous nun are the two threads that survive to na…
- Near Hereford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leominster nunnery
Herefordshire
No wall or door of it has ever been found: an Anglo-Saxon nunnery that vanished so completely its ground may lie hidden beneath a later religious h…
- Near Leominster
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leonard Stanley Priory
Gloucestershire
A single roof once held both a working parish church and a private monastic choir: a rare Augustinian-turned-Benedictine arrangement whose carvings…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lesnes Abbey
Greater London
Lesnes Abbey is a rare London ruin where a small 12th-century canons’ house, Peasants’ Revolt episode and former marshland landscape are preserved…
- Near Abbey Wood
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Letheringham Priory
Suffolk
A small outlying cell of the Augustinian house at Ipswich, founded at the end of the twelfth century.
- Near Letheringham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lewes Castle
East Sussex
Two earthen mounds rise on either side of its bailey, a doubled-mound plan shared with only one other castle in England: Lincoln.
- Near Lewes
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lewes Priory
East Sussex
The Mise of Lewes, a step toward England's Parliament, was settled here in 1264, and it was a Victorian railway cutting, not archaeology, that firs…
- Near Hastings
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lews Castle
Outer Hebrides
A private retreat built on an opium-trade fortune ended up given whole to the town it once stood apart from: a rare reversal for a Highland laird's…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Leybourne Castle
Kent
Leybourne Castle preserves a rare thirteenth-century twin-towered gatehouse, absorbed into a later farmhouse but still legible as a fortified entra…
- Near Leybourne
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Liddel Strength
Cumbria
A minor border castle whose fall in 1346 ended in the strangling of two sons before their father's eyes, on earthworks some believe are far older t…
- Near Longtown
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lidgate Castle
Suffolk
An unusual quadrangular design, probably raised about 1143 as part of Stephen's campaign against the rebel baron Geoffrey de Mandeville.
- Near Lidgate
- Some walking
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Lilla Cross
North Yorkshire
A stone cross on a windswept moorland burial mound marks where four ancient parishes meet, a boundary charter first named it in 1109, and it still…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lilleshall Abbey
Shropshire
Lilleshall was England’s rigorist Arrouaisian Augustinian abbey, built from a disputed royal-collegiate transfer and sustained by wide estates befo…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Limebrook Priory
Herefordshire
Only one wall of this small Marcher nunnery still stands, yet earthworks, a reused-stone cottage and a fishpond preserve the full footprint of a ho…
- Near Lingen
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Limekilns at Kiln Park, Pembrokeshire
Pembrokeshire
Twelve kilns nine metres high, the largest surviving in Pembrokeshire, standing in the grounds of a caravan park.
- Near Penally
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lincluden Collegiate Church
Dumfries and Galloway
Lincluden’s ruins record the transformation of Galloway’s first nunnery into a richly endowed collegiate church: a church staffed by a college of p…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lincoln Castle
Lincolnshire
Lincoln Castle uniquely combines a Norman two-motte fortress on a Roman fort, civil-war siege history, a preserved separate-system prison and one o…
- Near Lincoln
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lindisfarne
Northumberland
Lindisfarne concentrates Northumbria’s conversion, the making of the Gospels, Cuthbert’s enduring cult and the raid that reshaped European memory f…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lindisfarne Castle
Northumberland
Lindisfarne Castle preserves a Tudor gun fort on Holy Island, later transformed by Edwin Lutyens into an Arts and Crafts house within a deeply laye…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Linlithgow Palace
West Lothian
Taken back from the English by a hay merchant in 1313, birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots, and burned by accident in 1746.
- Near Linlithgow
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lisheen Castle
County Tipperary
A plain Palladian country house dressed up decades later as a castle, gutted by fire in the War of Independence and left roofless for eighty years…
- Near Cashel
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Liskeard Castle
Cornwall
Liskeard Castle was a short-lived medieval motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongsi…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lislaughtin Abbey
County Kerry
On the east bank of the Ballylongford Creek, a little over a kilometre north of Ballylongford in County Kerry, the roofless church of Lislaughtin A…
- Near Listowel
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lismore Castle
County Waterford
A working ducal seat still owned by the family that gave it its Gothic silhouette in the 1850s, sheltering a chimney-piece another English house re…
- Near Lismore
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Listowel Castle
County Kerry
Two of an original four towers still stand at Listowel Castle, joined by a heavy curtain wall and pierced by the unusual feature of an arch set bel…
- Near Listowel
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Litten Chapel
Berkshire
Its carved oak roof trusses, hidden by later ceilings for generations and only uncovered in 1980, survive as one of the clearest examples of early…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Little Malvern Priory
Worcestershire
One surviving window panel is thought to be among the only contemporary portraits ever made of Edward V, the boy king who vanished from history wit…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Little Moreton Hall
Cheshire
A timber-framed manor whose top-heavy Long Gallery and bowing floorboards have survived four centuries without a single wall left standing true.
- Near Congleton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Littledean Camp
Gloucestershire
Its motte, the mound built for a lookout tower and keep, is knitted into the ring of outer earthworks rather than placed at the castle's centre: a…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Llanddona fish weir
Gwynedd
Llanddona fish weir is a scheduled post-medieval (after about 1500) V-shaped tidal fish trap at Red Wharf Bay, preserving a large-scale form of coa…
- Near Llanddona
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llandough Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A fourteenth-century tower house built as a fortified residence rather than a military work, and remodelled in the nineteenth century by its tenants.
- Near Llandough
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llandovery Castle
Carmarthenshire
A knoll above the River Towy changed hands so many times between Norman lords and Welsh princes that its stone keep endured barely two centuries be…
- Near Llandovery
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Llanfaes Friary
Isle of Anglesey
Llanfaes Friary preserves the buried remains of a Franciscan house founded for Joan, Lady of Wales, whose survival through Edward I’s forced depopu…
- Near Beaumaris
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llangoed Hall
Powys
A house given to the church in 560, rebuilt by the architect of Portmeirion, and lost once to a gambling debt.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llangynwyd Castle
Bridgend
Its ruined gatehouse was built to echo the great twin towers of Caerphilly Castle, planting a miniature of Wales's mightiest fortress on a remote G…
- Near Maesteg
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Llanllugan Abbey
Powys
One of only two Cistercian nunneries in Wales, home to five women in 1377: and to sixty in a poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym.
- Near Llanllugan
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llanthomas Castle Mound
Powys
Leland found a tower here in the 1530s, four centuries after the earth mound was raised: and the uneven top may be the rubble of it.
- Near Llanigon
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Llanthony Priory
Monmouthshire
Llanthony Priory is one of Wales’s greatest medieval monastic ruins, founded in the remote Vale of Ewyas and rebuilt after conflict before the Diss…
- Near Llanthony
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Llanthony Secunda Priory
Gloucestershire
For two centuries the chapter house here held the tombs of the earls of Hereford and the Bohun dynasty, and its walls are still tied, however uncer…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llantrisant Castle
Rhondda Cynon Taf
Who built it, and when, has never been determined. Antiquaries have argued for a Welsh lord, a Norman earl, and the son of Henry I.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llawhaden Castle
Pembrokeshire
Llawhaden Castle is a ruined medieval bishops’ castle above the River Cleddau, with a gatehouse, towers and surviving defensive walls.
- Near Llawhaden
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Llys Euryn
Conwy
A late-medieval Conwy house linked to the ancestry of the Tudor dynasty, preserved on Bryn Euryn after fire, quarry damage and modern conservation.
- Near Conwy
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Llys Rhosyr
Isle of Anglesey
The only excavated royal court of the medieval Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, its buried hall now has a full-scale twin standing at St Fagans in Cardiff.
- Near Bangor
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Loch a' Bharain
Argyll and Bute
Loch a’ Bharain is a purpose-built Crinan Canal reservoir whose 1801 dam stabilised the summit reach and whose recent drainage exposed traces of an…
- Near Cairnbaan
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Loch Gorm Castle
Argyll and Bute
A Clan Donald stronghold so thoroughly reduced that its island now looks bare from the shore, yet its walls changed hands four times in fewer than…
- Rough ground
-
Settlement · Medieval
Lochleven Castle
Perth and Kinross
Besieged in 1335 by an English force that dammed the loch to drown it. The captain went off to a saint's festival, and the defenders broke the dam.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lochmaben Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Lochmaben Castle anchors the Bruce lordship of Annandale and records centuries of border conflict, royal rebuilding and repeated sixteenth-century…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lochnell Castle
Argyll and Bute
A staircase inside is said to be carved from a sacred yew felled on nearby Bernera Island: timber that reportedly survived at least two fires which…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lochranza Castle
North Ayrshire
Lochranza’s waterside tower links thirteenth-century lordship with Robert the Bruce’s reported 1306 landing, James IV’s island campaign and later a…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Locking Castle
Somerset
A castle site at Carberry Hill where excavations found a stone chamber, pottery and a sword fragment.
- Near Locking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Locko Preceptory
Derbyshire
The only recorded Lazarite preceptory (a local estate of a military order such as the Knights Templar) in England, it once returned an annual incom…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
London Charterhouse
Greater London
The London Charterhouse is an exceptionally layered Clerkenwell complex: a Black Death burial ground became a Carthusian priory, a monastery run by…
- Near Clerkenwell
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Long Bennington Priory
Lincolnshire
A tiny outpost of the Norman abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) of Savigny that for over a century supported just one resident monk, bef…
- Near Long Bennington
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Longford Castle
Wiltshire
A rare Elizabethan prodigy house built to a triangular Swedish plan, its completion reputedly funded by silver and gold salvaged from a wrecked Spa…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Longleat Priory
Wiltshire
A community of Augustinian canons answering directly to the Dean of Salisbury for three centuries, whose suppressed priory: a smaller monastery led…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Longthorpe Tower
Cambridgeshire
Beneath centuries of whitewash, Longthorpe Tower hid one of England's most complete sets of 14th-century domestic wall paintings, unseen until the…
- Near Peterborough
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Longtown Castle
Herefordshire
A circular stone keep with three evenly spaced turrets and 5-metre-thick walls, a design shared with only Skenfrith and Caldicot in the Welsh Marches.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Loughmoe Castle
County Tipperary
One family held an unbroken line of barons here for over five centuries, from a 1204 marriage dowry to the title's extinction in 1722: a rare span…
- Near Thurles
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Loughor Castle
Swansea
A ruined fortification raised by Henry de Beaumont about 1106 to command a road and a crossing of the Loughor.
- Near Loughor
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Louth Park Abbey
Lincolnshire
A monk buried at the founder's request beside the very knight whose deathbed gift nearly ruined the house in litigation: Louth Park's archive reads…
- Near Lincoln
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Low Rock Castle
County Londonderry
Low Rock Castle’s short history runs from a battlemented Portstewart house and a notable military birth to its unauthorised demolition in 2001.
- Near Coleraine
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lowther Castle Stead
Cumbria
A Norman lord's earthwork (a mound or ditch formed by moving soil, not by building) stronghold and the planned village beside it were abandoned tog…
- Near Penrith
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Loyn Bridge
Lancashire
A crossing point in continuous use since a river ford was superseded, the present sandstone bridge still carries traffic despite recent flood damag…
- Near Hornby
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ludgershall Castle
Wiltshire
Three broken stretches of standing wall are nearly all that remain of a royal hunting lodge Henry III visited more than twenty times, set inside ea…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ludlow Castle
Shropshire
Ludlow Castle grew from one of England’s first masonry castles into the administrative capital of Wales and the Marches; its surviving chapel, hall…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Luffness Castle
East Lothian
Luffness preserves a house within a former fortification, where medieval Lindsay power, a short-lived 1549 French–Scottish fort and later country-h…
- Near Dunbar
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lulworth Castle
Dorset
Lulworth Castle is a rare Jacobean mock fortress whose long Weld-family history includes royal and exiled guests, a pioneering post-Reformation (th…
- Near East Lulworth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lumley Castle
County Durham
A manor house turned fortress in 1389 whose builder was executed within a decade for plotting against a king: and whose castle still bears his fami…
- Near Chester-le-Street
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lympne Castle
Kent
Lympne Castle is a Grade I listed fortified manor that preserves an archdeacon’s medieval residence above Romney Marsh, rebuilt in the 1360s beside…
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Mab's Cross
Greater Manchester
Mab’s Cross is a surviving medieval Wigan waymarker whose later association with Lady Mabel Bradshaigh shows how local legend can attach to a real…
- Near Wigan
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
MacDuff's Castle
Fife
MacDuff’s Castle preserves the changing fortunes of Fife’s medieval elite, from the MacDuff earls and Wemyss family to Colville rebuilding, while i…
- Near St Andrews
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mackworth Castle
Derbyshire
A single battlemented gatehouse is almost all that survives of a manor house grand enough to be mistaken for a castle: and historians still argue o…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
MacLellan's Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
MacLellan’s Castle is a late sixteenth-century Scottish L-plan tower house whose unfinished rooms and ‘Laird’s Lug’ reveal elite domestic life in K…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Madeley Old Manor
Staffordshire
Edward III licensed its owner to make a castle of it in 1348 and made him a founder Knight of the Garter weeks later. The family lost it to an exec…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Madron Well and Madron Well Chapel
Cornwall
Madron Well and its ruined chapel combine an early Christian sacred landscape, a once vital water source and enduring Cornish traditions of healing…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Madryn Castle
Gwynedd
Madryn Castle represents a layered Llŷn estate history: an early castle tradition, a Tudor house, a later Gothic rebuilding and a surviving Grade I…
- Near Bangor
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Maen Achwyfan
flintshire
The tallest wheel cross in Britain, 3.4 metres from a single block, carved with a naked man treading on a snake: and nobody has agreed in three cen…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Maen Huail
Denbighshire
A humble market stone was recast by folklore as the execution block where King Arthur beheaded a rival: legend layered onto stone centuries after i…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Maenan Abbey
Conwy
A Cistercian house forcibly moved by Edward I, dissolved in 1537 and largely dismantled, with medieval cloister (the covered walkway round a monast…
- Near Conwy
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Magazine Gateway
Leicestershire
A medieval gatehouse that once guarded a religious precinct now stands marooned on a traffic island, its rooms having served as prison, militia hal…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Maiden Bradley Priory
Wiltshire
Its last prior's own words to Henry VIII's commissioners: six children, a claimed papal licence to keep a mistress, and a boast about the Glastonbu…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mallow Castle
County Cork
Three castles on one site: a thirteenth-century ruin, a fortified house built for defence in the round, and a Victorian mansion.
- Near Mallow
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Malmesbury Abbey
Wiltshire
One of England's few religious houses with continuous life from the 7th century to the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Malmesbury Castle
Wiltshire
The monks petitioned King John to have it demolished, and he agreed. Archaeology has still not found where in the town it stood.
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Malmsmead Bridge
Devon
Malmsmead Bridge is a small seventeenth-century crossing whose position over Badgworthy Water makes it a shared monument of both Somerset and Devon…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Malton Castle
North Yorkshire
Fought over by English and Scottish kings alike, Malton was seized, slighted and finally destroyed by Robert the Bruce: yet its gatehouse still sta…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Malton Priory
North Yorkshire
The only church of the Gilbertine order: England's sole native monastic order: still used for regular worship, though its tower, transepts and chan…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mannan Castle
County Monaghan
Its builders raised a Norman fortress directly over the traditional capital of the Gaelic kingdom of Airgíalla, turning the site itself into a decl…
- Near Castleblayney
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Manor Farmhouse, Crick
Monmouthshire
In July 1645, as the First English Civil War drew to its end, Nicholas Moore twice sheltered the fugitive king Charles I here: a private manor brie…
- Near Crick
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Manorbier Castle
Pembrokeshire
A Norman castle founded in the late eleventh century by the Anglo-Norman de Barry family, south-west of Tenby.
- Near Manorbier
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Manorbier Dovecote
Pembrokeshire
A twelfth- or thirteenth-century dovecote within the castle estate, listed Grade II*.
- Near Manorbier
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Margam Abbey
Neath Port Talbot
Margam Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation with an active medieval intellectual legacy, including the Annales de Margan, within a church and ru…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Margam Stones Museum
Neath Port Talbot
Margam Stones Museum holds one of Britain’s most important local collections of early Christian carving: 17 pre-Norman stones and later memorials t…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Marham Abbey
Norfolk
Marham Abbey records a small Cistercian nunnery founded by an aristocratic woman, whose limited wealth placed it in the first 1536 wave of dissolut…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Markby Priory
Lincolnshire
A 1438 visitation record survives in unusual, damning detail: debts, drink and scandal in a house the bishop judged worse-kept than any other in th…
- Near Markby
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Markenfield Hall
North Yorkshire
A moated manor still owned by battlements first licensed in 1310, its restored chapel hosted a wedding in 2001: the first since 1487.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Markyate Priory
Hertfordshire
A Benedictine nunnery that grew from the hiding place of a woman who fled an arranged marriage in men's clothing, and whose life became one of the…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Marlborough Castle
Wiltshire
The mound beneath Marlborough Castle was raised around 2400 BC, making the Norman stronghold that came later only the latest occupant of a monument…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Marshwood Castle
Dorset
Marshwood Castle is a scheduled remnant of the medieval Honour of Marshwood, where motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an…
- Near Marshwood
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Masham Market Cross
North Yorkshire
Masham Market Cross keeps a medieval market-place landmark legible through its surviving base, later shaft, and formal protection as both listed st…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mathrafal
Powys
The capital of Powys for some three hundred years, abandoned for Welshpool in 1212 and destroyed the year after.
- Near Llanfair Caereinion
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mattersey Priory
Nottinghamshire
Mattersey’s isolated male Gilbertine community carried on for centuries without rebuilding its church after the 1279 fire, later relying on royal m…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Maudlin Castle
County Kilkenny
Maudlin Castle is the defensive remnant of one of medieval Ireland's principal leper hospitals, where a later tower house preserves the difficult s…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Maxey Castle
Cambridgeshire
Maxey’s double-moated manor earthworks preserve the wetland setting of a late medieval fortified house, briefly home to Margaret Beaufort before he…
- Near Maxey
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Maxstoke Castle
Warwickshire
A chair on which Henry VII was crowned after Bosworth, and the table the Gunpowder Plot was planned around, are both in this house.
- Near Maxstoke
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Maxstoke Priory
Warwickshire
Maxstoke preserves an unusually complete fourteenth-century Augustinian precinct, including buried waterworks and a moated manor, but its standing…
- Near Maxstoke
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Maynooth Castle
County Kildare
Maynooth’s gatehouse and Solar Tower are the survivors of the Fitzgerald earls’ principal residence, damaged in the rebellion that ended their medi…
- Near Maynooth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
McDermott's Castle
County Roscommon
A 2019 dig beneath the visible ruin found an older, far thicker wall and Gaelic finds spanning six centuries: proof the island was refortified agai…
- Near Boyle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Meaux Abbey
East Riding of Yorkshire
Its sale of land at Wyke to Edward I in 1293 helped found Kingston upon Hull: a monastery whose estate dealings shaped the growth of a major Englis…
- Near Beverley
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Melbourne Castle
Derbyshire
Fifteen metres of surviving rubble wall are folded into a Melbourne farm building, the last visible fragment of a castle that held a captured Frenc…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Melchbourne Preceptory
Bedfordshire
A house of the Knights Hospitaller whose founding family's descendants rose to lead the order in England, and whose last stone survived eight centu…
- Near Melchbourne
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Melingriffith Tin Plate Works
Cardiff
By the end of the 18th century this was the largest tin-plate works on earth, and its water pump survives as a scheduled monument (legally protecte…
- Near Whitchurch, Cardiff
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Melingriffith Water Pump
Cardiff
Built to settle a legal fight over stolen water, its towering paddle wheel and oak beams survive as one of Britain's few intact eighteenth-century…
- Near Whitchurch, Cardiff
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mellifont Abbey
County Louth
The first Cistercian abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) built in Ireland, and the template every one of its daughter houses across the country…
- Near Drogheda
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mendham Priory
Suffolk
A Suffolk priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: dissolved in 1537, about which the readily available sources record almo…
- Near Mendham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Menlo Castle
County Galway
A Blake-family stronghold on the Corrib whose grand 18th-century additions ended in a single catastrophic fire in 1910, claiming a life never accou…
- Near Galway
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Merlinpark Castle
County Galway
A well-preserved Galway tower house near Merlin Park University Hospital, associated with the Lynch family and retaining a rare sheela na gig carving.
- Near Galway
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Merton Priory
Greater London
Merton Priory was a major Augustinian house on the River Wandle where the Statute of Merton was enacted in 1236, while its association with Thomas…
- Near Merton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mettingham Castle
Suffolk
A licence to crenellate in 1342, three moated courts, and by 1562 a bakehouse, brewhouse, malting house and aisled hall inside the walls.
- Near Mettingham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Michelham Priory
East Sussex
A moated Augustinian priory whose surviving buildings: barn, gatehouse, refectory and watermill: trace six centuries of use, ending as a Canadian a…
- Near Hailsham
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Micklegate Priory
North Yorkshire
Its parish church, Holy Trinity on Micklegate, still stands on the same ground the monks held: a rare unbroken line from secular canons to Benedict…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Middleham Castle
North Yorkshire
A childhood home turned royal seat: Richard III married into the family here and made Middleham his main residence before losing throne and son wit…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Middleham Market Cross
North Yorkshire
Middleham Market Cross preserves a medieval market landmark whose worn steps and repeatedly changed summit trace centuries of civic use and repair.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Middleton Mount
Norfolk
Middleton Mount shows a common but important Norman strategy: placing a castle mound and enclosed yard on an existing Anglo-Saxon estate centre: wh…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Midford Castle
Somerset
A Gothic Revival house of 1775 south of Bath, given a three-towered plan by John Carter.
- Near Bath
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Milden Castle
Suffolk
The chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond records a village granted to a man because he could defend it against this castle's castellan.
- Near Milden
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Millom Castle
Cumbria
A single family, the Hudlestons, held this stronghold for over six centuries, riding out the Wars of the Roses and a Civil War siege that finally b…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Minsden Chapel
Hertfordshire
A 14th-century chapel that outlived its own congregation, then outlived its own building: its ruin has been photographed as a fake haunting, leased…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Minster Lovell Hall
Oxfordshire
A ruined fifteenth-century manor house beside the River Windrush, in a village whose name records a minster: an early church served by a community…
- Near Minster Lovell
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Minting Priory
Lincolnshire
A Lincolnshire outpost of a French abbey, the priory: a monastery headed by a prior: was seized by the Crown three times during the wars with Franc…
- Near Minting
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Missenden Abbey
Buckinghamshire
The second Arrouasian community ever founded in England, its church once held the largest bell in Buckinghamshire, and a country house built from i…
- Near Great Missenden
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mitford Castle
Northumberland
Mitford’s ruined hilltop, reshaped in Norman times into an earthen castle mound, became the setting for kidnapping, rebellion and destruction by 1323.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Molana Abbey
County Waterford
An island monastery whose monks helped compile a foundational text of early Irish canon law, later reduced to an ivy-choked ruin and finally absorb…
- Near Cappoquin
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mold Castle
Flintshire
A Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) raised in 1072 to hold a river crossing was fought over by Welsh princes and Cromwell's m…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monasteranenagh Abbey
County Limerick
A cannon was turned on the sheltering community here in 1580, and the massacre that followed left the abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an…
- Near Croom
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monastery of Inisnag
County Kilkenny
A battle in 745 and an anchorite's death in 889 are almost all that survive of a community whose own medieval clergy could not agree on its patron…
- Near Thomastown
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monastery of Mohill-Manchan
County Leitrim
A single monastic site lived through three separate lives: Irish saint's church, Augustinian priory, and briefly revived friary: each ended by forc…
- Near Mohill
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mongavlin Castle
County Donegal
The seat of Ineen Dubh, mother of Red Hugh O'Donnell, whose Scottish bodyguard's descendants: the Crawfords: still live in the district her strongh…
- Near Lifford
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monivea Castle
County Galway
A tower house rebuilt into a family seat conceals, in its own woods, a granite mausoleum with a marble effigy carved by an Italian sculptor and win…
- Near Monivea
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monk Bretton Priory
South Yorkshire
A Cluniac monastery whose 1350 endowment for Black Death thanksgiving prayers still stands, and whose ruins have been re-excavated by Sheffield arc…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monk's Well
Merseyside
Monk’s Well is a rare, dated 1414 holy well in Liverpool, preserving a medieval water source, charitable expectation and the memory of a vanished m…
- Near Lincoln
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Monkey Marsh Lock
Berkshire
One of only two surviving turf-sided locks on the Kennet and Avon Canal, out of more than a dozen originally built this way.
- Near Thatcham
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Monks Bridge, River Dove
Staffordshire
A fifteenth-century bridge scheduled twice: given statutory protection for what survives archaeologically by two counties, because it stands on the…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monkton Farleigh Priory
Wiltshire
A widow's act of religious patronage outlived the priory: a smaller monastery led by a prior: itself: its well house still stands and still marks t…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monmouth Castle
Monmouthshire
Monmouth Castle is a major Welsh Marches stronghold and Henry V’s birthplace, whose ruins reveal Norman expansion, Civil War destruction and enduri…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Monmouth Police Station
Monmouthshire
Monmouth Police Station is a Grade II mid-nineteenth-century building that records the town’s transition from its own force to county policing with…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monnow Bridge
Monmouthshire
Monnow Bridge is Britain’s only surviving fortified river bridge with its gate tower standing on the bridge, a Grade I monument that shaped Monmout…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Montacute Castle
Somerset
A Norman castle site on a hill above Montacute, built by Robert of Mortain after 1066.
- Near Montacute
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Montacute Priory
Somerset
A Cluniac monastic house under a prior, founded between 1078 and 1102 by William, Count of Mortain.
- Near Montacute
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Montfichet's Tower
City of London
One of two Norman castles guarding the mouth of the Fleet, this vanished tower was pulled down by King John in 1213 and its stones later helped rai…
- Near London
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Montgomery Castle
Powys
A castle rebuilt in stone in five unbroken years, host to the largest battle fought in Wales, and pulled down by Parliament in 1649 as a matter of…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Moor Abbey
County Tipperary
A Franciscan community returned here again and again after dissolution, burning and murder: until a dispute with a bishop's deputy, not the Crown,…
- Near Kilmallock
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moor End Castle
Northamptonshire
Moor End Castle is a vanished royal residence whose altered moat and wooded island preserve the clearest trace of its fourteenth-century power and…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moorstown Castle
County Tipperary
A circular tower house: a shape almost never used in Ireland, where nearly every other tower is built square.
- Near Thurles
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moreton Corbet Castle
Shropshire
Moreton Corbet preserves a rare physical conversation between a medieval stronghold and an Elizabethan manor: Corbet builders filled the old bailey…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morganstown Castle Mound
Cardiff
One of a trio of Norman motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) castles raised across the ridges of north Cardiff, its earthw…
- Near Morganstown
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morgraig Castle
Caerphilly
A castle built almost to completion on a contested Welsh-English border, then apparently walked away from before a single roof went on: and histori…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morlais Castle
Merthyr Tydfil
Morlais Castle preserves the remains of an unfinished thirteenth-century stronghold whose construction triggered a baronial war and royal intervent…
- Near Merthyr Tydfil
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morpeth Castle
Northumberland
Morpeth’s altered gatehouse preserves a castle whose unlikely story runs from Margaret Tudor’s refuge to a 1644 siege held against five-to-one odds.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morris Castle
Swansea
Not a castle. A block of twenty-four workers' flats built between 1768 and 1775: one of the earliest tenement buildings anywhere.
- Near Treboeth
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mortimer's Castle
County Westmeath
A ruined Anglo-Norman stronghold whose very name is disputed between two Earls of March: and whose cellar is said to still hide a fortune in gold.
- Near Athlone
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Morton Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Morton combines a fortified Nith Valley promontory with the comforts of a later hunting lodge, now dramatically isolated by an eighteenth-century a…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Morville Priory
Shropshire
Morville Priory was Shrewsbury Abbey’s tiny Benedictine cell and diocesan guest house, preserving how a major monastery administered parish revenue…
- Near Morville
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mothel Abbey
County Waterford
A monastery re-founded in the 1140s grew into one of the Augustinian order's major landholders in central Waterford, yet all that survives is a sin…
- Near Carrick-on-Suir
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Motte of Urr
Dumfries and Galloway
The Motte of Urr preserves the earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks and ditches rather than built up in stone) of a twelfth-century baronia…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mottisfont Abbey
Hampshire
A medieval monastery survives inside the walls of a country house, its church still standing as the mansion's core beneath a name its Georgian owne…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moulton Castle
Lincolnshire
Moulton Castle is a scheduled medieval earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) whose D-shaped moat preserves…
- Near Moulton
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mount Grace Priory
North Yorkshire
Mount Grace is England’s best-preserved accessible Carthusian site, revealing hermit-style monastic life, Yorkist and Lancastrian patronage, major…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mow Cop Castle
Cheshire
Mow Cop Castle is a 1754 mock ruin on a remarkable boundary ridge, layered with quarrying, Methodist and literary history.
- Near Mow Cop
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moy Castle
Argyll and Bute
Its walls still stand almost to the parapet, with a working well surviving on the ground floor and a Powell and Pressburger film crew's footprints…
- Near Lochbuie
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moycarkey Castle
County Tipperary
A double murder-hole still guards the entrance passage: a rare doubled defence for a tower-house whose owners, the Cantwells, married into the Butl…
- Near Thurles
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Moyne Abbey
County Mayo
One of Connacht's most complete Franciscan friaries, its cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central courtyard) arcade and traceried…
- Near Ballina
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Much Marcle Castle
Herefordshire
A near-vanished stronghold of the Mortimers survives only as earthworks: its very stones were carried off to rebuild the parish church beside it.
- Near Much Marcle
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Muchelney Abbey
Somerset
An abbey that paid its Domesday tax in six thousand eels a year: and whose thatched monks' lavatory is considered unique in Britain.
- Near Muchelney
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Muckross Abbey
County Kerry
In the central cloistered courtyard of Muckross Abbey stands a large yew tree, its trunk rising through an open square of arched walkways that loca…
- Near Killarney
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mulgrave Castle
North Yorkshire
Three successive castles on one ridge trace nine centuries of the same family line, from a Norman baron's stronghold to a duchess's country mansion.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Muncaster Castle
Cumbria
A Venetian glass bowl said to have been given by a fugitive king in 1464 is held to bind the Pennington family's fortunes to Muncaster for as long…
- Near $2
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Muness Castle
Shetland Islands
The most northerly fortified house in the British Isles: burnt by privateers in 1627 after less than thirty years of use, and its top floor later b…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mungret Abbey
County Limerick
Three roofless medieval churches still stand together on one site, the rare physical trace of a monastery once reputed to hold six churches and 1,5…
- Near Limerick
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Murrisk Abbey
County Mayo
Local tradition ties the ruins to a church founded by Saint Patrick himself, and the surviving 1457 grant names the family who turned that legend i…
- Near Westport
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nantcribba Castle
Powys
A castle on a natural outcrop of igneous rock, identified with the Gwyddgrug of medieval documents and taken by a Welsh prince in 1263.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nantwich Castle
Cheshire
Not a stone survives above ground, yet the castle's ghost still shapes Nantwich: the curve of the modern High Street is believed to trace its outer…
- Near Nantwich
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Narberth Castle
Pembrokeshire
A ruined Norman fortress, a castle here recorded as attacked and destroyed by Gruffydd ap Rhys.
- Near Narberth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Naworth Castle
Cumbria
A working border stronghold whose Great Hall carries the largest fireplace of its kind in the north of England, later reshaped by the Pre-Raphaelit…
- Near $2
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Neath Abbey
Neath Port Talbot
Neath Abbey was once Wales’s largest abbey and a rare site where medieval monastic ruins were later engulfed by copper and iron industry, then unco…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Neath Castle
Neath Port Talbot
Neath Castle charts the transfer of a Norman lordship across the river, repeated conflict with Welsh and English opponents, and the survival of a m…
- Near Neath
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Nebstone
West Yorkshire
A rock shaped like the lid of a grand piano, a few hundred yards west of the Swastika Stone on the northern edge of Ilkley Moor.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Necarne
Fermanagh
Necarne traces the evolution of a seventeenth-century planter castle into a Victorian Gothic house and, most recently, a long-running public equine…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Neidpath Castle
Scottish Borders
A single L-plan tower rebuilt almost nowhere else in its 750-year life, whose carved archway still names both families that shaped it: the Hays' go…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Nelson Rooms, Monmouth
Monmouthshire
The Nelson Rooms records Lady Llangattock’s philanthropy in Monmouth: first a working-men’s gymnasium, then the home of her renowned Nelson collect…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Nether Hall, Roydon
Essex
Nether Hall preserves a rare fifteenth-century Essex manorial complex, where a Grade I ruined gatehouse and listed farm buildings record the Colte…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Netley Abbey
Hampshire
A house that was never rich and never famous for scholarship still left behind the most complete Cistercian monastery standing in southern England,…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
New Romney Priory
Kent
New Romney Priory preserves the remains of a likely monastic grange linked to Pontigny Abbey in France, recording the impact of Anglo-French war on…
- Near New Romney
-
Fortified place · Medieval
New Slains Castle
Aberdeenshire
Seat of the Hay Earls of Erroll for over three centuries, its ruined halls hosted Jacobite plots, Samuel Johnson's uneasy night, and the octagonal…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newark Castle, Nottinghamshire
Nottinghamshire
Newark Castle controlled the River Trent and Fosse Way junction, a bishop’s stronghold whose Civil War slighting still shapes its riverside ruin.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newark Castle, Port Glasgow
Inverclyde
Newark exposes the transformation of a defensive Maxwell tower into a Renaissance mansion, then into the harbour-side landmark around which Port Gl…
- Near Port Glasgow
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newark Friary
Nottinghamshire
Newark Friary preserves the town’s short-lived Observant Franciscan foundation, later absorbed into a changing commercial streetscape after Henry V…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newark Priory
Surrey
A roofless Augustinian religious house stands on its own island in the River Wey. Its rents once ran from London to Winchester before its closure i…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newbattle Abbey
Midlothian
Newbattle Abbey links Cistercian settlement, early Scottish coal extraction, repeated Anglo-Scottish conflict, Reformation (the break with Rome tha…
- Near Dalkeith
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newbo Abbey
Lincolnshire
Its founder was the ringleader behind one of medieval England's deadliest anti-Jewish massacres: a stain on the abbey (a monastic house under the r…
- Near Sedgebrook
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newburgh Priory
North Yorkshire
Newburgh Priory connects a twelfth-century Augustinian foundation to Tudor conversion, Fauconberg and Wombwell family history, and a long-lived est…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newbury Castle
Berkshire
The castle stamped proudly on Newbury's coat of arms never stood in the town at all: its true remains are three earthen mottes hidden four miles aw…
- Near Hamstead Marshall
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle Castle, Bridgend
Bridgend
Within little more than a century its ownership passed from Norman knights to a Welsh rebel leader to a king's own wife: a small hilltop stronghold…
- Near Bridgend
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle Emlyn Castle
Carmarthenshire
One of the few stone castles in west Wales raised by a Welsh lord rather than an English one, and the place where a prince's revolt against the cro…
- Near Newcastle Emlyn
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle town wall
Tyne and Wear
A medieval defensive wall raised in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to protect the town from attack.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newcastle-under-Lyme Castle
Staffordshire
A cholera inspection in the nineteenth century found the castle moat full of sewage. It was drained, and an iron foundry cut back the mound.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newenham Abbey
Devon
Newenham Abbey was a Cistercian house at Axminster whose foundation, Black Death losses, Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in th…
- Near Axminster
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newminster Abbey
Northumberland
Newminster was more than a lost Cistercian monastery: its founding abbot’s shrine, vast estate and three daughter houses made it a northern powerho…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newnham Priory
Bedfordshire
Bedfordshire's oldest religious foundation, tracing an unbroken line from pre-Conquest secular canons to a dissolved Augustinian priory: a monaster…
- Near Bedford
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newport Castle
Newport
Newport Castle’s surviving river façade shows how a fourteenth-century Marcher stronghold controlled the Usk crossing, collected dues and served a…
- Near Newport
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newport Castle, Pembrokeshire
Pembrokeshire
A castle first raised in the thirteenth century, with a later house built into the surviving fabric.
- Near Newport
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newstead Abbey
Nottinghamshire
Newstead layers Henry II’s penitent Augustinian foundation, its conversion after Henry VIII’s closure of the monasteries in the 1530s, Lord Byron’s…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newton Longville Priory
Buckinghamshire
A tiny Cluniac outpost whose loyalty to a French mother house made it a target in wartime, and whose estates ultimately built the foundation of an…
- Near Newton Longville
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newton St Loe Castle
Somerset
A fortified manor said to have held King John under arrest: with an early gunport in its gatehouse and a university in its grounds.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newtown Abbey
County Meath
The Augustinian house on the Boyne east of Trim, founded about 1206, where a synod reordered five Meath sees in 1216 and a prior stood accused of m…
- Near Trim
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Nocton Priory
Lincolnshire
A monastic house whose stone was recycled twice over: first into a Tudor-era mansion, then into nothing at all: leaving only earthworks on Abbey (a…
- Near Lincoln
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Noltland Castle
Orkney Islands
A castle of the later sixteenth century near Pierowall on Westray, never fully completed.
- Near Pierowall
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Norham Castle
Northumberland
Norham’s keep stands where the Tweed itself became a border, a bishops’ fortress repeatedly taken, rebuilt and later immortalised by Turner.
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Norman Cross Prison
Cambridgeshire
Tens of thousands of carved bone ships, dominoes and straw-work marquetry made by bored, ingenious captives survive in museums today: the largest b…
- Near Peterborough
-
Sacred place · Medieval
North Abbey, Youghal
County Cork
A thirteenth-century Dominican priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose Marian image made Youghal a centre of devotion unt…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
North Elmham Castle
Norfolk
North Elmham Castle is a rare bishop’s fortified church site where an Anglo-Saxon cathedral tradition, an eleventh-century Norman church, Henry le…
- Near North Elmham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
North Ormsby Priory
Lincolnshire
A double house of nuns and canons under the rare Gilbertine order, its enclosure of a hundred women and fifty men now reduced to grass-grown earthw…
- Near North Ormsby
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Northallerton Castle
North Yorkshire
Seized by a Scottish claimant in the 1140s and rebuilt by a rebel bishop, this timber stronghold was destroyed on a king's direct order: and the ra…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Northampton Castle
Northamptonshire
A stage for a state trial of Thomas Becket and two baronial wars, obliterated so completely by a Victorian railway that only a gatehouse and some e…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Northburgh Castle
County Donegal
Its design deliberately echoes Edward I's conquest castles in Wales: a calculated political statement in stone by the Anglo-Norman earl who built it.
- Near Carndonagh
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Northolt Manor
Greater London
Northolt Manor preserves the archaeological footprint of a moated medieval manor on a site occupied from at least the 7th or early 8th century, whi…
- Near Northolt
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Norton Priory
Cheshire
Excavated from 1971 over twelve years by modern archaeological methods on a scale unmatched anywhere in Europe, this is the most thoroughly underst…
- Near Runcorn
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Norwich Castle
Norfolk
Norwich Castle is a richly ornamented Norman royal keep whose long afterlife: from Conquest stronghold and refuge amid anti-Jewish violence to coun…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Norwich Cathedral
Norfolk
Norwich Cathedral is one of England’s most complete Norman cathedrals: a vast flint-and-Caen-stone church whose towering spire, exceptional cloiste…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Nostell Priory
West Yorkshire
A Palladian house of 1733 built for the Winn family on the site of a twelfth-century Augustinian priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Notley Abbey
Buckinghamshire
A private house built from the bones of one of the Oxford region's richest Augustinian monasteries, later home to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nottingham Castle
Nottinghamshire
Nottingham Castle layers William’s 1068 conquest stronghold, Civil War destruction and a Restoration mansion above the city’s defining sandstone rock.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Nuneaton Priory
Warwickshire
Nuneaton was one of only four English nunneries of Fontevraud, a large female religious community whose surviving church plan and precinct gave the…
- Near Nuneaton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Nunney Castle
Somerset
A castle that escaped deliberate demolition after the Civil War because the besiegers' cannon had already wrecked it.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
O'Brien's Castle (Inisheer)
County Galway
A carved human face still watches from a stone bracket projecting from the tower wall, while the ground beneath the castle's main tower hides a muc…
- Near Inis Oirr
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
O'Rourke's Castle
County Leitrim
A survivor of the doomed March to Leitrim died within its walls' shadow: this small tower house witnessed the last act of Gaelic Ulster's resistanc…
- Near Dromahair
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Oakham Market Cross
Rutland
A sixteenth- or seventeenth-century market cross, of the kind that served as a gathering point and market venue.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Odiham Castle
Hampshire
One of only three castles King John built himself, and the probable departure point for his ride to seal Magna Carta in 1215.
- Near Winchester
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Offa's Dyke
Powys
An earthwork whose ditch faces Wales along its whole length: and whose radiocarbon dates now run from three centuries before Offa to two centuries…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ogbourne Priory
Wiltshire
A Benedictine priory, a monastery headed by a prior, that spent much of its two-century life not as a monastery but as the paper name for a Norman…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ogle Castle
Northumberland
Ogle Castle shows why a Northumbrian manor needed crenellations: a captured Scottish king was held here, and its earthworks still surround a Grade…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ogmore Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A butler held it against the Welsh in 1116 while its lord was away, and was knighted and given a castle of his own for it.
- Near Ogmore-by-Sea
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Okehampton Castle
Devon
Okehampton Castle charts the transformation of a Norman stronghold guarding a Devon crossing into a luxurious Courtenay hunting lodge, followed by…
- Near Okehampton
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Old Beaupre Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
Windows and fireplaces were blocked up here, most likely to reduce the tax owed on them. Water still flows along the drain the privies emptied into.
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Old Bridge, Bridgend
Bridgend
Only two of its five original medieval arches are visible; a third is walled into a shop, and a fourth lay hidden until a chance discovery in 2015.
- Near Bridgend
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Old Bridge, Huntingdon
Cambridgeshire
Its central pier still carries a visible kink from 1332, when two building crews working from opposite banks failed to meet in a straight line.
- Near Huntingdon
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Old Bridge, Pontypridd
Rhondda Cynon Taf
William Edwards's single-span arched footbridge over the Taff at Pontypridd.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Old Buckenham Priory
Norfolk
Old Buckenham Priory transformed an abandoned Norman castle site into an Augustinian house with estates in 42 Norfolk parishes, showing how monasti…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Old Castle Bridge
Warwickshire
Half its width was already in ruins by 1373, and it was repaired by charity. A flood swept most of the rest away in 1795.
- Near Warwick
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Old Castle Lachlan
Argyll and Bute
A clan stronghold bombarded into ruin by government order after Culloden: its fall traces the collapse of Jacobite Cowal in a single act of naval g…
- Near Strathlachlan
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Old Church of St Nidan, Llanidan
Isle of Anglesey
Old St Nidan’s is a partly ruined double-naved medieval church near the Menai Strait, preserving a six-arch arcade and relic traditions despite 19t…
- Near Brynsiencyn
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Old Exe Bridge
Devon
The Old Exe Bridge is England’s oldest surviving bridge of its scale and Britain’s oldest bridge with a chapel still on it, preserving Exeter’s med…
- Near Exeter
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Old Gorhambury House
Hertfordshire
A working Elizabethan statesman's house reduced to a porch, a chapel and a clock tower, built in part from the stones of a dissolved abbey (a relig…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Old Rectory, Warton
Lancashire
A 14th-century rector's house standing to almost its full gable height, its private hall, kitchen courtyard and even a well still traceable on the…
- Near Warton
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Old St Bartholomew's Church, Lower Sapey
Worcestershire
Its 1990s restorers worked "to make it appear as though we had never been on the site": conservation by near-total restraint rather than repair.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Old St Peter's Church, Llanbedr Dyffryn Clwyd
Denbighshire
A roofless medieval church whose paper trail: a 1291 tax record and a 1535 valuation of £418: survives more fully than the building itself.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Old Warden Castle
Bedfordshire
Nobody has ever settled whether the earthwork on Quince Hill was a motte (a castle mound) or a ringwork: a rare case where the basic identity of a…
- Near Old Warden
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ongar Castle
Essex
Ongar Castle preserves a rare urban castle mound-and-yard complex whose moat, two enclosed yards and later mansion history reveal nearly a millenni…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oola Castle
County Limerick
A late-Renaissance tower house whose corner turrets and fireplaces survive largely intact, and whose grounds gave up a hoard of prehistoric (from t…
- Near Adare
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oranmore Castle
County Galway
A working home, not a ruin: this Galway towerhouse survived a 17th-century siege and later became the lived-in house of a Leslie family and an Iris…
- Near Oranmore
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Orchardton Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Orchardton is Scotland’s only cylindrical tower house, a deliberate fifteenth-century revival of an obsolete form within a later, more domestic tow…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Ore Place
East Sussex
A manor house whose owners ranged from a traditionally claimed Plantagenet founder to Jesuit theologians who trained Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, be…
- Near Hastings
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Orford Castle
Suffolk
A round keep of a design unmatched in England, raised by Henry II to check the power of the Bigods.
- Near Orford
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ormacleit Castle
Outer Hebrides
A T-plan, two-storey mansion house on South Uist, Ormacleit Castle stood as the seat of Clanranald for barely a decade before fire reduced it to th…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ormonde Castle
County Tipperary
A fortified bawn on the River Suir grew a Tudor manor house grafted onto its medieval towers: the first Elizabethan-style residence built in Irelan…
- Near Carrick-on-Suir
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Oronsay Priory
Argyll and Bute
A tidal island monastery so remote that its own priors barely surface in the record, yet it left one of the finest carved crosses in the Hebrides s…
- Near Oronsay
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Osney Abbey
Oxfordshire
For four centuries the wealthiest monastery in Oxford, its bell Great Tom now the loudest voice in the city's skyline: hung not in its own ruined t…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ossington Preceptory
Nottinghamshire
Ossington was a Hospitaller estate centre whose disputed village grant reveals how medieval military-religious orders accumulated and defended Engl…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oswestry Castle
Shropshire
Oswestry Castle preserves a Welsh-Marcher stronghold whose name, ownership and repeated attacks track the border’s shifting politics, while its mot…
- Near Oswestry
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Otley Bridge
West Yorkshire
A bridge commissioned by the Archbishop of York in 1228 and finished the next year, its width set to take a cart, and flooded repeatedly ever since.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Otterburn Tower
Northumberland
Otterburn layers an 1830 country-house rebuild over a medieval tower, beside a frontier river and burial circles from before written records reache…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Our Lady's Well, Hempsted
Gloucestershire
A 14th-century well house carved with Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary and an angel: physical record of a pilgrimage for cures revived as recently as 1989.
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Over Bridge
Gloucestershire
Telford borrowed the arch's shape from a Parisian bridge over the Seine, and builders watched it sink eight measured inches as its foundations sett…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Owston Abbey
Leicestershire
One of Leicestershire's poorest Augustinian houses, its chancel (the eastern end of the church, holding the altar) survives folded into the parish…
- Near Owston
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Owston Ferry Castle
Lincolnshire
Owston Ferry Castle preserves the motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) of a repeatedly dismantled Norman stronghold, rebuilt in 1173 fo…
- Near Owston Ferry
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oxford Castle
Oxfordshire
A large, partly ruined medieval castle on the western side of central Oxford, its timber work rebuilt in stone.
- Near Oxford
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oxford city walls
Oxfordshire
A rare English example of genuine concentric double-walling, possibly inspired by Crusader experience of Near Eastern fortresses or by masons retur…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oxwich Castle
Swansea
A castle in name only. What stands is a grand Tudor fortified manor house, and building its east range may have bankrupted the man who raised it.
- Near Oxwich
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oystermouth Castle
Swansea
Burnt by the Welsh in 1116, probably destroyed again in 1137, and lost with its owners' line in 1215: rebuilt each time.
- Near Mumbles
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Padley Chapel
Derbyshire
A gatehouse range rebuilt as a chapel in 1933 to honour two priests hanged, drawn and quartered for their faith in 1588.
- Near Bakewell
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Padley Hall
Derbyshire
Padley Hall’s double courtyard preserves the setting where two hidden priests were seized in July 1588 and later became known as the Padley Martyrs.
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Painscastle Castle
Powys
A castle besieged by two Welsh armies and taken by neither, held for a time by a woman, and rebuilt in stone by a king to fight Llywelyn the Great.
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Paisley Abbey
Renfrewshire
Robert II was born here by caesarean section in 1316, after his mother fell from her horse nearby. A stone marker stands where she came off.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pallas Castle
County Galway
Its bawn: the perimeter wall with four corner towers and a working gatehouse: survives almost complete, letting the whole defensive layout of a Bur…
- Near Tynagh
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Papplewick Pumping Station
Nottinghamshire
Papplewick preserves a working Victorian clean-water system whose original beam engines still demonstrate the engineering that transformed Nottingh…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Park Crescent West ice well
Greater London
The Park Crescent West ice well is a rare, well-preserved 1780 urban ice store whose use by ice-trade pioneer William Leftwich captures the shift f…
- Near Marylebone
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Parke's Castle
County Leitrim
A Gaelic tower house, a Plantation manor and a wartime prison all stand on the same patch of lakeshore: one site holding three centuries of conques…
- Near Manorhamilton
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Paston Great Barn
Norfolk
Paston Great Barn is a 1581 Paston grain store whose exceptional architecture now supports Britain’s only building-based barbastelle maternity roos…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Patrixbourne Priory
Kent
Patrixbourne shows how a Kent parish church became an alien priory cell, first tied to Normandy and then transferred to Merton in 1409.
- Near Patrixbourne
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Patterson's Spade Mill
County Antrim
Patterson’s Spade Mill is the British Isles’ last water-powered spade mill operating in situ, preserving a critically endangered craft in Templepat…
- Near Belfast
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Peddimore Hall
West Midlands
Photographed by the government in case bombing destroyed it, Peddimore Hall survived the Second World War intact: a moated manor whose earthworks p…
- Near Minworth
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pele Tower, Angle
Pembrokeshire
The only pele tower to survive anywhere in Wales, its rubble walls still carrying corbels for a vanished parapet walk and machicolations above a mo…
- Near Angle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pembridge Castle
Herefordshire
A four-storey round tower keep behind a working moat once sheltered a hunted Catholic priest, later canonised as a martyr, ahead of his 1679 execut…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pembroke Castle
Pembrokeshire
A medieval castle in the town centre, the original family seat of the Earldom of Pembroke.
- Near Pembroke
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Pen y Bryn
Gwynedd
The present roof timbers of Pen y Bryn were felled between 1619 and 1624, dated by dendrochronology to the refurbishment that gave the two-storey m…
- Near Bangor
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pen y Clawdd Castle
Monmouthshire
Pen y Clawdd is a scheduled double-moated mound whose archaeology complicates the simple label ‘castle’, preserving evidence of both a possible ear…
- Near Abergavenny
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Penally Abbey
Pembrokeshire
An old rectory overlooking Carmarthen Bay, a mile and a half from Tenby, now a country house hotel.
- Near Penally
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Penarth Fawr
gwynedd
Two carved oak posts and the beam they carry make up the westernmost screen of their kind recorded in Wales, and the only one known in the old coun…
- Near Criccieth
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pencoed Castle
Newport
Pencoed Castle is an imposing but derelict Tudor mansion near Newport, where a thirteenth-century tower survives within the ambitious sixteenth-cen…
- Near Llanmartin
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pendennis Castle
Cornwall
Pendennis Castle is a major Henrician coastal fort whose layered batteries defended Carrick Roads from the sixteenth century to the Second World War.
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pendragon Castle
Cumbria
A Norman stronghold that took the name of a legendary king centuries after it was built, and was restored by a woman who kept it as one of her favo…
- Near Kirkby Stephen
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pengersick Castle
Cornwall
Pengersick Castle is a rare surviving late-medieval Cornish tower house, enlarged into a fortified manor by families tied to local office and Saint…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penhow Castle
Newport
Penhow Castle is a Grade II* early-twelfth-century fortified manor repeatedly remodelled over nine centuries, retaining an early tower and notably…
- Near Penhow
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penlle'r Castell
Swansea
A blockhouse at 1,213 feet, probably the 'New Castle of Gower' attacked and destroyed in 1252: sited to watch the ridge route and warn Swansea.
- Near Felindre
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penllyn Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
Six courses of herringbone masonry near the base: an early Norman signature, and the argument for this being one of the first Norman buildings in G…
- Near Cowbridge
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pennard Castle
Swansea
The Braose family rebuilt the walls in stone at the turn of the fourteenth century. Sand dunes buried the site soon afterwards and it was abandoned.
- Near Pennard
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penrhyn Castle
Gwynedd
Penrhyn Castle is Thomas Hopper’s monumental Neo-Norman country house, whose architecture, art and estate landscape are inseparable from wealth dra…
- Near Bangor
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penrice Castle
Swansea
A thirteenth-century castle of the de Penrice family, successor to a ringwork: an early castle defended by a circular bank and ditch rather than a…
- Near Penrice
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penrith Castle
Cumbria
Ownership passed from the Neville 'Kingmaker' line to a future king, then to a Dutch earl gifted the estate by a Dutch-born monarch, a chain of gra…
- Near Penrith
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penstowe Castle
Cornwall
Penstowe Castle is a scheduled Cornish early Norman castle with a timber tower on an earthen mound and a bailey, the walled yard beside it; its unu…
- Near Kilkhampton
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pentney Priory
Norfolk
Pentney Priory preserves a Grade I flint gatehouse from an Augustinian house founded around 1130, later merged with Wormegay and recycled into the…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penwortham Castle
Lancashire
Penwortham Castle is a Scheduled Ancient Monument marking a post-Conquest motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) that guard…
- Near Penwortham
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Penwortham Old Bridge
Lancashire
Penwortham Old Bridge is a protected 1759 Ribble crossing whose five unequal arches, cobbled roadway and surviving cutwater refuges record an early…
- Near Penwortham
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Penwortham Priory
Lancashire
A Norman motte, a lost Benedictine cell, and a demolished Victorian mansion all occupy the same modest hill above the Ribble: three buildings, one…
- Near Penwortham
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pershore Abbey
Worcestershire
A Mercian minster refounded, despoiled, burned, rebuilt by a nobleman's patronage, then stripped again for Westminster Abbey: only a lantern tower…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Perth-hir House
Monmouthshire
A moated Herbert mansion with two drawbridges, a centre of Catholic recusancy, pulled down piecemeal by its own owner and reduced to one wall.
- Near Rockfield
- Rough ground
-
Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Perthi-Duon Burial Chamber
Isle of Anglesey
Perthi-Duon is an enigmatic collapsed Anglesey stone monument whose possible Neolithic (the closing Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) tomb status, e…
- Near Brynsiencyn
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Peterborough Castle
Cambridgeshire
Built by a Norman abbot to defend himself against his own monks, this earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone…
- Near Peterborough
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Peterborough Cathedral
Cambridgeshire
One of only four surviving painted medieval wooden ceilings in Europe crowns a nave (the main body of a church, where the congregation gathers) who…
- Near Peterborough
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pevensey Castle
East Sussex
A Roman shore fort turned Norman stronghold turned WWII strongpoint: three separate armies fortified the same walls seventeen centuries apart, each…
- Near Hastings
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Peveril Castle
Derbyshire
A square tower on Castleton’s limestone crag is the surviving core of a Domesday-listed stronghold that John of Gaunt later stripped for building s…
- Near Bakewell
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pickering Castle
North Yorkshire
A rare survivor: one of the few English castles left largely untouched by the Wars of the Roses, and the place a deposed king was held before his f…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Picton Castle
Pembrokeshire
A medieval castle built at the end of the thirteenth century by a Flemish knight, near Haverfordwest.
- Near Uzmaston
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Piel Castle
Cumbria
An abbot built this fortress to police his own abbey's smuggling as much as to repel invaders: and briefly it hosted a boy-king's court before the…
- Near Askam-in-Furness
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pill Priory
Pembrokeshire
A Tironensian priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: founded by the Roche family near Milford Haven, reduced to four monk…
- Near Pill
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pillar of Eliseg
Denbighshire
A ninth-century royal inscription and a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) burial mound occupy the same stone, three thousa…
- Near Denbigh
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pilsbury Castle
Staffordshire
A Norman castle on high ground above the River Dove, near the present village of Pilsbury.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pinley Priory
Warwickshire
A fourteenth-century cottage north-west of the farmhouse was probably where the nuns lodged their visitors. Both it and the farmhouse are listed gr…
- Near Rowington
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Pinxton Castle
Derbyshire
A three-metre mound and damp inner ditch in Castle Wood preserve Pinxton’s unusual medieval manor layout, with the moat inside its outer defences.
- Near Bakewell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pipewell Abbey
Northamptonshire
A single Northamptonshire abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) once ran a scattered farming empire across two counties, its Warwic…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Plas Mawr
conwy-county-borough
Robert Wynn's 1576–85 Conwy house retains rare Elizabethan plasterwork and a near-original plan, preserved by centuries of later reuse and restored…
- Near Conwy
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Playford Hall
Suffolk
Thomas Clarkson leased the house in 1813, in the years between the abolition of the slave trade and the campaign against slavery itself.
- Near Playford
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Pleasley Colliery
Derbyshire
Its two steam winding engines, built in 1905 and 1922, are among the few in the world still preserved complete inside their original engine-house.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pleshey Castle
Essex
Pleshey is one of England’s best-preserved castle mound-and-yard complexes, its 15-metre mound and intact earthworks revealing how a wooden fortres…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Plymouth Castle
Devon
Plymouth Castle was a town-run fifteenth-century harbour defence whose four towers survive in Plymouth’s civic identity even though only a small ga…
- Near Exeter
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Plympton Priory
Devon
Plympton Priory was one of Devon’s most important Augustinian houses, occupying an Anglo-Saxon religious site and becoming the county’s richest mon…
- Near Plympton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Podington Castle
Bedfordshire
A castle named in the Domesday Book of 1086 whose earthworks and building foundations still lie in a farmer's field behind a 17th-century manor house.
- Near Podington
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Poisoning of Abbot Greenwell
North Yorkshire
In 1447 a monk of England's richest Cistercian abbey tried to poison his own abbot with a bowl of soup: and the surviving letters to the mother hou…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Polesworth Abbey
Warwickshire
A Benedictine nunnery in north Warwickshire.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Poling Preceptory
West Sussex
A West Sussex house of a military order, dissolved in 1540: its buildings listed Grade I, its history almost unrecorded.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Polsloe Priory
Devon
Polsloe Priory preserves the story of Devon’s first religious house for women, from its twelfth-century Benedictine foundation to a rare surviving…
- Near Exeter
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Pont Fawr
Conwy
A Grade I listed, three-arched Llanrwst bridge completed in 1636, valued both for its design and for a long-running but unproven link to Inigo Jones.
- Near Conwy
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Pont Minllyn
gwynedd
A bridge with no road left on it. Two arches still span the Dyfi, but the deck has gone and grass has closed over the top, leaving a crossing to be…
- Near Dinas Mawddwy
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Pont-y-Cafnau
Merthyr Tydfil
Pont-y-Cafnau is the world’s earliest surviving iron railway bridge, built in 1793 to unite limestone transport and water power for Cyfarthfa Ironw…
- Near Merthyr Tydfil
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pontefract Castle
West Yorkshire
The castle where Richard II is thought to have died, built about 1070 by Ilbert de Lacy and besieged repeatedly in the Civil War.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pontefract Priory
West Yorkshire
A Cluniac house of about 1090, dependent on la Charité-sur-Loire, whose cartulary survives and whose burials include Richard, Duke of York.
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Popping Stone
Northumberland
The Popping Stone preserves an unusually specific courtship tradition: and the mystery of why its single landmark boulder became three after 1870.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Popton Fort
Pembrokeshire
One half of a matched pair of Milford Haven forts, its hexagonal ramparts and eleven-gun casemates now stand fenced inside a working oil refinery r…
- Near Angle
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Porth Wen Brickworks
Isle of Anglesey
Porth Wen Brickworks preserves a rare coastal industrial system: quartzite quarries, gravity incline, fire-brick works and loading quay, much of it…
- Near Amlwch
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Porth yr Aur
gwynedd
The seaward gate of Edward I's walled town at Caernarfon, badly damaged in the Welsh revolt of 1294 and repaired at a cost of £1,195: a third of wh…
- Near Bangor
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Porth-Mawr Gatehouse
Powys
A fifteenth-century gatehouse in central Crickhowell, built for the Herbert family.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Portland Castle
Dorset
Portland Castle is one of Henry VIII’s best-preserved coastal artillery forts, built to defend Portland Roads and later adapted through civil war,…
- Near Castletown
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Portslade Manor
East Sussex
Portslade Old Manor is a rare surviving Norman manor house, linking Domesday landholding, a medieval fair and later charitable reuse within one sch…
- Near Hastings
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Portsmouth Block Mills
Hampshire
Here, in 1803, ten labourers using Brunel's all-metal machines began outproducing 110 skilled craftsmen: the moment mass production entered the ind…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Portumna Abbey
County Galway
A single church at Portumna carried three congregations in succession: Cistercian, Dominican and Church of Ireland: across more than five centuries…
- Near Portumna
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Portumna Castle
County Galway
Richard Burke’s 1610–17 house brought Renaissance planning, Italianate detail and defensive towers to Ireland, making Portumna a deliberate stateme…
- Near Portumna
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Poughley Priory
Berkshire
A minor Augustinian monastery known through papal bulls, a fire, a flooded mill dispute, and Cardinal Wolsey's asset-stripping of it to found his O…
- Near Chieveley
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Poulton Abbey
Cheshire
A Cistercian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) that quietly relocated in 1214, leaving behind a chapel site so thoroughly forgotten tha…
- Near Chester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Poulton Priory
Gloucestershire
Founded in 1337 as a private chantry chapel, Poulton became a full Gilbertine priory within thirteen years: then vanished so completely that a Vict…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Powderham Castle
Devon
Powderham Castle is a Grade I listed fortified manor that has remained the Courtenay family’s Devon seat through medieval conflict, Civil War damag…
- Near Exeter
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Powis Castle
Powys
A Marches castle built by a Welsh prince rather than a Norman baron, whose owners were exiled for thirty years and finished the garden anyway.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Prestatyn Castle
Denbighshire
Built in 1165 and destroyed within two years, the castle's short life ended not in ruin but in retreat: the Banastre family abandoned Wales for Lan…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Preston Tower, East Lothian
East Lothian
Preston Tower is a rare layered survivor in Prestonpans: a medieval keep enlarged in 1626, repeatedly burned in conflict and accident, and now rest…
- Near Prestonpans
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Prinknash Abbey
Gloucestershire
A hunting lodge became a monastery that went on to found two more British abbeys, and whose pottery: fired from clay dug from its own foundations:…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Priory Church of St Peter, Thurgarton
Nottinghamshire
Thurgarton’s surviving tower and aisle make the scale of a wealthy Augustinian house tangible, even after an eighteenth-century owner demolished th…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Priory Cottages, Steventon
Oxfordshire
A monastic grange that never grew into the priory: a smaller monastery led by a prior: its name suggests, later saved from obscurity by five women…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Priory Gatehouse, Usk
Monmouthshire
The only substantial survivor of a Benedictine priory founded around 1135: a gatehouse whose windows suggest it may have been built after the monks…
- Near Usk
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St Mary in the Meadow, Beeston Regis
Norfolk
Beeston Priory is a substantial Augustinian ruin whose independent canons combined parish work, schooling and agricultural enterprise until the 153…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St Thomas of Canterbury
West Midlands
Its vanished graveyard kept resurfacing under Birmingham's streets for two centuries, fuelling a debate over whether this, not St Martin's, was the…
- Near Birmingham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of St. Thomas near Stafford
Staffordshire
The richest Augustinian priory in England, whose monks were caught hunting with the laity in 1347: and were caught again in 1518 and 1524.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Prittlewell Priory
Essex
Prittlewell Priory is a rare surviving Cluniac house in Essex, whose medieval doorway and later museum preserve a monastic site transformed into So…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Prudhoe Castle
Northumberland
Prudhoe records a castle sharpened by failure: William the Lion’s two unsuccessful attacks prompted upgrades from timber palisade to stone keep and…
- Some walking
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Puleston Cross
Shropshire
Puleston Cross is a medieval memorial and market monument whose relocation, disputed identity and archaeological surroundings preserve Newport’s ch…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Pulford Castle
Cheshire
A grassy mound beside a border stream once carried enough weight that a Wirral manor owed its lord the duty of mending its wooden defences.
- Near Chester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pulloxhill Grange
Bedfordshire
Its scant surviving records trace a working monastic economy: rents, land and jurisdiction shared between Woburn Abbey and Dunstable Priory: cut sh…
- Near Pulloxhill
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Pwll Du Tunnel
Monmouthshire
Six thousand feet of tunnel, worked by horses: the longest horse-powered tramway tunnel built in Britain, and originally just a mine.
- Near Blaenavon
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Quakers Friars
Bristol
A single Bristol plot carries two founding stories at once: a medieval Dominican friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather tha…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Quarr Abbey (Cistercian)
Isle of Wight
Quarr Abbey combines the remains of a powerful medieval Cistercian house with a bold 20th-century Benedictine monastery, making its landscape a rar…
- Near Ryde
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Queenborough Castle
Kent
Queenborough Castle was England’s first concentric castle and the only new royal castle of the Late Middle Ages, though it now survives only as ear…
- Near Queenborough
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Quenington Preceptory
Gloucestershire
A minor Gloucestershire manor became, within decades of its 1193 founding, a Hospitaller estate that absorbed a fellow preceptory (a local estate o…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Quin Abbey
County Clare
A friary: a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them: built inside the wall of the Norman castle that replac…
- Near Quin
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Raby Castle
County Durham
Nine towers ring a courtyard that has passed between only two families in seven centuries: a fortress that became, and remains, a lived-in family s…
- Near Staindrop
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Racton Monument
West Sussex
A four-storey brick folly of 1766–75, built either as a summerhouse or so an earl could watch his ships dock at Emsworth, and derelict since.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Radcliffe Tower
Greater Manchester
Radcliffe Tower is the sole survival of a fortified 1403 manor house, a rare Grade I listed and scheduled remnant of local lordship in Greater Manc…
- Near Radcliffe
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
RAF Upper Heyford
Oxfordshire
A Cold War frontline base whose F-111s flew the 1986 Libya raid and Gulf War combat missions is now being rebuilt, house by house, into a town of 6…
- Near Upper Heyford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Raglan Castle
Monmouthshire
Its hexagonal Great Tower once housed a steam-powered fountain that reputedly scared off a hostile search party: a castle built to dazzle as much a…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rahinnane Castle
County Kerry
More than half the outer walls of Rahinnane Castle still stand, a rectangular three-storey tower house set within the earthworks of a far older rin…
- Near Caherdaniel
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rampton Castle
Cambridgeshire
An unfinished siege-work whose builders simply walked away when their enemy died elsewhere: a rare frozen moment from the chaos of the civil war kn…
- Near Rampton
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ramsey Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A fen-island hermitage founded on the strength of a bull's wanderings grew into the third-ranked abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot…
- Near Ramsey
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ranton Abbey
Staffordshire
An Augustinian priory whose tower still stands beside the burnt-out shell of a hunting lodge: two ruins from two different centuries on one site.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Raphoe Castle
County Donegal
Built from the dismantled stones of an older round tower, the bishop's residence survived two sieges and a rebellion before an accidental fire fini…
- Near Raphoe
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rappa Castle
County Mayo
Three centuries of Bourke, Crofton and Knox ownership, and a run of High Sheriffs of Mayo, ended when the Gillespie family simply built a new house…
- Near Claremorris
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rathcoffey Castle
County Kildare
Rathcoffey’s surviving gatehouse is the last trace of a Wogan manor transformed by a family feud, Tudor forfeiture, Civil War siege and Georgian re…
- Near Rathcoffey
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rathfran Friary
County Mayo
A Dominican priory once known as "Brandubh's Fort of the Sweet Bells": and the scene of a 1513 murder that shattered the sanctuary its walls were m…
- Near Ballina
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rathmacknee Castle
County Wexford
One of County Wexford's best-preserved tower houses, its five-sided walled bawn and defensive features survive intact from a family who held their…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rathumney Castle
County Wexford
A rare surviving Cistercian grange house rather than a true castle, built by the family who first held these lands and still owned by descendants w…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rattin Castle
County Westmeath
A 16th-century tower house forfeited amid the upheaval of 1641, its stone walls still standing close to where the M6 motorway now cuts through the…
- Near Kinnegad
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ravenstone Priory
Buckinghamshire
Its 1524 suppression by Thomas Wolsey helped bankroll a new Oxford college: this small Buckinghamshire priory, a monastery headed by a prior rather…
- Near Ravenstone
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ravenstonedale Priory
Cumbria
A Gilbertine cell meant for only a master and three canons, whose surviving vault once served the manorial court as a prison for those facing capit…
- Near Kirkby Stephen
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ravensworth Castle (North Yorkshire)
North Yorkshire
Ravensworth Castle’s moated fourteenth-century ruins, designed park and reused stone make an unusually legible record of aristocratic estate-making…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ravensworth Castle, Lamesley
Tyne and Wear
The family mined coal directly under their own house from about 1935 and demolished it at the same time. The wreckage was meant to build a model vi…
- Near Lamesley
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rayleigh Castle
Essex
Rayleigh Castle is Essex’s only castle named in Domesday Book, preserving a large Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower rai…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Reading Abbey
Berkshire
Once one of the largest royal monasteries in Europe and the burial place of a king, reduced by the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monaste…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Red Castle, Shropshire
shropshire
Sandstone walls on a natural crag, ruinous by the time Leland saw them around 1540, and later the centrepiece of a landscape garden built around a…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Redwood Castle
County Tipperary
For three centuries this tower house was less a garrison than a working law school: seat of the Mac Aodhagáin, hereditary Brehon judges whose rulin…
- Near Newport
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Reigate Castle
Surrey
The castle itself vanished centuries ago, yet its rock-cut cave below the site is said to be where the barons drafted the terms that became Magna C…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Reigate Priory
Surrey
An Augustinian priory turned Tudor mansion turned secondary school: its 13th-century cloister (the covered walkway round a monastery's central cour…
- Near Reigate
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Renhold Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber motte-and-bailey: an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard beside it: once guarded the Great Ouse va…
- Near Renhold
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Repentance Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Repentance Tower is a rare mid-sixteenth-century Border watchtower, built for warning rather than living and still marked by its enigmatic ‘REPENTA…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Repton Abbey
Derbyshire
A stone crypt built over a spring still stands beneath a parish church, holding the remains of Mercian kings and later giving up a mass grave of Vi…
- Near Bakewell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Repton Priory
Derbyshire
Gilbert Thacker’s 1550s demolition left Repton Priory almost flat within a day, ending a four-century Augustinian house beside the River Trent.
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Restormel Castle
Cornwall
Restormel Castle is England’s most intact circular shell keep, transformed from a Norman fort into a luxurious administrative palace of the Earls o…
- Near Lostwithiel
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Revesby Abbey
Lincolnshire
A Cistercian house founded by an earl who ended his life as one of its monks later passed to the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, and its Victorian succe…
- Near Revesby
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rewley Abbey
Oxfordshire
Oxford's Cistercian house of study, built so monks could attend university lectures: a monastic experiment in higher education now reduced to a sin…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rhayader Castle
Powys
Built, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, rebuilt and destroyed again between 1177 and 1231, and then abandoned. Only the rock-cut ditch is visible.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rhuddlan Castle
Denbighshire
A castle built with a unique diamond-shaped layout, its gatehouses set at the corners rather than the sides, and reached by a river deliberately re…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Riasg Buidhe Cross
Argyll and Bute
Its carver rendered Christ with spiral arms and a fishtail body, an image found nowhere else among Scotland's early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100,…
- Near Scalasaig
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Riber Castle
Derbyshire
A Victorian industrialist's folly, hauled block by block up a 200-metre hill by pulley: later a school, a wartime food store, and a wildlife park,…
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Richmond Castle
North Yorkshire
Richmond Castle preserves an early Norman power centre above the Swale, later reshaped by military use and the First World War’s Richmond Sixteen.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Richmont Castle
Somerset
A castle King Stephen took by luring its garrison out and burning the gates behind them.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rievaulx Abbey
North Yorkshire
Rievaulx Abbey shows how Cistercian prayer, engineered water, and European wool and iron trade remade a remote Yorkshire valley into a monastic pow…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rincrew Abbey
County Waterford
A ruined house of two crusading military orders in succession: Templar, then Hospitaller: standing on private land where no visitor can walk its st…
- Near Waterford
- Rough ground
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Ringley Old Bridge
Greater Manchester
Ringley Old Bridge is a protected 1677 stone crossing of the River Irwell, built after flood destroyed its wooden predecessor and still linking Rin…
- Near Kearsley
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ripley Market Cross
North Yorkshire
Ripley Market Cross preserves the steps of a fifteenth-century market marker, later transformed by a sundial after the market itself faded.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Risinghoe Castle
Bedfordshire
A 20-foot earthen mound on private land near Bedford that historians cannot agree is a castle at all: one theory calls it a Norman stronghold, anot…
- Easy path
-
Settlement · Medieval
Rispain Camp
Dumfries and Galloway
Rispain Camp is one of Scotland’s major Iron Age (from about 800 BC until the Romans came) sites, where unusually well-preserved ramparts and excav…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Robertsbridge Abbey
East Sussex
Robertsbridge Abbey preserves the small-scale history of a Cistercian house shaped by difficult coastal land, dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of…
- Near Hastings
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Robertstown Castle
County Meath
Its bartizans sit on corbelling styled after Scottish tower houses, and a 1930s folklore recording still names the gunman who made these ruins his…
- Near Navan
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rocester Abbey
Staffordshire
Nine monks including their head at the surrender. The buildings were dismantled for reusable material and the land sold to a Shropshire MP.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roch Castle
Pembrokeshire
A thirteenth-century castle built by the Norman knight Adam de Rupe about 1200, near Haverfordwest.
- Near Roch
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Roche Abbey
South Yorkshire
A 1546 grant listing lead and glass still lying on site shows the abbey (a religious community led by an abbot)'s stripping after the Dissolution (…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rochester Castle
Kent
The keep that survived a king's siege engines, a burning mine of forty fat pigs, and still stands taller than any other in England.
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Rock moated site and medieval village
Worcestershire
A moat and the plough-marked streets of a vanished village survive side by side at Rock - proof that a 1328 market grant once served a settlement f…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Pictish & early medieval
Rock of Cashel
County Tipperary
A limestone outcrop that held the crown of Munster for six centuries before its last king simply gave it to the Church: a rare handover from royal…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rockfleet Castle
County Mayo
A modest four-storey tower on Clew Bay's shore carries an outsized reputation as the stronghold most tied to Grace O'Malley, the pirate queen, and…
- Near Newport
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rockstown Castle
County Limerick
One of County Limerick's most structurally complete tower houses, with vaulted ceilings, a full spiral stair and ogee-headed window slits surviving…
- Near Kilmallock
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Romsey Abbey
Hampshire
A Norman nunnery church that survived the Dissolution because the town bought it outright in 1544 for £100: now the largest parish church in Hampsh…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Roscommon Abbey
County Roscommon
Its founder's tomb effigy, carved around 1290–1300, is one of only two royal effigies known to survive from medieval Ireland.
- Near Roscommon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roscrea Castle
County Tipperary
A 13th-century royal foundation whose gate tower, prison and Ormond-era plasterwork survive intact alongside one of only two Queen Anne staircases…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Roscrea Friary
County Tipperary
A crenellated bell tower on pointed arches and carved corbels is the last standing witness to a friary, a house of friars who worked among townspeo…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roslin Castle
Midlothian
Roslin Castle combines the Sinclair family’s long medieval lordship, a rare Scots-prose manuscript connection, destructive episodes from the Rough…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ross Castle
County Kerry
On the edge of Lough Leane, within what is now Killarney National Park, a square tower house of stone and Irish oak has stood since the late 15th c…
- Near Killarney
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ross Errilly Friary
County Galway
A working monastery reoccupied and expelled seven times over three centuries, its cloisters, kitchen and dormitories still standing more complete t…
- Near Headford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rosserk Friary
County Mayo
A carved Round Tower on its double piscina, a pair of basins near an altar for rinsing communion vessels, is a rare stone echo of Ireland's older m…
- Near Ballina
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rosslyn Chapel
Midlothian
Rosslyn Chapel is a superbly carved fifteenth-century collegiate church (a church staffed by a college of priests, without being a monastery) whose…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rossmore Castle
County Monaghan
A decades-long rivalry over who could build the biggest room in County Monaghan left this Gothic mansion with three towers and more than 117 window…
- Near Clones
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rotherfield Greys Castle
Oxfordshire
A fourteenth-century fortified manor house, of which a single tower survives in ruin.
- Near Rotherfield Greys
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Rotherham Bridge
South Yorkshire
A medieval bridge chapel that became an almshouse, then the town gaol, then a shop: and is now the best preserved in England.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rothesay Castle
Argyll and Bute
A huge circular curtain wall, some 42 metres in diameter and originally around 7.9 metres high, still stands on a low mound above the town of Rothe…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rothley Castle
Northumberland
Daniel Garrett’s 1755 sham castle survives as a Grade II* part of Wallington’s designed landscape, built to frame Sir Walter Blackett’s view rather…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rothley Temple
Leicestershire
One small chapel held the Knights Templar, then the Knights Hospitaller, then an abolitionist campaign hatched with Wilberforce, and the birth of a…
- Near Leicester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rougemont Castle
Devon
Rougemont Castle is Exeter’s Norman stronghold, built after the 1068 rebellion and later transformed into a courthouse, prison and civic cultural s…
- Near Exeter
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rougemont Castle, Weeton
North Yorkshire
A castle so thoroughly abandoned that its own successor is also a ruin: Rougemont gave way to Harewood Castle, which in turn gave way to Harewood H…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roundhay Park
West Yorkshire
Land granted by William the Conqueror to Ilbert de Lacy for his part in the Harrying of the North, now a large urban park on the edge of Leeds.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rowton Castle
Shropshire
Rowton Castle traces a seventeenth-century country house through the Lyster and Rowton families, wartime displacement of a London blind college, fi…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roxburgh Castle
Scottish Borders
A grassy mound is nearly all that remains of what was once one of the most fought-over fortresses on the Anglo-Scottish border, changing hands at l…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Greater London
The Royal Observatory, Greenwich gave its name to Greenwich Mean Time and the prime meridian, making a hilltop scientific institution central to gl…
- Near Greenwich
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Royston Cave
Hertfordshire
A bell-shaped chamber cut into solid chalk is covered floor to ceiling in medieval carvings found nowhere else in Britain, yet nobody has ever prov…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ruardyn Castle
Gloucestershire
A Norman manor granted licence to crenellate in 1311, its stone walls and earthworks now reduced to grassy mounds behind a village church.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rufford Abbey
Nottinghamshire
Rufford’s parkland ruins trace how a Cistercian estate displaced villages, became a Tudor country house and remains publicly accessible today.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rufus Castle
Dorset
Rufus Castle is Portland’s oldest surviving defensive structure, a late medieval cliff-top blockhouse whose ruins connect medieval warfare, coastal…
- Near Portland
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rugemont Castle
Bedfordshire
A timber stronghold so thoroughly erased that only its earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) outline and a…
- Near Ridgmont
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Runston Chapel
Monmouthshire
The lone survivor of a vanished village: a Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Gothic) chapel still standing above some twenty-five…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ruperra Castle
Caerphilly
A 1626 mock castle built to look centuries older than it was, now a fire-scarred ruin whose gardens still carry national heritage status.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ruperra Motte
Caerphilly
A Norman timber castle raised directly on top of an Iron Age (from around 800 BC up to the Roman conquest) hillfort (an Iron Age settlement defende…
- Near Rudry
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ruther Cross
North Yorkshire
Ruther Cross preserves a small but protected trace of historic movement at the former meeting of Ruthergate and Hutton Lane in Guisborough.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ruxox Cell
Bedfordshire
A buried wall on the riverbank was built partly from a reused Roman column base: the clearest physical trace left of a monastic cell otherwise know…
- Near Flitwick
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ruyton-XI-Towns Castle
Shropshire
Ruyton-XI-Towns Castle records repeated rebuilding and destruction on the Welsh Marches, with its sandstone tower reused in cottages and church rep…
- Near Ruyton-XI-Towns
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rye Austin Friary
East Sussex
Rye's only visible trace of a community of Augustinian friars is a single chapel that has since done duty as a barracks, a hall and a pottery studio.
- Near Hastings
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rye Castle
east-sussex
A rare survivor of Rye's medieval harbour defences, later reused as a courtroom and prison before becoming the town museum.
- Near Rye
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rye House, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
A single moulded-brick gatehouse is all that survives of a manor whose 1683 occupants stood accused of plotting to kill a king.
- Near St Albans
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Saddell Abbey
Argyll and Bute
On a bluff above the confluence of Saddell Water and Allt nam Manach: the Water of the Monks: stand the fragmentary remains of a Cistercian monaste…
- Near Carradale
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Saint David's Castle
County Kildare
A medieval tower house folded into Naas's 15th-century town walls, later home to a surgeon who pioneered hypnosis in the operating theatre.
- Near Naas
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Saint Macdara's Island
County Galway
A patron saint of seafarers whose shrine, still reached only by open boat, has drawn a pilgrimage every 16 July for generations - a crossing so exp…
- Near Carna
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Salcombe Castle
Devon
Salcombe Castle is a tide-accessible coastal gun battery whose Civil War siege and ruined towers preserve a dramatic defensive landmark on the Sout…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Salisbury Friary
Wiltshire
A royal-backed Dominican house that vanished so completely that only chance building work in 1978 proved where its dead once lay.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Salisbury Grey Friary
Wiltshire
A Franciscan house built with timber from Henry III himself, erased so completely by the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in th…
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Saltwells Local Nature Reserve
West Midlands
Beneath the bluebells and gorse of a Black Country nature reserve lie the buried workings of medieval coal miners and a spring once bottled as a cu…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Saltwood Castle
Kent
A private home whose gatehouse still shelters descendants of the family that owned it since the 1950s, on a site where four knights are presumed to…
- Near Saltwood
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandal Castle
West Yorkshire
A ruined castle above the Calder, begun in timber by the Warennes and rebuilt in stone, and the setting of a scene in Shakespeare.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandgate Castle
Kent
Two surviving Tudor ledger books, 350 pages long, record its construction in such detail that a historian has called them the most complete buildin…
- Near Sandgate
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sandleford Priory (monastery)
Berkshire
One of its priors, William Westbury, went on to save Eton College from being folded into St George's Chapel, Windsor: an unlikely brush with histor…
- Near Newbury
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandown Castle, Kent
Kent
A Parliamentarian prisoner died here in 1664 after months of what his wife called inhumane confinement in a fort already being described as ruinous…
- Near Deal
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandsfoot Castle
Dorset
Sandsfoot Castle is a major Henry VIII coastal artillery fort whose Civil War service, cliff erosion and recent stabilisation illustrate both Tudor…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sandwell Priory
West Midlands
Suppressed in 1525 at Cardinal Wolsey's request to help fund his new Oxford college, more than a decade before Henry VIII's own dissolution: his cl…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sanquhar Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Sanquhar Castle is a thirteenth-century Nith Valley stronghold whose Crichton ownership, ruinous decline and incomplete nineteenth-century restorat…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sauvey Castle
Leicestershire
A royal hunting lodge whose builders flooded the valley to surround it with an artificial lake: earthworks Historic England says have few parallels…
- Near Leicester
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sawley Abbey
Lancashire
One of only three surviving books from its library became the Sawley Map, the earliest English world map in the same tradition as the Hereford Mapp…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sawtry Abbey
Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire's only Cistercian house, and the last resting place of a Scottish earl whose family tied the abbey, a monastery headed by an abbot,…
- Near Sawtry
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Saxtead Green Windmill
Suffolk
Raised three times during its working life, and rebuilt entirely between 1957 and 1960 using a crowntree salvaged from a demolished mill at Wetheri…
- Near Saxtead Green
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scaleby Castle
Cumbria
A working private home built inside a genuine medieval war-castle: moated, twice besieged and burned in the Civil War, yet still lived in today.
- Near Carlisle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scalloway Castle
Shetland Islands
Built by unpaid workers summoned from the parishes of Shetland, for an earl who was executed for misrule eight years after it was finished.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scoles Manor
Dorset
Scoles Manor combines a thirteenth-century medieval structure with a 1635 farmhouse and a long, documented chain of Dorset families, making it an u…
- Near Corfe Castle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Scone Palace / Scone Abbey
Perth and Kinross
The crowning place of forty-two Kings of Scots and the site of Scotland's first parliament: now a Gothic Revival house with nothing left standing o…
- Near Perth
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scotstarvit Tower
Fife
Scotstarvit Tower is a remarkably intact six-storey Fife tower house, recording the transition from an Inglis family residence to Sir John Scot’s l…
- Near St Andrews
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Scraesdon Fort
Cornwall
Scraesdon Fort is a Grade II listed Palmerston fort built to defend Plymouth's naval base, preserving the scale and strategic anxieties of nineteen…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Seagate Castle
North Ayrshire
Seagate’s scheduled ruin preserves Irvine’s former harbour route and the sixteenth-century Montgomerie town house, where defence, aristocratic disp…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Seaton Priory
Cumbria
A nunnery so poor it depended on grants from an archbishop, a duke and a neighbouring abbey just to survive: yet its ruined chancel (the eastern en…
- Near Workington
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sedgwick Castle
West Sussex
A double concentric moat in a former deer park, 140 metres across at the outer ring, whose stone went into the foundations of a house in 1600.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selborne Priory
Hampshire
Nothing of its buildings shows above ground today, yet twentieth-century digging recovered one of the most complete documentary archives of any Eng…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selby Abbey
North Yorkshire
A fifteenth-century window in the quire carries the heraldic arms of George Washington's ancestors: reputedly among the oldest depictions of the Am…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sele Priory
West Sussex
A Benedictine priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: dependent on Saumur, cut loose from France in 1396 for an annual pay…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selsey Abbey
West Sussex
Founded by St Wilfrid in 681 on land from the king of the last mainland English kingdom to be converted, and marked by the freeing of 250 slaves.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Selskar Abbey
County Wexford
Ireland's first Anglo-Irish peace treaty was signed on this ground in 1169: decades before the stone priory, a monastery headed by a prior and usua…
- Near Wexford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sempringham Priory
Lincolnshire
The mother house of the only religious order ever founded by an Englishman, governing dozens of double communities of monks and nuns until its ston…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Seton Collegiate Church
East Lothian
Seton Collegiate Church is an unusually legible unfinished late-medieval church, preserving its choir, transepts and tower alongside the absent nav…
- Near Dunbar
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Severndroog Castle
Greater London
Severndroog Castle is a striking 18th-century memorial folly that links Britain’s imperial naval history with the surveys that helped create the Or…
- Near Shooter’s Hill
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shaftesbury Abbey
Dorset
Shaftesbury Abbey was one of medieval England’s richest nunneries, shaped by royal foundation and the cult of St Edward the Martyr before its 1539…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shalford Preceptory
Berkshire
A Knights Hospitaller estate reduced to a single building: its medieval chapel, which quietly served as a farm barn for centuries before its histor…
- Near Brimpton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sham Castle
Somerset
A folly on Claverton Down above Bath, its screen wall pierced by a pointed arch between turrets and towers.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shanbally Castle
County Tipperary
Shanbally was the grandest private house the English architect John Nash ever built in Ireland: and within 150 years the state itself dynamited it…
- Near Cahir
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shane's Castle
County Antrim
Shane’s Castle layers medieval O’Neill power, John Nash’s unrealised rebuilding, destructive fires, and a later tourist railway on the shores of Lo…
- Near Randalstown
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shap Abbey
Cumbria
One of its own abbots rose to become Bishop of Ely, and his memory still links this remote Cumbrian ruin to the great cathedral where his monument…
- Near Shap
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sheen Priory
Greater London
Sheen Priory was Henry V’s ambitious Carthusian foundation beside his rebuilt royal palace, a lost monastery whose foundations survive beneath Rich…
- Near Richmond
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sheffield Castle
South Yorkshire
Buried beneath a demolished 20th-century market, its foundations still trace the medieval castle where Mary, Queen of Scots spent fourteen years a…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Sheffield Lock
Berkshire
An early-18th-century canal lock still doing its original job, its scalloped brick chamber and paddle gearing protected as a scheduled monument (le…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Sheffield Manor Lodge
South Yorkshire
For nearly fifteen years this lodge and its neighbouring castle held Mary, Queen of Scots captive, making it one of the best-documented settings fo…
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Sacred place · Medieval
Shelford Priory
Nottinghamshire
Shelford brings contested patronage, royal visits and a later transformation into a fortified manor to one site that began as a small Augustinian c…
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Shepherd Wheel
South Yorkshire
One of the last complete water-powered grinding workshops on the River Porter, still turning where dozens once ground Sheffield's blades.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sherborne Abbey
Dorset
Sherborne Abbey is a thousand-year religious landmark that evolved from Saxon cathedral to Benedictine abbey and parish church, preserving exceptio…
- Near Sherborne
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sherborne Castle
Dorset
Sherborne Castle combines Sir Walter Raleigh’s Tudor lodge, the ruins of a powerful twelfth-century bishop’s palace and a major eighteenth-century…
- Near Sherborne
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sheriff Hutton Castle
North Yorkshire
For a century and a half this was the seat of the Council of the North, and briefly a residence of Richard III himself, before its stone was carted…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Shiaba
Argyll and Bute
A cleared crofting township on the Ross of Mull whose stone walls, kilns and mill remains survive well enough to trace the whole shift from run rig…
- Near Bunessan
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shingay Preceptory
Cambridgeshire
A water-filled moat in open Cambridgeshire farmland is almost all that survives of a Hospitaller estate nearly nine centuries old, its buildings go…
- Near Shingay
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shirburn Castle
Oxfordshire
A supposed visit by Dante's tutor, quoted in Victorian sources, turned out to be a forgery in a book published in 1948.
- Near Shirburn
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shotwick Castle
Cheshire
A Norman river-crossing castle whose flooded ditches defended the Dee ford before the fort became a royal hunting lodge and then earthworks.
- Near Chester
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Shotwick Hall
Cheshire
A 1662 brick manor whose Grade II* house, garden and nearby moat preserve the shift from a fortified home to a post-medieval (after about 1500) est…
- Near Chester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shrewsbury Abbey
Shropshire
Shrewsbury Abbey turned a Norman foundation into a major pilgrimage centre around St Winifred, then survived dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of t…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shrewsbury Castle
Shropshire
Shrewsbury Castle began as William I’s Welsh-border command and became a civic, military and museum landmark; excavated ditches, high-status feasti…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shrule Abbey
County Mayo
A grassy mound carries thirteen centuries of memory: a saint's disciple, two changes of overlord, a 1306 tax record: with almost nothing built left…
- Near Claremorris
- Rough ground
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Fortified place · Medieval
Shrule Castle
County Mayo
A river-crossing stronghold on the Mayo–Galway border whose 1570 siege killed a gallowglass chief and left the man who took it wounded in the face.
- Near Claremorris
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shulbrede Priory
West Sussex
A medieval monastic house that became the home of the Ponsonby family, and is listed Grade I.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sibton Abbey
Suffolk
A monastery under an abbot of the early Cistercian order, founded about 1150 by William de Chesney, High Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk.
- Near Sibton
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Silverstream Priory
county-meath
A house built for the Gormanston family in 1843, passed through two religious orders, and in 2017 made the first new monastery in County Meath sinc…
- Near Drogheda
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Sinai Park House
Staffordshire
Its name comes from the Old French for blood. Monks came here to convalesce after being bled.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sizergh
Cumbria
One family held this house for over seven centuries, and its Elizabethan panelling was sold abroad, missed, and finally brought home in 1999.
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Skelton Castle
North Yorkshire
Skelton Castle shows how a medieval stronghold was demolished yet partially absorbed into a Gothic country house and changing estate identity.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Skenfrith Castle
Monmouthshire
A circular keep rises from the middle of a squared curtain wall beside the Monnow: one-third of a deliberately linked trio of castles that governed…
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Skerton Bridge
Lancashire
The first large public bridge in England built with a flat roadway rather than a bowed one, a design John Rennie later carried into Waterloo Bridge…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Skipness Castle
Argyll and Bute
A working stronghold refortified across three centuries, ending its working life not by decay but under active siege in 1646: the last Scottish cas…
- Near Skipness
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Skipsea Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
The Normans built their motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) on a mound already a millennium and a half old, and dammed a…
- Near Beverley
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Fortified place · Medieval
Skipton Castle
North Yorkshire
One of the few English castles never taken by force in nearly a thousand years, it endured a three-year Civil War siege and still stands roofed and…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Slade Castle
County Wexford
A four-storey tower house guards Bannow Bay and Waterford Harbour from a tiny 210-acre estate, its scale paid for by fishing or trade rather than l…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Slane Castle
County Meath
A late-Georgian rebuild of a confiscated Fleming estate that became, from 1981, the natural amphitheatre behind some of rock music's biggest outdoo…
- Near Slane
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sleady Castle
County Waterford
One family's grave in Lismore cathedral, a castle their descendant built eighty years later, and a great-granddaughter of the tenants who once serv…
- Near Dungarvan
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sleaford Castle
Lincolnshire
A bishop's fortified manor rather than a warrior's stronghold, it hosted two kings and a Tudor state council before all but vanishing beneath its o…
- Near Sleaford
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sleaty Church
County Laois
A seventh-century bishop here wrote one of the earliest surviving lives of Saint Patrick, at a site that also once served as a residence of the Kin…
- Near Portlaoise
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sligo Abbey
County Sligo
A 15th-century tower hangs suspended over the nave on two arches alone: bolder than any of its sister Munster friaries, and now unreachable even by…
- Near Sligo
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Smerby Castle
Argyll and Bute
Two separate bonds, in 1594 and 1597, show the family here signing not as MacDonald but as M'Connall: a rare direct trace of how Gaelic Kintyre act…
- Near Campbeltown
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Smithills Hall
Greater Manchester
Smithills Hall preserves one of north-west England’s oldest manor houses, where a medieval Radcliffe residence evolved through gentry, industrial a…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Snape Castle
North Yorkshire
A mob from the Pilgrimage of Grace once held Katherine Parr and her stepchildren hostage inside its walls, years before she became queen of England.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Snelshall Priory
Buckinghamshire
A monastery that never found its feet: refounded twice, dogged by poverty, and quietly dismantled so its stones could build the parish church next…
- Near Tattenhoe
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Fortified place · Medieval
Snodhill Castle
Herefordshire
Recent digs found a stone hall keep buried inside the visible tower, pushing its origin back to 1067 and making it one of England's earliest stone…
- Near Peterchurch
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Soham Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A Cambridgeshire parish church stands on the foundations of the county's first Roman Christian site, whose founder's bones travelled through three…
- Near Soham
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Fortified place · Medieval
Someries Castle
Bedfordshire
A fortified manor rather than a true castle, its surviving gatehouse ranks among the earliest brick buildings raised in England.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Somerton Castle
Lincolnshire
A king of France spent roughly a year confined here after Poitiers, inside a fortress whose 1330s artillery towers were a design a generation ahead…
- Near Somerton
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Sacred place · Medieval
Sopwell Priory
Hertfordshire
A community of Benedictine women vanished into a Tudor courtyard: the same walls sheltered a medieval prioress and, four centuries later, a command…
- Near St Albans
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Fortified place · Medieval
Sorbie Tower
Dumfries and Galloway
Sorbie Tower is the ancestral stronghold of Clan Hannay, a late-sixteenth-century fortified house whose surviving lower levels preserve a rare Gall…
- Near Sorbie
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Fortified place · Medieval
South Cerney Castle
Gloucestershire
A castle so easily confused with two others of the same era that historians still dispute whether it, or a neighbouring site, saw King Stephen's fo…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
South Cowton Castle
North Yorkshire
A country gentleman built this house like a fortress, its twin corner towers a plain answer to the violence of the Wars of the Roses.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
South Moreton Castle
Oxfordshire
Two separate earthworks half a mile apart preserve both a Norman lord's stronghold and a disputed siege-castle from the 12th-century Anarchy.
- Near South Moreton
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Southampton Castle
Hampshire
One of the first castles in England fitted with cannon, and once the storehouse of the royal wine trade through Southampton's medieval docks.
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Southsea Castle
Hampshire
One of Henry VIII's Device forts, stormed in the Civil War, rebuilt by Charles II's Dutch engineer, and still training its guns on the Solent as la…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Southwark Cathedral
Greater London
The first Gothic church in London, nearly demolished for a railway in 1852: and with a nave, the long western body of the church, that has been reb…
- Near Southwark
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Sacred place · Medieval
Southwick Priory
Hampshire
A pilgrimage shrine famous enough to draw Henry VIII in person in 1510, its original church still stands in daily use inside the Roman walls of Por…
- Near Winchester
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sowerby Castle, Cumbria
Cumbria
Its walls have vanished, but its name has not: Castle Sowerby parish still carries the memory of a timber stronghold once passed between the Englis…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Spinney Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A murdered prior, a Cromwell in retirement and a working farm making award-winning cider all sit on the same low fen-edge site where an Augustinian…
- Near Wicken
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Fortified place · Medieval
Spitbank Fort
Hampshire
A Victorian island gun-fort built to catch any warship that slipped past its two larger neighbours in the Solent: now a scheduled monument (legally…
- Near Portsmouth
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Spofforth Castle
North Yorkshire
A hall-tower cut straight into the rock it stands on, wrecked in the Civil War, its ruins now owned outright by the village that saved the field ar…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Springfield Castle
County Limerick
A Norman foothold that became a Gaelic-Norman lordship, sheltered a 17th-century poet, burned in 1921, and is still lived in by the family that fir…
- Near Limerick
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Spynie Palace
Moray
For roughly five hundred years this was the working seat of the Bishops of Moray, and its tower still stands as the largest medieval tower house in…
- Near Elgin
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Albans Cathedral
Hertfordshire
Its crossing tower, raised from reclaimed Roman brick around 1080, is the only 11th-century great tower still standing in England.
- Near St Albans
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Aldhelm's Well
Somerset
An ancient spring at Doulting that is the source of the River Sheppey, listed Grade II.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's and Blackfriars' Hall, Norwich
Norfolk
St Andrew’s and Blackfriars’ Hall form England’s most complete surviving mendicant complex from before the sixteenth-century closure of the monaste…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
St Andrew's Castle, Hamble
Hampshire
Raised in barely a year against an invasion that never came, its guns went on to watch the Solent for a century before the sea itself demolished mo…
- Near Winchester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's Church, Dacre
Cumbria
A monastery recorded here in the 8th and 10th centuries left two carved cross-shaft fragments inside the Norman church that replaced it, one bearin…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Andrew's Priory, Northampton
Northamptonshire
A Cluniac priory, a monastery run by a prior, where the philosopher Duns Scotus was ordained a priest in 1291, and whose stone was later reused to…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
St Andrews Castle
Fife
St Andrews Castle was the palace and prison of Scotland’s bishops, a frontline fortress in the Wars of Independence and Reformation (the sixteenth-…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Anthony's Chapel and Hermitage
City of Edinburgh
The chapel above St Margaret's Loch is one of Edinburgh's least explained medieval buildings: no foundation record survives, and the earliest firm…
- Near Edinburgh
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Augustine's Abbey
Kent
St Augustine’s Abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) was a foundational English Benedictine monastery, created beside Canterbury’s fi…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Augustine's Conduit House
Kent
St Augustine’s Conduit House preserves the medieval water infrastructure that supplied a major Canterbury abbey (a religious community led by an ab…
- Near Canterbury
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Bartholomew-the-Great
City of London
Founded on the strength of a single fevered dream, its Norman crossing and choir survived the Dissolution, the Great Fire and the Blitz to become L…
- Near London
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Bartholomew's Church, Penn
West Midlands
A round Anglo-Saxon churchyard and a broken preaching cross tied to Lady Godiva's husband sit beside a Victorian rebuild by the Lancaster firm of P…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Bees Priory
Cumbria
A 14th-century knight's body, found in 1981 with skin and nails still intact after six centuries, lies within a priory, a monastery headed by a pri…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Benet's Abbey
Norfolk
St Benet’s Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) is an exceptional Broads monastery: a Benedictine house spared at the Dissolution (Henry VIII's c…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Beuno's Church, Clynnog Fawr
Gwynedd
St Beuno’s Church is a Grade I medieval pilgrimage church at the site of a 7th-century clas, notable for its late-medieval fabric, chapel and nearb…
- Near Clynnog Fawr
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Blane's Church
Argyll and Bute
Its identity was forged not by an ancient founding but by two centuries of Scottish church schism and reunion, condensed into a single Dunblane bui…
- Near Dunblane
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Botolph's Priory
Essex
St Botolph’s Priory: a monastery headed by a prior: was England’s first Augustinian house and a leading convent until 1536; its Norman ruins preser…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Brendan's Chapel, Skipness
Argyll and Bute
A roofless chapel far larger than any other in Kintyre, standing beside five carved late medieval tombstones in a graveyard still used today.
- Near Skipness
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
St Briavels Castle
Gloucestershire
Its gatehouse carries three full sets of working portcullises, a defensive feature no comparable English castle actually completed, guarding a stro…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
St Catherine's Castle
Cornwall
St Catherine's Castle is a compact Henrician gun fort at Fowey that shows four centuries of coastal defence, from Henry VIII's invasion fears to Se…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Catherine's Chapel, Lydiate
Merseyside
St Catherine’s Chapel is a rare late-medieval private chapel, locally called Lydiate Abbey despite never being an abbey, with fabric and burials th…
- Near Lydiate
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Chad's Church, Wybunbury
Cheshire
The surviving leaning tower of a repeatedly rebuilt Cheshire church, whose nineteenth-century rescue technique later informed work on the Leaning T…
- Near Wybunbury
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Christopher's Church, Pott Shrigley
Cheshire
Its churchyard preaching cross is a scheduled monument (a site protected by law for its archaeological importance) in its own right, and one of its…
- Near Pott Shrigley
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Columba's Chapel, Southend
Argyll and Bute
A ruined medieval chapel on the Kintyre coast whose carved grave slabs are the strongest surviving evidence of the community that once worshipped h…
- Near Southend
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Cuthbert's Well
Northumberland
Cuddy’s Well preserves a spring tied to Cuthbert’s cult and twelfth-century miracle stories, still channelled through a Georgian conduit for baptis…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Davids Bishop's Palace
Pembrokeshire
A fourteenth-century episcopal palace of extraordinary ambition, ruined not by war but by a bishop who sold the lead off its roof in 1536.
- Near St Davids
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Denis Church, East Hatley
Cambridgeshire
A redundant medieval church whose consecrated churchyard now doubles as a legally protected nature reserve, rescued from decay by a charity built s…
- Near East Hatley
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Denys Priory
Hampshire
A royal foundation of Henry I whose pilgrimage chapel once drew Henry VIII in person now survives as a garden wall and re-sited archway in a Southa…
- Near Southampton
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
St Donat's Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A castle on cliffs above the Bristol Channel, on ground held since well before the Romans came.
- Near St Donats
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Edith's Church, Shocklach
Cheshire
The carved south entrance is the church's defining survival: three Norman orders, chevron and cable moulding, and weathered corbel heads (carved st…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Edward the Confessor's Church, Leek
Staffordshire
A church whose churchyard shows a double sunset at midsummer: an alignment calculated to predate Christianity in Britain.
- Near Leek
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
St Fagans Castle
Cardiff
An Elizabethan mansion raised inside the surviving D-shaped wall of a medieval castle, later given whole to the nation with its gardens and collect…
- Near St Fagans
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Fillan's Cave and Well, Pittenweem
Fife
St Fillan’s Cave is the sacred core of Pittenweem’s ‘place of the caves’ identity, linking an early Christian site, an Augustinian monastery and th…
- Near St Andrews
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Frideswide's Priory
Oxfordshire
A 7th-century royal nunnery, sacked in the St Brice's Day massacre and rebuilt three times over, still stands today as Oxford's cathedral and an Ox…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Giles' Cathedral
City of Edinburgh
Its 1637 prayer-book riot lit the fuse for the National Covenant and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, earning St Giles' the title 'the Mother Church…
- Near Edinburgh
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Govan's Chapel
Pembrokeshire
A chapel of twenty feet by twelve built into the side of a limestone cliff at St Govan's Head.
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Gwenfaen's Well
Isle of Anglesey
A rare three-chambered drystone well house survives almost intact, still visited for a legend of curing mental illness with an offering of white qu…
- Near Bangor
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Helen's Church, Bishopsgate
City of London
A double church built for nuns and parishioners side by side, it now holds more monuments than anywhere in London bar Westminster Abbey, and has co…
- Near London
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Illtyd's Church, Llantwit Major
Vale of Glamorgan
A church complex on the site of what has been called the oldest college in the United Kingdom.
- Near Llantwit Major
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
St Ives Bridge
Cambridgeshire
A working medieval road bridge that still carries a consecrated chapel on one of its piers: a combination almost unique in England.
- Near St Ives
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St James' Chapel, Lindsey
Suffolk
Dissolved in 1545 and granted to Thomas Turner, who turned it into a barn. That is the reason a thirteenth-century chapel is still standing.
- Near Lindsey
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St James' Church, Stirchley
Shropshire
A twelfth-century church encased in brick, extended for ironworkers in 1838, and holding a Norman chancel arch: at the eastern end, by the altar: t…
- Near Stirchley
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St James' Priory, Bristol
Bristol
For seven centuries its churchyard hosted Bristol's greatest fair: bear-baiting, Punch and Judy, and possibly Shakespeare's own company on the bill.
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St John the Baptist's Church, Chester
Cheshire
In 973 six tributary kings are said to have rowed King Edgar up the Dee to hold court here: a church that was Chester's cathedral before it was eve…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St John's Abbey, Colchester
Essex
St John’s Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) was a major Benedictine institution built from Roman Colchester’s fabric, whose gatehouse and redi…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St John's Jerusalem
Kent
Its county historian owner spent so lavishly on the house that he went bankrupt and served five years in prison, a very personal footnote to a site…
- Near Dartford
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St John's Priory, Kilkenny
County Kilkenny
Weathered tombs sit beside a working chapel where Kilkenny's Michael Street meets John Street, marking the former religious house's layered fabric.
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St John's, Monmouth
Monmouthshire
St John’s pairs an eighteenth-century Monmouth villa with a separately protected Coalbrookdale verandah and formal walled garden, a rare survival b…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Kenneth's Chapel
Argyll and Bute
Eight medieval cross slabs and a sixteenth-century high cross survive inside its walls, set within an island cemetery still used for burials today.
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Kentigern's Church, Aspatria
Cumbria
Behind its Victorian rebuild the church keeps a working holy well, a genuine Anglo-Saxon hogback tomb, and pre-Norman crosses carved with a fifth-c…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Kentigern's Church, Caldbeck
Cumbria
A working parish church built over a 6th-century predecessor, still paired with the holy well where the earliest Christians of Caldbeck were baptised.
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Lawrence's Church, Over Peover
Cheshire
Its surviving medieval and seventeenth-century family chapels contain Mainwaring monuments, while a plaque and flag record General Patton's staff w…
- Near Over Peover
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Leonard's Priory, Stamford
Lincolnshire
St Leonard’s Priory: a monastery headed by a prior: preserves a rare Grade I church front and arcade in the heavy round-arched style of the elevent…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Machar's Cathedral
Aberdeen City
A working Church of Scotland kirk that still keeps William Wallace's quartered remains in its walls and a ceiling of 48 royal and episcopal coats o…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall
Orkney Islands
The oldest cathedral in Scotland, now a Church of Scotland parish church in Kirkwall.
- Near Kirkwall
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Margaret's Convent, Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire
A Benedictine house so poor it needed royal land grants to survive, it left behind only a lane name, a farm name and a district still called St Mar…
- Near St Albans
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Martin's Chapel, Chisbury
Wiltshire
For three centuries the tithes from this small chapel supported a priory, a monastery headed by a prior, forty miles away in Southampton, even afte…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Martin's Church, Cwmyoy
Monmouthshire
A medieval parish church so distorted by ground movement that its tower, nave (the main western space where the congregation stood) and chancel (th…
- Near Abergavenny
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary Abbots
Greater London
St Mary Abbots brings a medieval Abingdon Abbey foundation into the centre of modern Kensington, crowned by London’s tallest church spire and layer…
- Near Kensington
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary and St Martin's Church, Blyth
Nottinghamshire
Blyth preserves rare Norman fabric from a French-connected Benedictine priory whose church remained in parish use after its 1536 closure.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary Magdalene Priory, Lincoln
Lincolnshire
A tiny Benedictine outpost of York's St Mary's Abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) ended up guarding a sacred spring and a stretc…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary the Virgin, Ivinghoe
Buckinghamshire
Rebuilt after rebels burned the church and town in 1234, it kept its rose windows and grew a tie-beam roof carved with angels and apostles.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Abbey ruins, Bardsey Island
Gwynedd
A single ruined tower on a remote Welsh island once drew a king and, by tradition, held the graves of some 20,000 saints.
- Near Bangor
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Abbey, Kenilworth
Warwickshire
The abbot's pension at the surrender was £100; his prior got £8. Most of the ruins were deliberately reburied in 1967 to protect them.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Abbey, York
North Yorkshire
One of its own monks wrote the fullest surviving eyewitness account of a medieval parliament and the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, later folded into a chr…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Acton
Cheshire
Its tower, raised around 1180, is the oldest in Cheshire, and its south aisle holds carved Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Goth…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Astbury
Cheshire
Astbury's church is unusually broad at the west end, with a detached tower and a south porch whose upper room may have served as a priest's treasury.
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Bruera
Cheshire
St Mary's Church, Bruera preserves Norman fabric within a much-altered rural church, alongside a scheduled churchyard sundial made from the remains…
- Near Bruera
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Derwen
Denbighshire
A carved timber rood screen, the carved screen dividing the main body of a church from the space around the altar, has kept its loft intact, one of…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Eastwell
Kent
St Mary’s, Eastwell is a protected church ruin whose 15th-century tower and 19th-century mortuary chapel survive after the nave (the main body of a…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Pateley Bridge
North Yorkshire
St Mary’s Church preserves a roofless parish ruin on Pateley Bridge’s older high-ground settlement site, beside the town’s later shift of worship c…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Reculver
Kent
Demolished by gunpowder in 1809 on the casting vote of its own vicar, its twin towers survived only because Trinity House recognised their value as…
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Church, Temple Balsall
West Midlands
A parish church traditionally reckoned the mother church of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller in England, its altar window still picturing knight…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's College, Oxford
Oxfordshire
A college founded in 1435 by Thomas Holden and his wife Elizabeth for the Augustinian order.
- Near Oxford
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Mary's Guildhall, Lincoln
Lincolnshire
St Mary’s Guildhall is a palatial Romanesque (the heavy round-arched architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries) domestic complex in Lincol…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mary's Priory and Cathedral
West Midlands
The only English cathedral pulled down at the Reformation: the break with Rome that shut the religious houses in the 1530s: its buried west front a…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Michael's Church, Llanfihangel Ysgeifiog
Isle of Anglesey
Old St Michael’s is a rare unrestored late-medieval Anglesey church ruin, retaining chancel (the eastern end of the church, holding the altar) and…
- Near Gaerwen
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Michael's Church, Trelawnyd
Flintshire
A scheduled 14th-century preaching cross, carved with the Crucifixion, still stands in a churchyard rebuilt almost entirely within one decade of Vi…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Michael's Church, Whittington
Lancashire
A Victorian church tower rises from the earthworks of a vanished Norman castle, its sundial still standing on the summit of the original great eart…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
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Building or ruin · Medieval
St Michael's Leper Hospital
Warwickshire
The last leper hospital left standing in England, its chapel and fifteenth-century Master's House surviving in scrubland north of Warwick.
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Moluag's Cathedral, Lismore
Argyll and Bute
The parish church swallowed a medieval cathedral whole in 1749, still wearing its doorways, piscina: the basin near an altar for rinsing communion…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Monans Windmill and Salt Pans
Fife
One of the few surviving structures from the East Neuk's vanished salt-panning industry, and today the site of a modern revival of the same craft n…
- Near St Andrews
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Mullin's Monastic Site
County Carlow
St Mullin’s is an early medieval monastery: roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans: at a river confluence associated with Saint Mo…
- Near St Mullins
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mungo's Church, Bromfield
Cumbria
A sandstone wellhead raised in 1878 still covers a spring beside a Norman-era church: two separately listed structures sharing one saint's name and…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Myllin's Well
Powys
A holy well where the saint is said to have been the first in Britain to baptise by full immersion: and where wishes were tied to rags rotting on t…
- Near Llanfyllin
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Neots Priory
Cambridgeshire
A Cornish saint's bones, carried east to draw pilgrims, gave this Cambridgeshire town its name and its priory, a monastery headed by a prior rather…
- Near St Neots
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Nicholas Chapel, Chester
Cheshire
St Nicholas's Chapel survives as a rare record of changing urban use: medieval worship gave way to trade, theatre, concerts, cinema and a present-d…
- Near Chester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Nicholas' Priory, Exeter
Devon
St Nicholas’ Priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: preserves rare domestic ranges of a Benedictine monastery in Exeter, late…
- Near Exeter
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Olave's Priory
Norfolk
St Olave’s Priory, a monastery run by a prior, is a surviving Augustinian Black Canons site on the Waveney, linking a medieval ferry, annual fair a…
- Near St Olaves
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Oswald's Church, Dean
Cumbria
A working parish church that has grown by addition for eight centuries: Norman nave (the main body of a church, where the congregation gathers), me…
- Near Carlisle
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Oswald's Church, Ravenstonedale
Cumbria
A Georgian church built almost entirely of box pews arranged like a college chapel, standing over the ruined covered walkway of a vanished Gilberti…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Oswald's Priory, Gloucester
Gloucestershire
One of only two English minsters known to be an exact copy of the Old Minster at Winchester, and the burial place of the Mercian rulers who founded…
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Osyth's Priory
Essex
St Osyth’s Priory: a monastery headed by a prior: is one of Essex’s most substantial monastic estates, where Augustinian fabric, Tudor rebuilding a…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Padarn's Church, Llanbadarn Fawr
Ceredigion
Mid-Wales's largest medieval church, rooted in an early Christian learning centre whose history moves between tradition, monastic power and parish…
- Near Llanbadarn Fawr
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Pancras, Soper Lane
City of London
A wealthy City parish rebuilt its small church twice in the 1620s, only for the Great Fire to erase it entirely in a single night four decades later.
- Near City of London
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Patrick's Island
County Dublin
In 1148 the island hosted a synod of fifteen bishops and over two hundred priests convened to reform the Irish church, one of the larger such gathe…
- Near Skerries
- Rough ground
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
St Peter's Cave, Chepstow
Monmouthshire
Charcoal found deep inside may be the earliest trace of human habitation anywhere in the lower Wye valley, hidden in a cave most visitors will neve…
- Near Abergavenny
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Peter's Church, Dixton
Monmouthshire
St Peter’s, Dixton, preserves a church site recorded by about 735, medieval fabric and a flood-prone Wye setting, while remaining a Church of Engla…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Queran's Well
Dumfries and Galloway
St Queran’s Well preserves a continuing Scottish holy-well tradition, where coins, pins and ribbons have been offered from at least the nineteenth…
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Fortified place · Medieval
St Quintins Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
A stone keep of the late twelfth century survives inside the later gatehouse: a building swallowed by the one that replaced it.
- Near Cowbridge
- Some walking
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Radegund's Priory, Cambridge
Cambridgeshire
A 12th-century nunnery whose chapel, cloister and hall survive intact inside Jesus College: one of the few places in Cambridge where the medieval r…
- Near Cambridge
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Saeran's Church, Llanynys
Denbighshire
Its 15th-century St Christopher mural, hidden under plaster until 1967, is reckoned the finest surviving medieval wall painting in north Wales.
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Theobald's Church, Great Hautbois
Norfolk
St Theobald’s is a Grade II* round-tower church whose medieval shrine attracted pilgrims, shaping later side arms, aisles and hospital provision at…
- Near Great Hautbois
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Winefride's Well
Flintshire
One of Britain's very few sacred sites to keep an unbroken pilgrimage tradition straight through the Reformation (the break with Rome that shut the…
- Easy path
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Sacred place · Medieval
St Winifred's Well, Woolston
Shropshire
A holy well and wellhouse in the hamlet of Woolston, listed Grade II*.
- Near Woolston
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Dominic's Abbey
County Tipperary
A Dominican community that hosted the order's national chapter meetings three times over half a century, and clung on quietly for three hundred yea…
- Near Cashel
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. John's Priory, Trim
County Meath
Granted after the Battle of the Boyne to one of King William's men, who by one account lasted a single night there before riding away at dawn.
- Near Trim
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Dublin
County Dublin
St Mary's Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) was a powerful medieval Dublin monastery whose buried chapter house preserves a trace of its lost…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Duleek
County Meath
The bell tower's north wall still carries the printed outline of the round tower it replaced: early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Roma…
- Near Duleek
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Trim
County Meath
St Mary’s monastery became a pilgrimage centre around a Marian statue before its public burning in 1538, joining sacred survival, suppression and c…
- Near Trim
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Plegmund's well
Cheshire
St Plegmund's Well is a scheduled Cheshire holy well whose documentary history, stone-lined structure and continuing well-dressing tradition preser…
- Near Mickle Trafford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Radegund's Abbey
Kent
St Radegund’s Abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) traces a Premonstratensian foundation from Prémontré through its service near D…
- Near Dover
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stafford Castle
Staffordshire
A castle rediscovered in the 1790s by workmen underpinning its last standing wall: and rebuilt on its own buried foundations.
- Near Stafford
- Easy path
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Ancient place · Medieval
Stainsby, North Yorkshire
North Yorkshire
A working medieval village of nine taxpaying households vanished so completely that a Second World War pillbox now stands more prominent above grou…
- Some walking
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stamford, Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire
A stone-built market town where a 1333 walkout of Oxford scholars nearly founded England's third university, and where a medieval bull run ran thro…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stanbrook Abbey
North Yorkshire
A community of English nuns founded in exile in 1625 survived imprisonment during the French Revolution, two centuries in Worcestershire and a 2009…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Standon Preceptory
Hertfordshire
A rare English commandery that housed sisters of a crusading order alongside knights, with a fifteenth-century barn still standing on the site.
- Near St Albans
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stanley Abbey
Wiltshire
A royal-favoured Cistercian house that hosted two kings and a princess, reduced by the dissolution to an empty field: its only visible trace now a…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stanlow Abbey
Cheshire
Stanlow Abbey preserves the scant remains of a Cistercian house repeatedly damaged by its exposed Mersey setting, whose monks moved to Whalley whil…
- Near Ellesmere Port
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Stansted Mountfitchet Castle
Essex
Stansted Mountfitchet Castle is a scheduled Norman ringwork (an early castle defended by a circular bank and ditch rather than a mound) and bailey…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Stansted Mountfitchet Windmill
Essex
Stansted Mountfitchet Windmill is a restored eighteenth-century tower mill whose working sails and machinery preserve the changing technology of ru…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Starborough Castle
Surrey
A Georgian folly of dressed sandstone conceals the moat and footprint of a fortified manor licensed for war in 1341: one that briefly held a captiv…
- Near Lingfield
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stavordale Priory
Somerset
An Augustinian house of the thirteenth century near Charlton Musgrove, its buildings put to other use after 1538.
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Fortified place · Medieval
Stirling Castle
Stirling
The castle Edward I kept bombarding after it had already surrendered, because he wanted to try out his new trebuchet.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stixwould Priory
Lincolnshire
Stixwould Priory records an unusually fluid female religious house: founded by Lucy of Chester, interpreted differently as Cistercian, Gilbertine a…
- Near Stixwould
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Stogursey Castle
Somerset
A castle ordered destroyed by the crown twice, in 1215 and 1228, and still standing to be extended in stone in 1300.
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Sacred place · Medieval
Stogursey Priory
Somerset
A religious house founded around 1100 at Stogursey, with its church surviving as the parish church.
- Near Stogursey
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Stokesay Castle
Shropshire
A wool merchant built it to look like Edward I's Welsh castles, and it was never meant to fight. Almost nothing has changed since the 1290s.
- Near Stokesay
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stone Priory
Staffordshire
A priory founded on the grave of two princes their father was said to have killed: with the story recorded in a chronicle found at the Dissolution,…
- Near Stone
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stoneleigh Abbey
Warwickshire
A Cistercian abbey turned country house, with an interior called the swan song of English baroque plasterwork: and Jane Austen among its visitors.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stonely Priory
Cambridgeshire
A modest Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose heir, after the dissolution: Henry VIII's closure of the mon…
- Near Stonely
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Stopham Bridge
West Sussex
A bridge over the Arun between Pulborough and Stopham, listed Grade I and scheduled as a monument besides.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stow Abbey
Lincolnshire
A ruined 11th-century Benedictine refoundation wrapped around one of England's largest Anglo-Saxon churches, carrying the tallest Saxon arches of t…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Stow Green, St Briavels
Gloucestershire
A grassy mound and its silted ditch are the only remains of the small Norman ring-motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) that once guarde…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Stowey Castle
Somerset
An early Norman castle of the eleventh century at Nether Stowey, known locally as The Mount.
- Near Nether Stowey
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Strade Abbey
County Mayo
Within little more than a decade its community switched religious order twice and survived a fire, a turbulent start followed by six centuries of c…
- Near Claremorris
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Strancally Castle
County Waterford
A working medieval river-stronghold turned into an 1830s Gothic country house, with a Spanish murder-hole legend still clinging to its ruined prede…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stratfield Saye Priory
Berkshire
A priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: owned outright by a Norman abbey, a monastic house under the rule of an abbot, for ov…
- Near Beech Hill
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stratford Langthorne Abbey
Greater London
Stratford Langthorne Abbey was one of England’s largest Cistercian houses, shaping mills, bridges and marshland around West Ham before its building…
- Near Stratford
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Stratton Park Moated Enclosure
Bedfordshire
Surveyed in 1982-83 as "one of the most exciting areas" found near Biggleswade, its earthworks preserve a lost manor deliberately built for display…
- Near Biggleswade
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Studley Priory, Oxfordshire
Oxfordshire
A medieval nunnery reborn as a country house that hosted C. S. Lewis's Sunday pint and stood in on screen for Thomas More's Chelsea home.
- Near Horton-cum-Studley
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Studley Priory, Warwickshire
Warwickshire
An Augustinian priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: moved here from Worcestershire, burial place of three generations of Ca…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stydd Preceptory
Derbyshire
Its 1338 accounts survive in such detail that a reader can see exactly how much wheat, barley and meat a small crusading order's guesthouse consume…
- Near Bakewell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sudeley Castle
Gloucestershire
The only privately owned castle in the world with a queen of England buried in its grounds: Catherine Parr, Henry VIII's last wife, lies in the cha…
- Near Gloucester
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Sunderland Bridge, County Durham
County Durham
A Grade I listed medieval crossing whose four sandstone arches once carried the Great North Road, now bypassed and reduced to footpath and estate t…
- Near Sunderland Bridge
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Surrender Mill
North Yorkshire
Its flue once carried poisonous lead fumes some 745 metres to a hillside chimney: an unusually ambitious piece of industrial engineering for a smal…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sutton Valence Castle
Kent
Sutton Valence Castle preserves the keep (the principal tower, built to be held even if the walls fell) of a strategically placed 12th-century Kent…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Swaffham Bulbeck Priory
Cambridgeshire
Almost nothing beyond its name has survived of this Cambridgeshire priory: a reminder of how completely a small monastic house can vanish from the…
- Near Swaffham Bulbeck
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Swansea Castle
Swansea
Founded in 1107 as the seat of the Lordship of Gower, a timber castle standing by 1116 above the River Tawe.
- Near Swansea
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Swarkestone Bridge
Derbyshire
For roughly three hundred years this was the only crossing of the River Trent between Burton and Nottingham, and in 1745 it was the point at which…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Swavesey Priory
Cambridgeshire
A small Fenland village church became, within twenty years of the Conquest, the English outpost of a French abbey on the Loire: one of England's sh…
- Near Swavesey
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sweetheart Abbey
Dumfries and Galloway
Sweetheart Abbey preserves the personal memorial of Dervorguilla of Galloway and John de Balliol, and traces how a Cistercian house shaped the farm…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Swerford Castle
Oxfordshire
A twelfth-century castle in the village of Swerford, built as an earth mound carrying a tower with a walled yard beside it.
- Near Swerford
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Swine Cross
North Yorkshire
A weathered animal effigy on its capital may show a swine or the white boar of the Nevilles, keeping a 15th-century royal favour to Middleham legib…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Swineshead Abbey
Lincolnshire
A working farmhouse built from monastic stone still stands on the site where a dying King John is said to have sheltered in 1216, and where Shakesp…
- Near Swineshead
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Swineyard Hall
Cheshire
Swineyard Hall combines a sixteenth-century moated house with nineteenth-century additions, retaining both Grade II* listing and scheduled-monument…
- Near High Legh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Swinford Preceptory
Leicestershire
A small Hospitaller house that never grew beyond a satellite of a larger preceptory (a local estate of a military order such as the Knights Templar…
- Near Swinford
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Swinford Toll Bridge
Oxfordshire
A privately owned bridge over the Thames above Eynsham Lock, linking Eynsham with Swinford.
- Near Eynsham
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Swingfield Preceptory
Kent
Swingfield Preceptory records a Kent headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller whose surviving 13th-century St John’s Chapel and adapted farm buildin…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sycharth
Powys
The house Owain Glyndwr grew up in, praised in detail by a poet and burned to the ground by the future Henry V in May 1403.
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tabley Old Hall
Cheshire
Tabley Old Hall is a moated, at-risk ruin that preserves the ancestral home of the Leicester family and the changing fortunes of a house displaced…
- Near Tabley
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Talley Abbey
Carmarthenshire
The only Premonstratensian house ever founded in Wales, its lone surviving tower now rises alone over the fishponds the White Canons dug to feed th…
- Near Llandeilo
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tamworth Castle
Staffordshire
A palace of the Mercian kings burned by Vikings, rebuilt as a burh by Aethelflaed, ordered demolished by King John, and bought for the town in 1897…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tandridge Priory
Surrey
A modest Augustinian religious house had a 1535 income less than a fifth of Sheen Priory's, yet its fishponds and footprint still shape the private…
- Near Tandridge
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tantallon Castle
East Lothian
Tantallon is Scotland’s last medieval curtain-wall castle, a dramatic coastal fortress whose single massive landward wall defended a naturally clif…
- Near North Berwick
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tarbert Castle
Argyll and Bute
A royal stronghold fought over for nearly a thousand years, from early-medieval burnings to a 1494 siege by a Scottish king, now looked after by th…
- Near Tarbert
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Tarr Steps
Somerset
A stone-slab bridge over the River Barle in Exmoor, within a national nature reserve.
- Near Withypool
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tarset Castle
Northumberland
Tarset’s low foundations mark a formally planned four-turret border castle, authorised in 1267 and deliberately destroyed in 1525 rather than repea…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire
Lincolnshire
Ralph Cromwell’s fifteenth-century Great Tower, built with 700,000 fashionable bricks, became the 1910 rescue that helped inspire Britain’s foundat…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tatton Old Hall
Cheshire
Tatton Old Hall preserves a fifteenth-century manor site within Tatton Park, with its exposed timber roof and relocated cruck barn tracing the esta…
- Near Knutsford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Taunton Castle
Somerset
The hall where Judge Jeffreys hanged 144 men after the Monmouth Rebellion: now the Museum of Somerset.
- Near Taunton
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Taunton Priory
Somerset
One of the five canons sent to reform the house in the 1110s went straight back to Merton. The reform was, in the record's words, apparently no eas…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tavistock Abbey
Devon
Tavistock Abbey was one of western England’s richest Benedictine houses, whose long history connects royal foundation, extensive estates, St Rumon’…
- Near Tavistock
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tealing Earth House
Angus
Its walls incorporate two Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread) stones carved with cup-and-ring marks, built by Iron Age…
- Near Tealing
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Teignmouth Abbey
Devon
Teignmouth Abbey traces the survival of an English Benedictine community from continental foundations and revolutionary exile to a purpose-built De…
- Near Teignmouth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tellarought Castle
County Wexford
Ownership can be traced through named tenants across six centuries, from a 1307 Sutton grant to a 2019 rescue by the state: a rare unbroken paper t…
- Near Wexford
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Temple Bruer Preceptory
Lincolnshire
The intact south tower still holds its rib-vaulted chamber, blind arcade and double piscina: a rare surviving fragment of a working Templar church,…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Temple Church, Bristol
Bristol
A round Templar church rebuilt as a rectangular one grew a west tower that leans further off true than Pisa's, its distortion the honest work of so…
- Near Bristol
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Temple Guiting Preceptory
Gloucestershire
A working Templar estate whose closure in 1308–1309 pensioned its last preceptor onto the very lands he had once run for the order.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Temple House Manor and Castle
County Sligo
A Templar castle raised in 1181 on a Sligo lakeshore gave its name to the Georgian house the same family has occupied for over 350 years.
- Near Sligo
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Templecombe Preceptory
Somerset
Templecombe Preceptory was a Templar administrative centre whose later St John and post-Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tenby Castle
Pembrokeshire
A Norman promontory fortress that was destroyed in 1153, twice besieged, and finally made redundant not by an enemy but by the town walls built aro…
- Near Tenby
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tenby town walls
Pembrokeshire
One of the most complete medieval town walls in Britain, begun after a Welsh prince sacked the town in 1260 and still running down to the sea along…
- Near Tenby
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Terryglass Castle
County Tipperary
A four-towered keep completed just in time for its own builder's debts to hand it to the English crown, on ground carrying monastic life since the…
- Near Nenagh
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Teston Bridge
Kent
Teston Bridge is a Grade I listed medieval River Medway crossing whose six unequal arches, cutwater refuges and surviving single-track road functio…
- Near Teston
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tewkesbury Abbey
Gloucestershire
The crossing tower here is reckoned England's largest and finest Romanesque (the round-arched style that came before Gothic) tower, and the town bo…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
The Castle, Newcastle
Tyne and Wear
The city is named after a castle that no longer exists: a timber work of 1080 raised on ground the Romans had already fortified at Pons Aelius.
- Near Newcastle upon Tyne
-
Sacred place · Medieval
The Charterhouse, Coventry
West Midlands
Its refectory (the monks' dining hall) still holds the only surviving medieval wall painting from a Carthusian monastery anywhere in England, hidde…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
The Grange, Monmouth
Monmouthshire
The Grange is a Grade II group within Monmouth’s walls whose evolution from farmhouse site to preparatory school and boarding house reflects the to…
- Near Monmouth
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
The Leper Hospital of St Giles
Essex
Maldon’s Hospital of St Giles preserves rare fabric from a medieval institution that moved from leper care to wider poor relief before becoming a f…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
The Mint (Carlingford)
County Louth
A merchant's fortified townhouse whose carved street-facing windows preserve a rare burst of Celtic-revival ornament on an otherwise plain defensiv…
- Near Carlingford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
The More
Hertfordshire
A Tudor palace so magnificent a French ambassador rated it above Hampton Court, and the refuge chosen for Catherine of Aragon after her marriage wa…
- Near St Albans
-
Sacred place · Medieval
The Priory, Pebworth
Worcestershire
A Tudor stone fireplace and a 17th-century staircase are the surviving seams joining a house to an older monastic property once tied to Evesham Abbey.
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
The Procurator's House, Magor
Monmouthshire
The Procurator’s House is one of only two known British sites of its kind, a rare Magor ruin that reveals medieval ecclesiastical landholding and l…
- Near Magor
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
The Rose (theatre)
Greater London
The Rose was Bankside’s first playhouse and an early stage for Shakespeare and Marlowe; its 1989 rediscovery transformed a threatened development s…
- Near Winchester
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
The Tinkers' Heart
Argyll and Bute
A heart of twenty-six quartz pebbles laid in a Loch Fyne field is, on current research, the only known permanent physical memorial to Scotland's Tr…
- Near Cairndow
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thelsford Priory
Warwickshire
A small friary: a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them: near the Avon, its endowment built up acre by ac…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Theobalds House
Hertfordshire
A house built to flatter a queen became so favoured by her successor that James I chose to die within its walls, and its Elizabethan splendour was…
- Near St Albans
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thetford Castle
Norfolk
Thetford Castle’s motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) is England’s second-largest man-made mound, preserving the dramatic core of a Bi…
- Near Thetford
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thetford Priory
Norfolk
Thetford Priory was a leading Cluniac house of East Anglia, founded by Roger Bigod and later a pilgrimage centre and burial place for the Howards a…
- Near Thetford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thicket Priory
North Yorkshire
A medieval nunnery vanished twice over: demolished in 1850, then quietly reborn as a Carmelite monastery in 2009, on the same wooded estate south-e…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thirlwall Castle
Northumberland
Thirlwall Castle survives as a Border tower strengthened with Hadrian’s Wall stone, its ruin linking Roman material to later medieval defence.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thirsk Castle
North Yorkshire
Deliberately levelled by royal order in 1176, its stone is said to have gone straight into the parish church still standing in the town today.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thoby Priory
Essex
Thoby Priory traces an Augustinian community from a 12th-century foundation through Wolsey’s educational programme to a site reshaped by mansion bu…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thoor Ballylee
County Galway
The tower where W. B. Yeats wrote some of his best-known poetry, once called by Seamus Heaney 'the most important public building in Ireland.'
- Near Gort
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Thornborough Bridge
Buckinghamshire
Thornborough’s six-arched stone bridge is Buckinghamshire’s only surviving medieval road bridge, retaining pedestrian refuges and the parish-bounda…
- Near Thornborough
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thornbury Castle
Gloucestershire
Built as a residence for the wealthiest noble in England, it was left unfinished when its owner was executed for plotting against the Tudor crown.
- Near Gloucester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thorney Abbey
Cambridgeshire
A Fenland abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) whose Anglo-Saxon community was thought so holy that at least a dozen saints came to…
- Near Thorney
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Thornhill Hall
West Yorkshire
Excavation found two halls on this moated island: a thirteenth-century building and an H-plan stone one of about 1450.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thornholme Priory
Lincolnshire
Thornholme Priory was a mid-twelfth-century Augustinian house in the Ancholme carrs, preserved today as a scheduled monument (legally protected as…
- Near Broughton
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thornton Abbey
Lincolnshire
England's largest surviving monastic gatehouse, built in an early experiment with brick, guards a plague pit that made archaeological history.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thorpe Waterville Castle
Northamptonshire
A bishop built this fortified manor with timber stolen from a neighbouring abbey's woods: then it was besieged in the Wars of the Roses and finally…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Threave Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Threave Castle is a powerful record of Black Douglas lordship in Galloway, combining a 14th-century tower house with one of Britain’s earliest purp…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Throwley Old Hall
Staffordshire
A ruined stately home near Calton and the River Manifold, listed Grade II*.
- Near Calton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thurleigh Castle
Bedfordshire
An earthen motte with a rare two-tier summit and one of the largest, most irregular baileys of any English castle of its kind: yet almost nothing o…
- Near Thurleigh
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Thurnham Castle
Kent
Thurnham Castle, or Godard’s Castle, preserves the flint bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) wall of a small 12th-century North Downs f…
- Near Thurnham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tibbers Castle
Dumfries and Galloway
Tibbers Castle preserves a rare Scottish example of a timber earthwork (banks and ditches raised from the earth rather than quarried stone) castle…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tickford Priory
Buckinghamshire
Not a ruin but a lived-in house: a listed obelisk and riverside gazebo in its grounds mark a Cluniac priory, a monastery headed by a prior rather t…
- Near Newport Pagnell
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tickhill Castle
South Yorkshire
A private house behind a fortified Norman gatehouse conceals one of King John's two chief strongholds against a feared French invasion.
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tideslow Rake
Derbyshire
Its lead-poisoned soil, hostile to almost all ordinary plant life, instead hosts a rare community of metal-tolerant plants and lichens found in few…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tilbury Fort
Essex
Tilbury Fort is the Thames defence where Tudor invasion fears became a major 17th-century star fort, later a magazine and military logistics base f…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tilty Abbey
Essex
Tilty Abbey preserves a Cistercian church that survived the 1536 Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) by becoming a p…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Timoleague Friary
County Cork
A friary: a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them: burnt in 1642 with a thousand barrels of Spanish wine…
- Near Timoleague
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tinnakill Castle
County Laois
Its four-storey limestone walls hide a double puzzle: a construction date disputed across two centuries, and a carved figure removed and lost witho…
- Near Portarlington
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tintagel Castle
Cornwall
Tintagel Castle unites a fifth- and sixth-century elite settlement with a thirteenth-century Cornish castle and one of Britain’s most influential A…
- Near Tintagel
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tintern Abbey
Monmouthshire
Tintern Abbey was Wales’s first Cistercian foundation and remains one of its defining medieval ruins, where 400 years of monastic life meet the Wye…
- Near Tintern
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tintern Abbey, County Wexford
County Wexford
A monastery founded from fear at sea rather than piety alone: its name, 'Tintern de Voto', still records the vow that built it.
- Near New Ross
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tiptree Priory
Essex
Tiptree Priory links a modest Augustinian foundation to Wolsey’s short-lived educational endowments and to the red-brick Elizabethan house that rep…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Titchfield Abbey
Hampshire
A minor monastery whose canons built one of medieval England's largest libraries, then became the private house where a royal marriage and a Shakes…
- Near Titchfield
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tithe Barn, Maidstone
Kent
This is medieval agricultural infrastructure at civic scale: a palace storehouse that became stables and then Britain’s first carriage museum.
- Near Maidstone
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tiverton Castle
Devon
Tiverton Castle preserves a Norman and Courtenay stronghold whose dramatic 1645 capture ended its military role and led to its transformation into…
- Near Tiverton
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Toddington Castle
Bedfordshire
A grass-covered mound in a Bedfordshire village still carries the folk memory of an 'old woman' frying pancakes underground, layered over the real…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tolquhon Castle
Aberdeenshire
Built for show rather than defence, its gatehouse still carries the founder-laird's own inscription naming the exact day in 1589 he finished the work.
- Near Tarves
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tomen y Rhodwydd
Denbighshire
A princely stronghold thrown up in a single year of conquest and burned within a decade: its earthworks still mark the moment Owain Gwynedd tore th…
- Near Denbigh
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tomen yr Allt
Powys
A timber castle burnt in 1257, whose destruction shows up as daub and a scorched layer in a 1978 excavation.
- Near Llanfyllin
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tonbridge Castle
Kent
Tonbridge makes Norman conquest tangible through a siege-scarred Medway stronghold whose 1260 gatehouse still dominates grounds opened as a public…
- Near Tonbridge
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tong Castle
Shropshire
Capability Brown's first commission in Shropshire. The house was demolished in 1954 and the M54 now runs over the site.
- Near Tong
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tongland Abbey
Dumfries and Galloway
Tongland Abbey records a little-documented Premonstratensian community in Galloway, where uncertain foundation evidence, a troubled late-medieval d…
- Near Newton Stewart
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Topcliffe Castle
North Yorkshire
A Norman motte (the earthen mound a castle was raised on) and bailey (the walled yard below the castle mound) at a river confluence that saw a king…
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Torksey Castle
Lincolnshire
Its brick upper storey was one of the earliest uses of that lavish material in English secular building: yet Royalist soldiers, not enemies of the…
- Near Lincoln
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Torre Abbey
Devon
Torre Abbey is Devon and Cornwall’s best-preserved medieval monastery, combining a Premonstratensian foundation, surviving Grade I fabric and a maj…
- Near Torquay
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Totnes Castle
Devon
Totnes Castle is one of England’s best-preserved Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower raised on a mound with a walled cour…
- Near Totnes
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Totnes Priory
Devon
Totnes Priory was a Norman foundation of the feudal baron of Totnes, documented by a surviving c.1087 charter and connected to the town’s early med…
- Near Totnes
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Totnes Trinitarian Priory
Devon
Totnes Trinitarian Priory preserves the limited but tangible remains of a medieval Trinitarian house in the town, with chapel ruins surviving after…
- Near Totnes
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Tottenham High Cross
Greater London
Tottenham High Cross marks the historic centre of Tottenham village on the line of Ermine Street, replacing a medieval wayside cross and preserving…
- Near Tottenham
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Totternhoe Castle
Bedfordshire
A rare double-bailey layout cut into a chalk hillside: an unusual arrangement for an English motte-and-bailey castle, an early Norman stronghold wi…
- Near Totternhoe
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Totternhoe Knolls
Bedfordshire
A single hillside reserve holds a Norman castle's earthworks, chalk grassland rich in rare orchids, and the quarry that once supplied stone for Wes…
- Near Totternhoe
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tower of London
Greater London
Founded during the Norman Conquest, the Tower of London is both a formidable royal fortress and an evolving national institution: palace, prison, m…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Traquair House
Scottish Borders
Its Bear Gates have stood locked since the eighteenth century under a vow never to reopen them: a promise the family has kept for more than two hun…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Treago Castle
Herefordshire
Mason's marks cut into its stone match those at Raglan Castle and trace to William Herbert, 1st Earl of Pembroke's workshop: physical evidence link…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tredustan Castle
Powys
A mound raised within a year of the Norman victory at Brecon, to hold down the district it stands in.
- Near Talgarth
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Treen Cliff
Cornwall
A protected Penwith cliffscape where a scheduled prehistoric (before any written account of Britain existed) cliff castle shares ground with rare m…
- Near Penzance
- Rough ground
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Treffry Viaduct
Cornwall
A 100-foot Cornish mining viaduct that carried both tramway and water power across Luxulyan Valley, binding quarries, mines and harbour into one in…
- Near Bodmin
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tregantle Fort
Cornwall
A Palmerston fort above the Channel approaches to Plymouth, built for 35 guns and still used for military training more than 160 years later.
- Near Looe
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tregrug Castle
Monmouthshire
The bailey here, at 164 by 78 metres, is the largest single enclosure of any castle in England and Wales: yet recent scholarship reads it not as a…
- Near Abergavenny
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Trematon Castle
Cornwall
Trematon Castle is a striking Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongside) ab…
- Near Saltash
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Trentham Priory
Staffordshire
A priory that claimed a seventh-century Saxon founder it probably never had: and whose tower may be standing in Derbyshire.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tresco Priory
Cornwall
Tresco Priory records more than five centuries of monastic life in the Isles of Scilly, alongside the vulnerability of an island community to pirac…
- Near Tresco
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tretower Castle
Powys
A round keep built inside an older shell keep, with the gap between them roofed over: and abandoned because the family preferred the house next door.
- Near Tretower
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tretower Court
Powys
A castle that turned into a house, and survived because nothing ever happened to it: until it became a piggery.
- Near Tretower
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Triermain Castle
Cumbria
A minor Cumbrian stronghold whose stone came straight from Hadrian's Wall, and whose lord's name found its way into Coleridge's gothic poem "Christ…
- Near Carlisle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Trim Castle
County Meath
Trim Castle’s unique twenty-cornered great tower grew from de Lacy’s Boyne crossing stronghold into Ireland’s most ambitious Norman castle complex.
- Near Trim
- Some walking
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Trinity Bridge, Crowland
Lincolnshire
Built to cross two rivers at their fork, this medieval three-way bridge has stood over dry ground for more than three centuries since the waters it…
- Near Lincoln
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tristernagh Abbey
County Westmeath
Its own stone was pulled down to build a private house whose slow ruin was reputedly the model for Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent.
- Near Mullingar
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Trowbridge Castle
Wiltshire
Nothing of the fortress stands above ground today, yet its ditch still bends Trowbridge's main street around a shape laid out nine centuries ago.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tullynally Castle
County Westmeath
The Pakenham family who built it are tied by marriage to the Duke of Wellington, and the house they left behind is still the largest in private han…
- Near Castlepollard
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tupholme Abbey
Lincolnshire
Tupholme’s surviving refectory: the monks' dining hall: wall preserves a rare, legible fragment of a small Premonstratensian house shaped by the Wi…
- Near Tupholme
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Turnberry Castle
South Ayrshire
Robert the Bruce grew up here and ordered it destroyed in 1310, so the English could not have it. Nobody rebuilt it.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tutbury Castle
Staffordshire
Slighted twice, rebuilt as a princely household, used to hold Mary Queen of Scots, and finally pulled down by order of Parliament.
- Near Tutbury
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Twizell Castle
Northumberland
A castle on a bend of the River Till at Tillmouth Park, protected by law for its architecture and its archaeology.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Twmpath Castle
Cardiff
Once the third-largest motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) in the medieval Lordship of Glamorgan, it held one link in an…
- Near Cardiff
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Twthill, Rhuddlan
denbighshire
The Norman earthwork that held North Wales before Edward I's stone castle replaced it 300 yards away: with a borough, a church and a mint beside it…
- Near Denbigh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tynemouth Priory and Castle
Tyne and Wear
Three kings are buried on this promontory, and North Tyneside's heraldry carries three crowns to say so.
- Near Tynemouth
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tyrrellspass Castle
County Westmeath
The only Tyrrell castle to survive, and the namesake of the 1597 battle that gave the town its name: now a working restaurant with a 1280 roof beam…
- Near Tyrrellspass
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ulverscroft Priory
Leicestershire
A community that grew from three canons to nine and a prior, then talked its way past the 1536 axe that felled the other small houses before fallin…
- Near Ulverscroft
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Union Chain Bridge
Northumberland
The Union Chain Bridge’s 1820 span is the world’s oldest road-carrying suspension bridge, making an Anglo-Scottish crossing a landmark of engineeri…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Up Holland Priory
Lancashire
Up Holland Priory preserves a rare line of continuity from a 1319 Benedictine foundation to a living parish church within protected medieval remains.
- Near Upholland
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Upavon Priory
Wiltshire
A modest daughter house of a Norman abbey that left almost nothing behind: not ruins, but a single farm barn, itself pulled down two centuries ago.
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Upminster Tithe Barn
Greater London
Known as Upminster Tithe Barn but more accurately a medieval grange barn, this timber-framed agricultural building preserves Waltham Abbey’s 15th-c…
- Near Upminster
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Upnor Castle
Kent
Upnor Castle guarded Chatham’s Medway anchorage, endured the 1667 Dutch raid, and then became one of England’s leading naval ammunition depots.
- Near Upnor
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Upsall Castle
North Yorkshire
Upsall Castle preserves the fragmented remains of a Scrope quadrangular castle, revealing how fortification, family succession and reuse reshaped o…
- Easy path
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Upthorpe Mill, Stanton
Suffolk
Painted grey during the war so it would not serve as a landmark for aircraft: RAF Shepherds Grove was close by.
- Near Stanton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Upton Castle
Pembrokeshire
A fortified mansion near a creek of the Cleddau whose chapel is older than the castle, and whose gardens outlived two owners, a national park and a…
- Near Cosheston
- Easy path
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Upton Cressett medieval settlement
Shropshire
A deserted medieval village beside the surviving hamlet of Upton Cressett.
- Near Upton Cressett
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Urishay Castle
Herefordshire
A fifteenth-century room from this ruin was shipped to Kansas and rebuilt inside a university library, while the chapel's altar with its five carve…
- Near Peterchurch
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Urishay Castle Chapel
Herefordshire
Raised in the bailey of a Herefordshire castle in the early 12th century, it is likely the county's earliest purpose-built castle chapel: and still…
- Near Peterchurch
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Urquhart Castle
Highland
Blown up in 1692 to deny it to Jacobite forces, its shattered gatehouse and leaning tower still mark almost four centuries of siege along the Great…
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Usk Bridge (Brecon)
Powys
A Tudor bridge widened in every century since, with a 1950s concrete bed its own record calls extremely ugly.
- Near Brecon
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Usk Castle
Monmouthshire
A private family home built inside the ruins of a Marcher stronghold, with disarmed WWII naval mines standing as garden ornaments beside a medieval…
- Near Abergavenny
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Vale Royal Abbey
Cheshire
At Vale Royal, a royal Cistercian foundation survives chiefly through fragments folded into a later house, with excavated foundations marking the s…
- Near Northwich
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Valle Crucis Abbey
Denbighshire
The last Cistercian monastery ever founded in Wales, its west front and rose-window masonry still standing over the only surviving monastic fishpon…
- Near Bakewell
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Vaudey Abbey
Lincolnshire
A Cistercian house that grew rich on wool and sent its abbot on royal business to the Prince of Wales, yet today survives only as earthworks inside…
- Near Lincoln
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wakefield Castle
West Yorkshire
A motte: the earthen mound a castle was raised on: and two baileys in a Wakefield park, probably built without royal permission and abandoned befor…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Walden Castle
Essex
Walden Castle is a rare physical trace of the Anarchy in Essex, showing how Geoffrey de Mandeville used castles to control territory before royal p…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wallingford Castle
Oxfordshire
A castle so strong it was never taken by force in nearly six centuries of use: only surrendered by treaty or siege attrition, then deliberately lev…
- Near Wallingford
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wallingford Priory
Oxfordshire
A small Berkshire cell of St Albans Abbey trained two abbots and produced Richard of Wallingford, the monk-scientist whose astronomical clock desig…
- Near Wallingford
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wallingwells Priory
Nottinghamshire
A tiny Benedictine nunnery whose unusually complete roll of prioresses and pensions after Henry VIII’s closure of the monasteries in the 1530s pres…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Walmer Castle
Kent
Walmer Castle is a Henrician artillery fort transformed into the official residence of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and a major historic gar…
- Near Walmer
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Walsingham Friary
Norfolk
A Franciscan house founded in 1347, Walsingham Friary preserves the outline of a distinct community in a town better known for its Marian shrine.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Walsingham Priory
Norfolk
Walsingham Priory was a major Marian pilgrimage site, built around the Holy House; royal visitors, Erasmus, its 1538 closure and a lasting ballad t…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Waltham Abbey Church
Essex
Waltham Abbey Church preserves the Norman nave: the main western space where the congregation stood: of a pilgrimage abbey that was the last religi…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Walworth Castle
County Durham
A working manor house rebuilt almost entirely around 1600 while keeping one medieval tower: and the only County Durham castle where a Scottish king…
- Near Darlington
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Warblington Castle
Hampshire
A single octagonal turret, deliberately spared by its Parliamentarian besiegers as a landmark for ships in Langstone Channel, is almost all that re…
- Near Winchester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wardon Abbey
Bedfordshire
A single Tudor wing standing alone in a Bedfordshire field is almost all that remains above ground of one of England's senior Cistercian houses, wh…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wardour Castle
Wiltshire
Under siege for five days in 1643, its 61-year-old chatelaine held it with only twenty-five men: the ruin standing today is the mark of two wartime…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wareham Castle and town defences
Dorset
Wareham’s Walls and Castle preserve a major Anglo-Saxon burh, a Norman motte-and-bailey (a Norman earth-and-timber castle, a tower on a mound besid…
- Near Wareham
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wark on Tweed Castle
Northumberland
A ruined castle raised around an earthen mound at the west end of the village, known also as Carham Castle.
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Warkworth Castle
Northumberland
Warkworth Castle’s Percy keep, river-loop setting and later restoration show how a border stronghold became the defining landmark of a Northumbrian…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Warwick Castle
Warwickshire
Fortified against the Danes in 914, held a king prisoner in 1469, and nearly lost altogether to a fire in 1871.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wat's Dyke
Wrexham
A second great frontier earthwork running alongside Offa's Dyke, judged the more sophisticated of the two: now mostly a hedge line and a cropmark.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Watch Hill Castle
Greater Manchester
Watch Hill Castle is Trafford’s only scheduled monument: legally protected for its archaeological importance: : a well-defined medieval castle moun…
- Near Bowdon
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Waterbeach Abbey
Cambridgeshire
One of only two English Franciscan nunneries founded directly from Longchamp Abbey in France, undone within sixty years not by decline but by the r…
- Near Waterbeach
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Waterden medieval settlement
Norfolk
Waterden is a scheduled deserted medieval village whose tax records trace decline without a decisive Black Death shock, while streets, green, homes…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wattlesborough Castle
Shropshire
A ruined thirteenth-century fortified manor house standing within a moated enclosure near the Powys boundary.
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Waverley Abbey
Surrey
England's first Cistercian house, founded 1128: yet so poorly endowed its monks recorded famine even as it mothered four daughter abbeys.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Waytemore Castle
Hertfordshire
A deliberate valley-floor stronghold rather than a hilltop one, built to hold a river crossing: and the only English bishop's castle King John chos…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Weeting Castle
Norfolk
Weeting Castle is a rare surviving twelfth-century high-status manor house, not a true fortress: its keep (the castle's main tower, and its stronge…
- Near Weeting
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Welbeck Abbey
Nottinghamshire
A former Premonstratensian monastery transformed into a ducal estate, where monastic fabric survives inside the home that made Welbeck a centre of…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Wellbrook Beetling Mill
County Tyrone
Wellbrook Beetling Mill is the UK’s last publicly accessible working beetling mill, preserving water-powered linen finishing on the Ballinderry River.
- Near Cookstown
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wemyss Caves
Fife
Wemyss Caves preserve rare northern symbols from the period after Roman rule, Christian carvings and evidence of ritual use along Fife’s coast.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wendling Abbey
Norfolk
Wendling Abbey was a Premonstratensian house with a far-reaching Norfolk estate, close links to Prémontré, a repeatedly documented struggle to main…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wenlock Priory
Shropshire
A priory that nearly became a cathedral in 1540: and whose church was pulled down instead, leaving a south transept, the side arm that crosses the…
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Wensley Bridge
North Yorkshire
Four stone arches of three distinct dates and shapes sit side by side across the River Ure, funded by a medieval lord's will and rebuilt piecemeal…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wentworth Castle
South Yorkshire
A rejected heir's revenge in stone: built to outshine the rival estate six miles away that should have been his, its Baroque east front still start…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wenvoe Castle
Vale of Glamorgan
Robert Adam's only building in Wales. A fire in 1910 destroyed most of it; what was restored is now a golf clubhouse.
- Near Wenvoe
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Weobley Castle, Gower
Swansea
A fourteenth-century fortified manor above the Llanrhidian saltmarshes, with a hall recess made for hanging tapestry.
- Near Llanrhidian
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Weobley Castle, Herefordshire
Herefordshire
Its owners' 1208 defiance of King John here cost the de Lacy dynasty every castle they held, from Ludlow to Trim in Ireland.
- Near Weobley
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Weoley Castle (house)
West Midlands
A single moated platform on the edge of Birmingham carries a thousand years of continuous building, from a possible Anglo-Saxon shrine to a license…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
West Acre Priory
Norfolk
West Acre Priory preserves a rare Grade I monastic gatehouse whose heraldry records de Toni and Warwick connections, while its 1538 closure and unr…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
West Derby Castle
Merseyside
West Derby Castle was the Norman predecessor to Liverpool Castle, and its buried remains chart how the foundation of Liverpool shifted military and…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
West Dereham Abbey
Norfolk
West Dereham Abbey was a large, wealthy Premonstratensian house founded by Hubert Walter at his birthplace, whose late-medieval teaching reforms, c…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
West Ravendale Priory
Lincolnshire
Only earthworks and scattered rubble now mark a priory, a monastery run by a prior, whose ownership passed from a Breton abbey, a monastery headed…
- Near Lincoln
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
West Tarr Mediaeval House
Pembrokeshire
A small vaulted medieval house south of St Florence that four separate authorities classify four different ways: including one that says it was nev…
- Near St Florence
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Westenhanger Castle
Kent
Westenhanger Castle is a rare fortified quadrangular manor with royal associations, Armada-era command use and a continuing programme of conservation.
- Near Westenhanger
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Westgate, Canterbury
Kent
Westgate condenses Canterbury’s Roman approach, medieval fear of invasion and four centuries of imprisonment into the largest surviving city gate i…
- Near Canterbury
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Westminster Abbey
Greater London
Westminster Abbey has been the setting for English and British coronations since 1066 and is a national burial place, but it is also a living royal…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Weston Turville Castle
Buckinghamshire
Deliberately destroyed on royal orders in the 1170s, its earthworks survived so intact that a rescue dig only found them in 1985, when a swimming p…
- Near Weston Turville
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Westwood Priory
Worcestershire
A small Worcestershire priory tied by obedience to Fontevraud Abbey, the Loire monastery where Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionh…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wetheral Priory Gatehouse
Cumbria
English Heritage rates it the finest medieval gatehouse in Cumbria: and it survived only because Henry VIII's men found little else worth keeping.
- Easy path
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Wetherby Bridge
West Yorkshire
A thirteenth-century bridge over the Wharfe whose repair bills have been argued over for seven hundred years, from a toll granted in 1315 to a maso…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Weybourne Priory
Norfolk
Weybourne Priory's Saxon tower and church-adjacent ruins trace a shift from West Acre dependency to independence, a sharply shrinking community and…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Whalley Abbey
Lancashire
A working monastery relocated wholesale after three disasters at its old home, then rebuilt over 150 years into one of the largest Cistercian house…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Wharram Percy
North Yorkshire
A whole medieval village vanished here, leaving only a roofless church and grass-grown house platforms: the excavation that first taught archaeolog…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wherwell Abbey
Hampshire
A community of Benedictine nuns that grew, under one determined abbess, to eighty strong and left behind a psalter now kept at Cambridge: one of th…
- Near Winchester
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Whimpton Village
Nottinghamshire
Walkable earthworks preserve the street, house plots and moated homestead of a Domesday settlement that vanished so completely it was recorded as a…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Whistones Priory
Shropshire
A Cistercian nunnery whose surrender was never recorded: but which gave a Worcestershire village the name White Ladies Aston.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Whitby Abbey
North Yorkshire
A ruined church on the East Cliff that hosted the 664 Synod deciding how all of England would date Easter, then gave Bram Stoker the setting for Dr…
- Some walking
-
Carved stone · Medieval
Whitby Abbey Cross
North Yorkshire
A fluted medieval shaft still standing on Whitby's Abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) Plain, possibly the very 'great cross' named in the town'…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
White Castle, Monmouthshire
Monmouthshire
One of three castles built to guard a single Marches valley, its curtain walls and moat-ringed towers survive almost complete: a rare, undisturbed…
- Near Abergavenny
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
White Ladies Priory
Shropshire
Charles II hid here after Worcester in 1651. Nobody knows who founded it: no layman ever claimed the right to name its prioress.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
White Tower (Tower of London)
Greater London
The White Tower is the monumental Norman keep at the heart of the Tower of London: a royal residence, fortress and later armoury whose scale, chape…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Whitefriars, Coventry
West Midlands
One surviving cloister range carries four centuries of reuse under a single roof: friary, Tudor mansion, grammar school and workhouse: with both El…
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Whitewell Ruins
Pembrokeshire
Three ruined medieval structures on the edge of Penally, all Grade I listed, all scheduled, and all now surrounded by a caravan park.
- Near Penally
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Whitland Abbey
Carmarthenshire
The Cistercian house whose monks went out to found three more Welsh abbeys, and the place where a blinded prince chose to live out his final years…
- Near Whitland
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Whittington Castle
Shropshire
A Marcher castle whose outer bailey held two water gardens in the fourteenth century: with a viewing mound that may be the oldest of its kind in En…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Whorlton Castle
North Yorkshire
A motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower)-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a wal…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wicklow Friary
County Wicklow
Excavations in 2022–23 uncovered the remains of several friars beneath the ruined church: a rare direct encounter with the community that once pray…
- Near Wicklow
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Widdrington Castle
Northumberland
Widdrington Castle’s vanished tower survives in engravings and earthworks, linking royal visits, Jacobite forfeiture and centuries of rebuilding to…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wigmore Abbey
Herefordshire
Burial place of five Earls of March and the Mortimer dynasty that once contended for the English throne: later the private home of a television star.
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wigmore Abbey Grange
Herefordshire
A working farmhouse that began as an abbot's private lodging, carrying Norman stonework and three centuries of separately listed farm buildings beh…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wigmore Castle
Herefordshire
Left in private hands, it escaped the tidying-up that stripped most great English castles bare: what survives is a genuinely wild ruin, not a manic…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Willoughton Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Not a minor outpost: this was the richest of all the English Templar houses, and its estate outlived the order itself by two centuries, passing thr…
- Near Lincoln
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Willoughton Priory
Lincolnshire
Nothing built here survives above ground, yet the earthworks alone preserve the outline of a French abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an…
- Near Lincoln
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wilmington Priory
East Sussex
Wilmington Priory records how a small Norman Benedictine cell became a fortified agricultural grange, then a secular estate and carefully conserved…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wilton Abbey
Wiltshire
For over a century its abbess held an entire barony from the crown, one of only four English nunneries with that status, and its cloister (the cove…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wilton Castle
Herefordshire
In 1292 a widow lied to a king about this castle's age to claim rights it never held: the real history, of Marcher lords, ransom, and civil-war rui…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wimborne Minster (church)
Dorset
Wimborne Minster is a 1,300-year religious landmark, notable for its Saxon royal associations, Norman fabric, astronomical clock and one of the wor…
- Near Wimborne Minster
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wimpole's Folly
Cambridgeshire
A sham medieval castle built deliberately as a ruin, its four-storey Gothic tower carries a poem shared with a private literary manuscript written…
- Near Wimpole
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Winchcombe Abbey
Gloucestershire
Once one of Mercia's richest monasteries and burial place of a king venerated as a saint, almost nothing survives beyond a stone cross and a scatte…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Winchester Castle
Hampshire
For more than three centuries after the rest of the castle was torn down, its Great Hall alone kept functioning as one of England's most consequent…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Winchester Cathedral Priory
Hampshire
A single community of monks served this cathedral for close to six centuries, surviving Viking attacks and shrinking numbers before Henry VIII clos…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Windsor Castle
Berkshire
Nearly a millennium of continuous royal occupation on one chalk mound above the Thames: the longest-occupied palace in Europe, rebuilt again and ag…
- Easy path
-
Settlement · Medieval
Winterborne Farringdon
Dorset
Winterborne Farringdon is a deserted medieval village whose platforms, enclosures, tracks, lynchets and church remnant preserve the footprint of a…
- Near Dorchester
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wisbech Castle
Cambridgeshire
A Norman stronghold rebuilt as a bishop's palace, then a notorious prison holding future Gunpowder Plotters, before vanishing entirely under a Rege…
- Near Wisbech
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wiston Castle
Pembrokeshire
A castle of earth mound and walled yard in the Pembrokeshire village of the same name.
- Near Wiston
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Witham Charterhouse
Somerset
Witham Charterhouse was England's earliest Carthusian house, founded by Henry II as penance and now preserved through parish use, earthworks and fi…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Witham Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Excavation uncovered the full plan of a working Templar farmstead of eighteen buildings: barns, kilns, a hall keep and a rare rectangular chapel, u…
- Near Lincoln
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Withyham Priory
East Sussex
A Sussex estate run for over three centuries by a lone monk answering to a Norman abbey: until the Hundred Years' War made such cross-Channel loyal…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Witton Castle
County Durham
A fortified manor licensed in 1410 that survived a devastating 1796 fire only to be rebuilt as a Georgian showpiece, and now serves as the clubhous…
- Near Bishop Auckland
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Woburn Abbey
Bedfordshire
A Cistercian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) pulled down by its own owners and rebuilt three times over, yet the family that dissolve…
- Near Woburn
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wolston Priory
Warwickshire
A small alien priory: a religious house led by a prior, a rank below an abbot: whose rectory became the farmhouse where some of the Martin Marprela…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wolvesey Castle
Hampshire
A bishop's fortified palace on a river island, besieged twice in real medieval wars and later the venue for a royal wedding breakfast.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wombridge Priory
Shropshire
A solvent priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: dissolved for being small, whose church became a coach house and then a catt…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Woodspring Priory
Somerset
Woodspring Priory preserves a rare Victorine religious complex whose church, infirmary and barn chart medieval devotion, farming and post-Dissoluti…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Woodwalton Castle
Cambridgeshire
A castle whose builder was never recorded, yet whose earthworks: moat, bailey and mound, plus fishponds: still trace a working residence born out o…
- Near Woodwalton
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wootton Wawen Priory
Warwickshire
A priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: of one prior and one monk, granted to King's College Cambridge in 1443, with nothing…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Worcester Castle
Worcestershire
Built by cutting into the cathedral's graveyard, the castle drew a formal curse from an archbishop, and later held its own king prisoner during a b…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Worcester Cathedral
Worcestershire
A working cathedral since 680 that still buries a king between two vanished saints' shrines, beneath a Norman crypt no later rebuilding ever touched.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Worksop Priory
Nottinghamshire
The surviving main body of the parish church keeps alive an Augustinian monastic community whose manuscripts, including the Worksop Bestiary and Ti…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wormegay Castle
Norfolk
Wormegay’s large castle mound and outer enclosure commanded a Fen causeway and headed an East Anglian estate whose holders owed castle-guard servic…
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Wortley Top Forge
South Yorkshire
Only ever powered by water. All three of its waterwheels have been restored to working order.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wressle Castle
East Riding of Yorkshire
A great lord's palace built to impress rather than defend, its four towers and gatehouse still stand witness to a family that fell and rose again w…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wroxton Abbey
Oxfordshire
A Jacobean house west of Banbury, its 1727 garden partly reworked in the serpentine style after 1731.
- Near Wroxton
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Wycoller Hall
Lancashire
Wycoller Hall is a Grade II* listed manor-house ruin whose Cunliffe family history, nineteenth-century dismantling and later conservation preserve…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wymondham Abbey
Norfolk
Wymondham Abbey's d’Aubigny foundation, difficult shared use, 1449 independence and partial sixteenth-century destruction explain how a monastic ch…
- Near Wymondham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wymondley Castle
Hertfordshire
A grassed-over motte, the earthen mound a castle was raised on, and bailey, the defended yard attached to the mound, tied to a wider group of castl…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wyresdale Abbey
Lancashire
A Cistercian house that barely lasted a generation before folding back into its mother house at Furness: yet it left a village bearing its name.
- Near Abbeystead
-
Fortified place · Roman
Y Gaer
Powys
A cavalry fort held for three centuries by Spanish horsemen, quarried in 1093 to build Brecon Castle: and still standing three metres high in places.
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Yarmouth Castle
Isle of Wight
Yarmouth Castle is Henry VIII’s pioneering artillery fort, the first English example of an arrow-head bastion and a long-lived guardian of the Sole…
- Near Yarmouth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Yattendon Castle
Berkshire
A dropped handkerchief at a 1520 dance here became courtroom evidence in the Anne Boleyn trial sixteen years later: the earthworks are almost all t…
- Near Yattendon
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Yester Castle
East Lothian
Yester is remembered for its extraordinary underground Goblin Ha’, a surviving medieval hall bound to the enduring folklore of the ‘Wizard of Yester’.
- Near Dunbar
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Yielden Castle
Bedfordshire
A double-baileyed stronghold of the Trailly family for over a century, now reduced to a grassed mound whose buried stone curtain was only confirmed…
- Near Yelden
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
York Castle
North Yorkshire
A single motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle) has carried a wooden fort, a quatrefoil stone keep, a Georgian jail and a Vi…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
York Franciscan Friary
North Yorkshire
A friary that once housed medieval nobility now survives as a single stone wall: one of the few physical traces of York's four medieval friaries to…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
York Minster
North Yorkshire
Built in stages between 1220 and 1472, it is the largest cathedral completed anywhere during the Gothic period, its east window alone holding the l…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Youghal Priory
County Cork
Oliver Cromwell made this decommissioned hospital-monastery his personal headquarters through the winter of 1649, turning a building built for pray…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Yr Hen Gapel, Llanybri
Carmarthenshire
Believed to be the only Welsh church ever converted from Anglican to non-conformist worship: a reversal contemporaries themselves called remarkable.
- Near Llanybri
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ystrad Peithyll
Ceredigion
A Norman motte thrown up on the River Peithyll and burned out by Welsh rebels within a few years: a fortification whose failure is as telling as it…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Zouches Manor
Cambridgeshire
One of five historic manors packed into a single Cambridgeshire village, its documented life spans 1066 to 1539 and threads together a Breton earl,…
- Near Cambridge
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More places
Briefer entries: recorded and worth knowing, with fuller pages to come.
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Boa Island
Fermanagh
Boa Island concentrates prehistoric (predating the written record in Britain) stone figures, early Christian burial ground and a tidal-lough landsc…
- Near Kesh
- Easy path
-
Ancient tree · Medieval
Bruce Tree
West Dunbartonshire
An oak said to have been planted by Robert the Bruce, burnt down by an arsonist in May 2004: and then cut up and carved into a replica of his throne.
- Near West Dunbartonshire
-
Ancient tree · Medieval
Eppie Callum's Oak
Argyll and Bute
Eppie Callum’s Oak is a named living landmark whose value lies in the survival of local landscape memory, even though its age and namesake remain u…
- Near Argyll and Bute
-
Ancient tree · Medieval
Robert the Bruce Yew
Argyll and Bute
The Robert the Bruce Yew preserves a royal association in local tradition while clearly separating that enduring landscape memory from any unverifi…
- Near Arrochar
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Ayton Castle
Scottish Borders
A dated panel above the door reads 1745, or possibly 1743: inserted, it seems, to mark the completion of repairs to the 653 nesting boxes inside.
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Carloonan, Inveraray Castle Estate
Argyll and Bute
The Carloonan dovecot: a stone house for pigeons, kept for winter meat: survives within the designed estate landscape of Inveraray Castle.
- Near Inveraray
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Dovecot, Megginch Castle
Perth and Kinross
The weathervane on top is a model of the East Indiaman General Elliot, which Captain Robert Drummond commanded from her launch in 1783: at the age…
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Castle Street, Aberdeen
Aberdeen City
Aberdeen’s 1686 market cross combines royal and civic carving with a gilt unicorn, preserving the burgh’s public trading and ceremonial centre thro…
- Near Aberdeen
- Easy path
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Church Street, Cromarty
Highland
Cromarty’s market cross, the stone cross marking a burgh’s right to hold a market, preserves a rare civic document in stone: its 1578 shaft and Geo…
- Near Cromarty
- Easy path
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Drumlanrig Street, Thornhill
Dumfries and Galloway
Thornhill’s 1714 Pegasus-topped cross was planned with the village road, making its column a surviving civic centre despite relocation and later re…
- Near Thornhill
- Easy path
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, High Street, Airth
Falkirk
Airth Mercat Cross is a 1697 market marker in the High Street, protected through Category A listing after its former scheduled-monument designation…
- Easy path
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, Prestwick
South Ayrshire
The cross carries its own admission that it is not original: the inscription reads 'Rebuilt 1777'.
- Near Prestwick
- Easy path
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Market Cross, The Square, Cumnock
East Ayrshire
Cumnock’s 1703 market cross combines burgh ceremony, a working sundial and Crighton heraldry, with repairs showing its civic role endured for three…
- Near Cumnock
- Easy path
-
Minor monument · Medieval
Village And Market Cross, Rossie
Perth and Kinross
Two lions and two unicorns share the top of this cross, holding up a ball finial between them.
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Abbey of Woney
County Limerick
In 1205 Theobald Walter, chief butler of Ireland and brother of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, granted the entire "feodum" of Woodenikuwi…
- Near Kildimo
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Abbeydorney Abbey
County Kerry
The Cistercians who settled at Abbeydorney gave their house a Greek name, Kyrie Eleison, or Lord Have Mercy. The choice followed the order's habit…
- Near Abbeydorney
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Aconbury Priory
Herefordshire
A standing church at Aconbury preserves the clearest trace of a vanished priory: a medieval religious house governed by a prior or prioress: founde…
- Near Aconbury
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Adare Friary
County Limerick
Robert Thompson's thumbnail-sized carved mouse sits on the lectern base inside St Nicholas' Church of Ireland parish church in Adare. The small mod…
- Near Adare
- Easy path
-
Settlement · Medieval
Aghaherrish
County Fermanagh
Aghaherrish combines a documented Plantation-era naming record with Boho’s water landscape and a scheduled rath with a counterscarp: the outer slop…
- Near Belcoo
-
Settlement · Medieval
Aghahoorin
County Fermanagh
Aghahoorin preserves Boho’s layered place-name history alongside a scheduled bivallate rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth b…
- Near Belcoo
-
Settlement · Medieval
Aghalislone
County Antrim
Aghalislone contains both a protected rath, a farmstead enclosed by a circular bank and ditch, and barrow, a burial mound, with nearby finds reveal…
- Near Ballycastle
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Aghalunny
County Tyrone
Aghalunny is a Tyrone townland whose protected Fairy Bridge and several Irish name traditions preserve both built and linguistic history.
- Near Coleraine
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Aghalurcher Monastery
County Fermanagh
Aghalurcher preserves a pre-Norman monastic tradition, a fifteenth-century Maguire remodelling and a dispersed sculptural record, making it a key b…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Aghanaglack
County Fermanagh
Aghanaglack concentrates thousands of years of archaeology in one Boho townland: a late Stone Age burial monument, medieval cross, underground cave…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Agivey Abbey
County Londonderry
Agivey Abbey preserves the record of an early monastic site that became a medieval grange before its lands passed to London’s Ironmongers in 1604.
- Near Coleraine
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Aldborough Castle
North Yorkshire
A circular mound called Studforth Hill marks a medieval bank-and-ditch site inside an older Roman townscape. Aldborough Castle was probably a timbe…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Aldermanshaw Priory
Leicestershire
Rubble cottage stonework in Charnwood Forest is the main clue to a monastery already ruined by the mid-fifteenth century. Aldermanshaw Priory was a…
- Near Woodhouse
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Almsworthy Common
Somerset
Almsworthy Common is a small stretch of unenclosed upland on Exmoor, in south-western England, covering roughly half a square kilometre and rising…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Andwell Priory
Hampshire
A rare surviving fragment of an "alien priory": a monastic cell answering to a French mother house: swept away by the political fallout of England'…
- Near Basingstoke
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Annaghdown Abbey
County Galway
Annaghdown Abbey preserves a compact Arroasian foundation beside its cathedral, where surviving church, cloister (the covered walkway round a monas…
- Near Galway
- Easy path
-
Settlement · Medieval
Antiville
County Antrim
Antiville’s excavated house and souterrain (a stone-lined tunnel dug beneath a settlement) show how radiocarbon dating and landscape evidence can o…
- Near Ballycastle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Antrim Castle
County Antrim
Antrim Castle charts four centuries of settler power, Jacobite raiding, Georgian rebuilding and twentieth-century destruction; its surviving garden…
- Near Antrim
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Arbury Priory
Warwickshire
The stones that once formed Arbury Priory were carried away, cut and dressed a second time, and reassembled as a country house. When Sir Edmund And…
- Near Chilvers Coton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ardglass Castle
County Down
Ardglass Castle preserves a fifteenth-century fortified merchant warehouse range within a later country house and golf clubhouse, making harbour co…
- Near Ardglass
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ardtole Church
County Down
Ardtole Church combines a fifteenth-century parish ruin, early-Christian sculpture and a stone souterrain (an underground passage, probably for sto…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Arundel Blackfriars
West Sussex
Structural remains of a Dominican friary: a house of friars who worked among townspeople: still stand in Mill Lane at Arundel, in West Sussex. For…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Arundel Priory
west-sussex
A religious house under a prior, founded in 1102, dissolved in 1380 and replaced on the same site by a college for twenty aged poor men: the buildi…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Aslackby Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Until about 1891 a tower, possibly belonging to the preceptory (a local estate of a military order such as the Knights Templar) church, stood toget…
- Near Aslackby
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Astley Priory
Worcestershire
The only fabric of Astley Priory that survives above ground is the Prior's Well, sitting near the entrance to St Peter's churchyard, and a fragment…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Atherstone Priory
Warwickshire
Before he was crowned, the man who would become Henry VII took communion at an Augustinian religious house in Atherstone on the eve of the Battle o…
- Near Atherstone
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Audley's Castle
County Down
Audley’s Castle is a compact late-medieval tower house whose rooms, bawn and County Down turret form reveal how lesser gentry combined storage, hos…
- Near Strangford
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Augustinian Friary of the Most Holy Trinity, Dublin
County Dublin
The Augustinian Friary of the Most Holy Trinity was medieval Dublin's Augustinian college, later revealed by excavation beneath Temple Bar.
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Augustinian Friary, York
North Yorkshire
A writ of protection issued by Henry III in July 1272 marks the first firm documentary trace of the Augustinian friars in York. Their house stood i…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Austin Friars, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Tyne and Wear
Founded about 1290, dissolved about 1540, and the site afterwards held hospitals, prisons, guild houses, a gas company and a barber surgeons' hall.
- Near Newcastle upon Tyne
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Axminster Monastery
Devon
A named Anglo-Saxon prince, Cyneheard the Ætheling, was buried here: the one fact anchoring this otherwise undocumented Devon minster (originally a…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Aylesford Priory
Kent
Aylesford Priory is a nationally important Carmelite pilgrimage site where a 1242 foundation, Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the mon…
- Near Aylesford
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Baddesley Preceptory
hampshire
A house of the Knights Hospitaller that moved after the Black Death and left its surviving buildings behind at the place it moved from.
- Near Basingstoke
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bagenal's Castle
Down
A sixteenth-century Newry fortified house hidden within a bakery for generations, rediscovered in 1996 and restored as a public museum.
- Near Newry
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinalacken Castle
County Clare
Ballinalacken Castle is a Burren tower house built in stages, where fifteenth-century defensive fabric and a 1641 Tudor chimney record centuries of…
- Near Doolin
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballincollig Castle
County Cork
Ballincollig preserves the keep (the great tower at a castle's heart), curtain wall and towers of a Barrett stronghold whose ownership and conditio…
- Near Ballincollig
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ballindoon Friary
County Sligo
A Dominican religious house that endured barely three generations beside Lough Arrow before Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries reached even th…
- Near Sligo
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ballinskelligs
county-kerry
Ballinskelligs brings a medieval Augustinian religious house into the coastal setting shared with the Skellig Islands and their older religious com…
- Near Ballinskelligs
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballinskelligs Castle
County Kerry
A tower raised by the MacCarthy Mórs to watch a bay, now itself being watched over by the sea that is slowly taking its ground away.
- Near Ballinskelligs
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ballybeg Priory
County Cork
Ballybeg is a substantial Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose exceptional medieval dovecot, a stone house…
- Near Ballybeg
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballycarbery Castle
County Kerry
Less than half of the high curtain wall that once enclosed Ballycarbery Castle still stands, its base pierced by arrow slits and a staircase buried…
- Near Cahersiveen
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyhannon Castle
County Clare
Ballyhannon Castle is an exceptionally intact fifteenth-century Clare tower house whose complex passages, defences and long MacNamara history survi…
- Near Quin
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Ballyharry
County Antrim
Ballyharry is an Islandmagee townland where well-preserved Neolithic (the closing Stone Age, roughly 4000–2500 BC) house sites bring early settleme…
- Near Newtownabbey
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyheigue Castle
County Kerry
The crenellated parapet that gives Ballyheigue Castle its name crowns a building that was never a fortress. What stands ruined above a golf course…
- Near Ballyheigue
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymaloe House
County Cork
Ballymaloe House incorporates traces of a fifteenth-century Anglo-Norman castle within a later country house that became a landmark of modern Irish…
- Near Shanagarry
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballymarkahan Castle
County Clare
Ballymarkahan Castle is a MacNamara fifteenth-century tower house in Quin, recorded as a ruin for nearly two centuries and part of Clare’s dense ca…
- Near Quin
-
Ancient place · Medieval
Ballymully Glebe
County Tyrone
Ballymully Glebe frames Tullyhogue Fort within a 144-acre County Tyrone townland whose name and nineteenth-century population decline preserve loca…
- Near Cookstown
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ballyroney Castle
County Down
Ballyroney Castle records a County Down motte-and-bailey (an early Norman form, a timber tower raised on a mound with a walled court beside it) sit…
- Near Banbridge
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ballywiheen
County Kerry
An ogham stone raised as a grave marker around AD 500 to 550 stands within a circular enclosure on the southern flank of Croaghmarhin mountain, hal…
- Near Dingle
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bangor Castle
County Down
Bangor Castle layers a former abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) site, a Victorian Jacobethan mansion and civic administration w…
- Near Bangor
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Barmeath Castle
County Louth
Its grounds were shaped by the 18th-century landscape architect Thomas Wright, laid over a castle that had already stood for three centuries by the…
- Near Dundalk
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Baswich Priory
Staffordshire
A monastic house under a prior, a rank below an abbot, founded in 1174 and dissolved in 1538.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bedford Abbey
Bedfordshire
A vanished Benedictine house that once held the burial of an Archbishop of York, its community later re-emerging at Newnham as an Augustinian prior…
- Near Bedford
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Belford Castle
northumberland
Philip Davis can see no reason to build a motte here when a better-defended prehistoric camp with a medieval chapel stands so close by: the identif…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bellaghy Bawn
County Londonderry
Bellaghy Bawn turns a Plantation-era fortified house built over a ringfort into a record of rebellion, civic care, archaeology and local cultural m…
- Near Bellaghy
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Belle Isle Castle
County Fermanagh
Belle Isle Castle layers an eighteenth-century Lough Erne estate, designed gardens, changing family ownership and a modern hospitality afterlife on…
- Near Lisbellaw
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bellingham Castle
Northumberland
Bellingham Castle preserves the recorded location of a lost Northumberland motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth m…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Belvelly Castle
County Cork
Belvelly Castle commands the bridge approach to Great Island, a compact tower house whose strategic position drew medieval families, wartime use an…
- Near Cobh
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Belvoir Priory
Leicestershire
Belvoir Priory was a small Benedictine cell of St Albans Abbey founded beside Belvoir Castle in 1076; its debt-stricken but patronised history and…
- Near Belvoir
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Benburb Castle
County Armagh
Benburb Castle commands the Blackwater border from a limestone cliff, joining a restored historic bawn with later religious and nineteenth-century…
- Near Moy
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Benedictine Priory, King's Lynn
Norfolk
King’s Lynn’s Benedictine Priory supported St Margaret’s and Norwich Cathedral from 1100 to 1537; its near-total loss makes the Minster (originally…
- Near King’s Lynn
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Black Abbey
County Kilkenny
Kilkenny’s Black Abbey is a 1225 Dominican foundation restored after suppression, where Ireland’s largest stained-glass window crowns a long histor…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackborough Priory
Norfolk
Blackborough Priory was a Benedictine nunnery near King’s Lynn from about 1200 to 1537, remembered through fishpond remains, named prioresses and i…
- Near King’s Lynn
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackfriars, Newcastle upon Tyne
Tyne and Wear
Nine of Newcastle's craft guilds leased it in 1552 and used it as their headquarters. That is the only reason any of the town's five friaries still…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Blackmore Priory
Essex
Blackmore Priory survives through the fabric of its parish church, where an Augustinian community’s twelfth-century entrance and fifteenth-century…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Blackrock Castle
County Cork
Blackrock Castle began as Cork’s anti-piracy river fort and now hosts an observatory, turning a harbour defence into a place for public astronomy.
- Near Cork
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Blarney Castle
County Cork
Blarney Castle is a MacCarthy stronghold whose fifteenth-century keep carries the Blarney Stone, connecting a turbulent medieval history with Irela…
- Near Blarney
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bledisloe Tump
Gloucestershire
A timber castle and a mysterious raised mound once watched over the River Severn here, destroyed in the 1970s and leaving only rival theories about…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Block House (Melcombe)
Dorset
Melcombe’s lost Block House records an early modern town-built artillery fort, showing how Weymouth’s harbour communities developed local defences…
- Near Weymouth
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Boa Island figures
County Fermanagh
The Boa Island figures are enigmatic damaged stone idols whose two-faced form, Christian graveyard setting and uncertain Iron Age (the period from…
- Near Kesh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Boarbank Hall
cumbria
A house recorded on this site since at least 1592, rebuilt in Italian style after a fire in 1870, and a working convent since 1921: with a 1986 ora…
- Near Ulverston
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bodmin Friary
Cornwall
A gateway and two pillars are the last visible pieces of a large Franciscan friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the stre…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bodmiscombe Preceptory
Devon
Bodmiscombe Preceptory records a thirteenth-century Knights Hospitaller house whose absorption into Buckland Abbey preserves Devon’s link to the or…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Abbey
North Yorkshire
Bolton Abbey joins an Augustinian priory, a living parish church and a vast Wharfedale estate in a layered Yorkshire Dales landscape.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bolton Abbey, Moone
County Kildare
A modern Cistercian monastery in County Kildare, founded from Roscrea in 1965 and independent since 1977, where monastic life is supported by a wor…
- Near Moone
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bonamargy Friary
County Antrim
Bonamargy Friary preserves a late Franciscan foundation where MacQuillan, MacDonnell, burial, legend and manuscript histories meet beside the Margy…
- Near Ballycastle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bonby Priory
Lincolnshire
Bonby Priory’s surviving St Andrew’s Church is the last trace of a Benedictine alien priory connected with St Fromond Priory between 1199 and 1403.
- Near Bonby
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bottreaux Castle
Cornwall
Bottreaux Castle survives chiefly as earthworks, but its motte (a steep artificial mound built to carry a timber tower) preserves the footprint of…
- Near Penzance
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bourn Castle
Cambridgeshire
A Norman sheriff's earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) stronghold that burned in the 13th century and wa…
- Near Bourn
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bradenstoke Priory
Wiltshire
A house of Augustinian canons set on the ridge above the south side of Dauntsey Vale, a mile and a half west of Lyneham.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Branny
County Tyrone
Branny is a compact Tyrone townland whose protected hilltop enclosure and sheep-fold name preserve both ancient and pastoral landscape history.
- Near Omagh
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Bridgeness Slab
Falkirk
The Bridgeness Slab is the most detailed surviving Antonine Wall distance slab, combining a precise construction record with vivid Roman imagery of…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bridgwater Friary
Somerset
A Franciscan house founded by William Briwere in 1245 and dissolved in 1538.
- Near Bridgwater
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Brig o' Doon
South Ayrshire
Sold as a quarry to the builders of its replacement, then bought back before they could take it apart.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bright Castle
Down
A heavily ruined late-medieval County Down tower house whose surviving east wall still records its vaulted floors, windows and parapet walk.
- Near Newcastle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Brightley Priory
Devon
Brightley was the short-lived first Cistercian religious house whose infertile land prompted a move to Thorncombe, creating the community that beca…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Brightwell Castle
Oxfordshire
A castle between Didcot and Wallingford, in Berkshire until the boundary changes of 1974.
- Near Brightwell-cum-Sotwell
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Brixworth Abbey
Northamptonshire
Brixworth’s lost monastic house is remembered through a church devastated in 876 and remade as All Saints’ in the tenth century.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bromhall Priory
Berkshire
A small Benedictine nunnery whose downfall came over a decade before Henry VIII's dissolution: condemned outright by a papal bull as a 'profane pla…
- Near Sunningdale
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Bromwich Castle
West Midlands
A motte castle: the earthen mound a castle was raised on: rebuilt in stone in 1168, excavated ahead of the M6, and now under a roundabout interchange.
- Near Castle Bromwich
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Buckingham Castle
Buckinghamshire
A vanished stronghold whose stone footings still hold up the churchyard green and the back gardens of Castle Street, long after the castle itself d…
- Near Buckingham
- Easy path
-
Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Bullock Park
County Tyrone
Bullock Park is a Tyrone townland whose protected stone burial chamber preserves an ancient monument within a nineteenth-century rural community.
- Near Omagh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Bulstrode Preceptory
Buckinghamshire
A single act of corruption by its preceptor is nearly all that survives of Bulstrode: a house so obscure it never earned proper commandery status o…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burgh by Sands Castle
Cumbria
For nearly two centuries this was the administrative seat of an entire barony, yet a Scottish raid erased it so completely that not one stone shows…
- Near Carlisle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Burley Castle
Rutland
A site north of Burley used first as a Saxon meeting place, more commonly called Alstoe.
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burstead Grange
Essex
Burstead Grange is a deliberately cautious entry in Essex’s monastic landscape: its name suggests estate management, while records cannot yet ident…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burtle Priory
Somerset
A hermitage at Sprauellissmede endowed by William son of Godfrey of Eddington in 1199, a monastic house under a prior by 1312.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Burwell Priory
Lincolnshire
Burwell Priory was a Benedictine alien cell dependent on Grande-Sauve Abbey in Aquitaine, making its fate closely tied to medieval Anglo-French con…
- Near Burwell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Buttercrambe Castle
North Yorkshire
A royal licence of 1200 ties this lost stronghold directly to King John, though little more than fragmentary earthworks now mark where it stood.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cabra Castle
County Cavan
A nineteenth-century Cavan country house that took the name of an older ruined castle, moving from Ascendancy seat to restored hotel.
- Near Kingscourt
- Easy path
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cannington Priory
Somerset
A Benedictine nunnery of about 1138, dissolved in 1536 and afterwards turned into a mansion.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Canwell Priory
Staffordshire
A tenant destroyed the ruins in the seventeenth century after exhuming coffins and forming a pool of water below them. What looks like medieval wor…
- Near Hints
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cardinham Grange
Cornwall
Cardinham Grange records the transfer of a Norman-era religious gift into the monastic economy of Tywardreath and, after dissolution (Henry VIII's…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carisbrooke Priory
Isle of Wight
Carisbrooke Priory represents both a medieval Norman dependency dissolved in wartime politics and a separate modern Dominican community that later…
- Near Newport
-
Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Carncorran Glebe
County Tyrone
Carncorran Glebe preserves the Giant’s Grave, a stone burial chamber from before written records whose unusually mismatched three-metre uprights cr…
- Near Dungannon
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Carrick Church
County Fermanagh
Carrick Church binds a 1483 O’Flanagan foundation to a 1528 family murder, while its graveyard and holy-well tradition preserve a long-lived sacred…
- Near Enniskillen
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Castle Goff
cornwall
A Cornish round: one of the small circular enclosures found almost nowhere else: with a later annexe whose ditch stops short of the original one.
- Near Penzance
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Castle Hedingham Priory
Essex
Castle Hedingham Priory was one of a small group of women-only southern English nunneries, whose brief, troubled history ends with the Dissolution…
-
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 · 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
-
Settlement · Medieval
Castletown, Cheshire
Cheshire
A whole village vanished here, leaving nothing but earthwork (earth moved and shaped into banks and ditches rather than built up in stone) traces o…
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Charlcotte Furnace
shropshire
Richard Knight of Bringewood Ironworks was leasing this blast furnace as early as 1712, and it may have been running since the 1690s.
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Charley Priory
Leicestershire
Charley Priory records the fluid identity of a small medieval religious house: a Norman-linked gift, an independent three-monk hermitage, a later A…
- Near Charley
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Carmelite Friary
Cheshire
Although no buildings survive, Chester’s Carmelite friary (the base of a mendicant order, whose members worked in the streets rather than behind wa…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chester Grey Friary
Cheshire
A house of Franciscan friars once stood within Chester's walls, part of the network of urban friaries that set the mendicant orders apart from the…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chibburn Preceptory
Northumberland
Chibburn Preceptory preserves the remains of a Hospitaller house whose medieval courtyard, defensive moat, and later reuse chart major changes in N…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chippenham Preceptory
Cambridgeshire
A religious house that endured from 1184 to 1540, spanning the entire era of the crusading military orders' presence in England before falling to H…
- Near Chippenham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cholsey Abbey
Oxfordshire
An Anglo-Saxon monastery founded between 993 and 997 by King Æthelred.
- Near Cholsey
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Chudleigh Abbey
Devon
Chudleigh Abbey records a short but distinctive chapter in the long post-Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) journey…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Church Island (Lough Currane)
County Kerry
Set into a block of sandstone in the ruined church on Church Island is a 12th-century engraving of a musician playing a bowed lyre, one of the more…
- Near Waterville
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Church of St Mary and St Petroc, Bodmin
Cornwall
A former medieval monastic church in Bodmin whose modern Catholic community restored the Lateran canons to Cornwall after more than three centuries.
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Clare Castle, County Armagh
County Armagh
Clare Castle preserves a ruined Plantation tower and bawn whose unfinished construction, 1641 attack and 1785 fire trace a troubled estate history.
- Near Tandragee
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Clavering Castle
Essex
Clavering Castle is a rare pre-Conquest ringwork, where Norman, Anglo-Saxon and possible earlier defensive layers survive as earthworks beside the…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Clogrennane Castle
County Carlow
Clogrennane Castle is a ruined River Barrow stronghold whose history traces Butler power, Tudor rebellion and later transformation into a country-h…
- Near Carlow
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Clomantagh Castle
County Kilkenny
Clomantagh Castle is a restored fifteenth-century Butler tower house where a Sheela na gig and later domestic additions carry medieval symbolism in…
- Near Freshford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Clonea Castle
County Waterford
A castle-like ruin on Clonea Beach turned out to be barely two centuries old, not medieval: and a single 1990 storm finished off in one night what…
- Near Dungarvan
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Clonmore Castle
County Carlow
Clonmore Castle is a late-thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman courtyard castle whose trefoil window and surviving plan remain visible despite severe iv…
- Near Tullow
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Cloonacauneen Castle
County Galway
A working medieval tower house that never became a ruin for long: after decades of decay it was patched, re-roofed and put back to use as a home, t…
- Near Galway
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Clough Castle
Down
A County Down motte-and-bailey: an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard beside it: whose 1951–52 excavation…
- Near Downpatrick
- Some walking
-
Ancient tree · Medieval
Cloughmore
Down
Cloughmore pairs 10,000-year-old glacial transport with a mountain legend: one huge boulder gives Rostrevor both a geological landmark and a Fionn…
- Near Rostrevor
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cockerham Priory
Lancashire
Cockerham Priory represents a small Lancashire cell of Leicester Abbey, recording the extension of Augustinian canons from St Mary de Pratis into t…
- Near Cockerham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Colchester Crutched Friary
Essex
Colchester Crutched Friary is a lost medieval house known through its foundation, Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Colchester Greyfriars
Essex
Colchester Greyfriars was a Franciscan house whose recorded church, hall and service buildings reveal a substantial friary (the base of a mendicant…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Colcombe Castle
Devon
Colcombe Castle was a Courtenay seat near Colyton whose later history ties dynastic rivalry, Civil War destruction and the survival of a few fragme…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Coleraine Castle
County Londonderry
A short run of entries in the Annals of Ulster records Coleraine’s castle being built, destroyed and perhaps rebuilt within fourteen years of war.
- Near Coleraine
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Combwell Priory
Kent
Combwell Priory records a rare institutional change from Premonstratensian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) to Augustinian priory, fol…
- Near Goudhurst
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Cranborne Priory
Dorset
Cranborne Priory preserves a major thousand-year religious foundation in Dorset, whose surviving priory church combines Norman fabric, medieval pai…
- Near Cranborne
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Creevekeeran Castle
County Armagh
Creevekeeran Castle preserves a rare three-storey wall on a rocky County Armagh outcrop, a protected fragment whose survival defines the site.
- Near Newry
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Crevenish Castle
Fermanagh
Crevenish Castle is a rare Plantation-period Fermanagh house-and-bawn whose brief history traces settler ambition, rebellion-era transfer and rapid…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Cross at Croes Llwyd Farm
monmouthshire
One of only two crosses in Monmouthshire to keep its head through the iconoclasm of 1643, out of seventy-nine: and the survival is credited to its…
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Derry, Ballyphilip
County Down
Derry’s two shale-built church ruins preserve early Christian worship, layered buildings and a cemetery whose men, women and children complicate a…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Derrynane Abbey
County Kerry
Three roofless stone buildings stand overgrown on Abbey Island, a tidal islet off the coast of Derrynane in County Kerry, reachable on foot across…
- Near Caherdaniel
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Derryvella
County Tipperary
A circular earthwork in Tipperary bogland carries two rival identities: one of the oldest monastic foundations in Ireland, its true name still disp…
- Near Cashel
- Some walking
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dodnash Priory
Suffolk
Its charters are thought to hold the first known references to Flatford Mill. Wolsey dissolved the house in 1525 and spent its endowment on college…
- Near Bentley
-
Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Doocrock
County Tyrone
Doocrock is a 426-acre County Tyrone townland where a Scheduled court tomb gives prehistoric depth to a landscape named “Black Hill.”
- Near Omagh
-
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
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Dorchester Friary
Dorset
Dorchester Friary was a substantial Franciscan community beside the River Frome, shaped by royal, episcopal and local patronage before its 1538 sup…
- Near Dorchester
-
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
-
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
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Drummacoorin
County Fermanagh
Drummacoorin links a sword dating roughly 2500–800 BC, when metal tools first spread and late Stone Age axe heads to a Boho landscape whose Irish n…
- Near Enniskillen
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
-
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
-
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
-
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
East Bergholt Abbey
Suffolk
The nuns baked their own bread, brewed their own beer, kept bees and showed at local agricultural shows: and paid the bills by making vestments.
-
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
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Eastminster
Greater London
Eastminster was a short-lived Cistercian abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) founded by Edward III beside the Tower of London, whose exca…
- Near London
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ellerton Priory (Spalding Moor)
East Riding of Yorkshire
Ellerton Priory is a scheduled remnant of the Gilbertine order, England’s only medieval monastic order founded for both men and women.
- Near Ellerton
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Elsham Priory
Lincolnshire
Elsham’s fishpond is a fragile witness: the lone physical trace of a monastery founded by Beatrice d’Amundeville and dissolved in 1536.
- Near Elsham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Enniskillen Castle
County Fermanagh
Enniskillen Castle preserves a Maguire stronghold remade through siege, Plantation rebuilding and military use into the town’s layered Fermanagh he…
- Near Enniskillen
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Etonbury Castle
Bedfordshire
A railway cutting was driven straight through this Danish-attributed stronghold, leaving cropmarks and fragments of earthwork: earth moved and shap…
- Near Arlesey
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Exeter Blackfriars
Devon
Exeter Blackfriars marks the former Dominican presence in the city centre and carries evidence of elite medieval burial before the priory: a religi…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fanning's Castle
County Limerick
Off Creagh Lane and Mary Street on King's Island, opposite the old tholsel, the roughly squared limestone walls of Fanning's Castle rise four store…
- Near Askeaton
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Faringdon Abbey
Oxfordshire
A Cistercian monastery at Wyke, just north of the town, on a royal manor.
- Near Faringdon
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Farmcote Grange
Gloucestershire
Farmcote Grange's only firmly established fact is one link: this Gloucestershire farm answered to the great abbey (a self-governing monastery, its…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fathom Castle
County Down
Fathom Castle records a strategically placed but vanished stronghold, moving from possible De Lacy-era occupation to O’Neill power and canal-era de…
- Near Newry
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Favor Royal Demesne
County Tyrone
Favor Royal Demesne layers a Plantation-era manor, a derelict nineteenth-century house and two protected raths within a County Tyrone border townland.
- Near Dungannon
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Faxfleet Preceptory
East Riding of Yorkshire
One of Yorkshire's wealthiest Templar houses, founded by a ransomed Crusader lord and erased so completely that only a buried field and a farm name…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fillongley Castle
Warwickshire
Two castles, two scheduled monuments, and a herbicide spraying in about 2012 that cleared the ruins and took the biodiversity with it.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Flixton Priory
Suffolk
A nunnery under a prioress following the Augustinian rule, in the north of the county.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Folkestone Priory
Kent
Folkestone Priory connects a possibly first English nunnery, founded by Saint Eanswith in the 640s, with a later Benedictine house whose repeated r…
- Near Canterbury
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Fordham Priory
Cambridgeshire
A Georgian manor house now stands on the footprint of a 300-year-old religious house, its Grade II listing the only formal recognition left of the…
- Near Fordham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Fort Williamsburg
Gwynedd
Fort Williamsburg stands half a mile south-east of Glynllifon Hall in Llandwrog, Gwynedd, on ground that Cadw has called a location "without releva…
-
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Frampton Priory
Dorset
Frampton Priory records a Benedictine dependency of the Abbey (a religious community led by an abbot) of Saint-Étienne whose medieval site later be…
- Near Frampton
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Franciscan Friary, Winchester
Hampshire
Nothing survives above ground, yet for three centuries this was one of Winchester's working friaries: a house of preaching friars living among the…
- Near Winchester
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Frating Abbey
Essex
Frating Abbey is not evidenced as an abbey: the name belongs to a nineteenth-century farmhouse and later cartographic tradition, not a documented m…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Freiston Priory
Lincolnshire
Freiston Priory was a Benedictine cell of Crowland Abbey, founded after a 1114 church gift and later developing into a priory before its 1539 Disso…
- Near Freiston
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Furzey Island
Dorset
Furzey Island combines a concealed modern oil-field installation with evidence that the wider former island landscape supported Iron Age (the centu…
- Near Corfe Castle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Gaer Penrhôs
Ceredigion
A ringwork: a castle enclosure ringed by a bank, built without a motte: on a steep Ceredigion hill whose timber defences repeatedly changed hands i…
- Near Llanrhystud
- Rough ground
-
Settlement · Medieval
Gainsthorpe
Lincolnshire
Gainsthorpe is a well-preserved deserted medieval village where sunken roads and raised tofts and crofts make a lost settlement plan visible in the…
- Near Hibaldstow
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Garvaghullion
County Tyrone
Garvaghullion preserves a Scheduled Bronze Age wooden trackway found deep in a raised bog landscape heavily reduced by peat extraction.
- Near Omagh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Gillingham Friary
Dorset
Gillingham Friary is a sparsely recorded possible Dominican house in Dorset, whose uncertain identification is itself an important limit on what ca…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Gokewell Priory
Lincolnshire
A tiny Cistercian community of nuns that never grew beyond a handful of women, remembered chiefly through a bishop's blunt verdict: poor in means,…
- Near Broughton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Gortalowry
County Tyrone
Gortalowry is a rural–urban County Tyrone townland where a Scheduled rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth bank), church and f…
- Near Dungannon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Gosford Castle
County Armagh
Gosford Castle is Ulster’s largest nineteenth-century country house, tracing Plantation estate power, Norman Revival ambition, wartime use and inve…
- Near Markethill
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Grace's Old Castle
County Kilkenny
Grace's Old Castle carries over eight centuries of Kilkenny civic history from a private Anglo-Norman town residence to gaol, courthouse and a buil…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Grafton Preceptory
Warwickshire
The village is called Temple Grafton because of a clerical error under Henry VIII. The Templars were never here; the Hospitallers had been for thre…
- Near Temple Grafton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Grallagh Castle
County Tipperary
Grallagh Castle is a protected late-medieval Tipperary tower house whose surviving bawn, battered walls and internal defensive features document a…
- Near Thurles
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Great Bricett Priory
Suffolk
Its head was summoned to Westminster in 1346 with the other alien priors, on pain of forfeiting the house, its lands and its goods.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Great Connell Priory
County Kildare
Great Connell was a powerful Augustinian priory, a monastery run by a prior, of the Pale, founded from Wales and later dismantled for Newbridge bar…
- Near Newbridge
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Great Haigh Sough
Greater Manchester
Great Haigh Sough is a 17th-century mine-drainage tunnel whose surviving portal records the engineering that prolonged coal workings and later shap…
- Near Aspull
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Great Yarmouth Carmelite Friary
Norfolk
Great Yarmouth Carmelite Friary represents the town’s medieval White Friars community, whose 1276 foundation, 1509 fire and 1538 suppression are no…
- Near Great Yarmouth
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Greencastle, County Down
County Down
Greencastle guards Carlingford Lough’s narrow entrance, where a thirteenth-century stone castle, earlier motte (a steep artificial mound built to c…
- Near Greenore
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Greenham Preceptory
Berkshire
A working house of the crusading Knights Hospitaller stood here for over three centuries, yet today not one stone of it can be pointed to.
- Near Greenham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Greenwich Castle
Greater London
Greenwich Castle marks the hilltop predecessor of the Royal Observatory: a royal hunting lodge linked to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester and Henry VIII…
- Near Greenwich
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Grey Abbey, Down
County Down
Grey Abbey preserves a Cistercian foundation with a rare female patron and some of the earliest Early Gothic pointed arches in Ireland.
- Near Newtownards
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Grey Abbey, Kildare
County Kildare
Grey Abbey joins a 1260 Franciscan foundation to the likely manuscript source of the Kildare poems, giving its ruined fabric a rare literary signif…
- Near Kildare
-
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Gloucester
Gloucestershire
Of Gloucester's three medieval friaries, only Greyfriars kept a standing church above ground - the Berkeleys' Perpendicular Gothic rebuild of about…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, King's Lynn
Norfolk
Greyfriars Tower is one of only three surviving Franciscan monastic towers in England, retained after the Dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the…
- Near King’s Lynn
-
Sacred place · Medieval
GreyFriars, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Tyne and Wear
Charles I was held prisoner by the Scots in the mansion built out of the Franciscans' own stone. The whole thing came down to make way for Grey Str…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Greyfriars, Shrewsbury
Shropshire
A house of friars where Owen de la Pole, the last Prince of Powys, was buried alongside his daughters.
- Near Shrewsbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Haldon Hills
Devon
The Haldon Hills are a long Devon ridge where prehistoric (before any written account of Britain existed) monuments, historic routes, extraction, c…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Haltwhistle Castle
Northumberland
Nothing of it stands. What survives is a street called Castle Hill, a drive of the same name, and some possible remnants of a fortified bank.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Harlow Marsh
Hertfordshire
A medieval moat, scheduled as a nationally important monument, survives quietly inside a modern wetland reserve of reed beds, wildflower meadow and…
- Near Harlow
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Harry Avery's Castle
County Tyrone
Harry Avery’s Castle is a rare Gaelic Irish stone castle whose twin D-towers adapt gatehouse imagery into a distinctive late medieval tower house.
- Near Castlederg
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hatfield Regis Priory
Essex
Hatfield Regis Priory records an English Benedictine house negotiating dependence on a Breton mother abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot), aristo…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Helenstowe Nunnery
Oxfordshire
Tradition ties it to a rare paired arrangement: a sister's nunnery and her brother's abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) standing on opposite hi…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Helston Castle
Cornwall
Helston Castle is a vanished late-thirteenth-century Cornish stronghold known chiefly through sparse medieval references and the surviving topograp…
- Near Helston
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hempton Priory
Norfolk
Hempton Priory was an Augustinian hospital-priory near Fakenham, where surviving earthworks record a community that combined care, fairs and estate…
- Near Fakenham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Higham Gobion Castle
bedfordshire
The earthworks at Higham Gobion were once called a castle, but later research identifies them as a fishery with a breeding island.
- Near Higham Gobion
-
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hogshaw Nunnery
Buckinghamshire
A modest Buckinghamshire nunnery that, by the 15th century, had been recast as a commandery bearing the name of the Knights Templar.
-
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Holywell Priory
Greater London
Holywell Priory was a long-lived Augustinian house of women in Shoreditch whose former precinct later hosted The Theatre, the playhouse whose timbe…
- Near Shoreditch
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Holywood Priory
County Down
Holywood Priory layers a pre-640 monastic foundation with Anglo-Norman, Franciscan and parish-church phases, preserving a rare long religious conti…
- Near Holywood
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Hornchurch Priory
Greater London
Hornchurch Priory was a small alien house that shaped the spiritual and landholding life of Havering for more than two centuries before its estates…
- Near Hornchurch
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Hound Tor
Devon
Hound Tor brings together a weathered Dartmoor granite tor, a deserted medieval settlement and nearby prehistoric (from the era before writing arri…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Huntington Castle, Clonegal
County Carlow
Huntington Castle layers a fifteenth-century Irish tower house, seventeenth-century plantation history and a later country-house landscape into one…
- Near Clonegal
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Inch Abbey
County Down
Inch Abbey preserves a Cistercian refoundation on an older Quoile monastery site, linking Viking attack, Anglo-Norman penance, English monastic net…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ireland's Eye
County Dublin
Ireland’s Eye rewards the crossing with an unusually compact sequence: an early ecclesiastical enclosure, Napoleonic coastal defence, and protected…
- Near Howth
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Italian Chapel
Orkney Islands
Two Nissen huts, joined end to end, decorated by a prisoner of war who stayed behind after his comrades were freed in order to finish the work.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
John's Lane Church
County Dublin
John’s Lane shows how a major Gothic-revival church reasserted an Augustinian presence on a site whose medieval predecessor had vanished in war.
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Jordan's Castle
County Down
Jordan’s Castle is one of Ardglass’s clustered harbour tower houses, remembered for Simon Jordan’s prolonged defence during the Tyrone rebellion an…
- Near Ardglass
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kersal Priory
Greater Manchester
Kersal Priory represents a small Cluniac community whose medieval dependence, later independence and dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monas…
- Near Kersal
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kilburn Priory
Greater London
Kilburn Priory began as a hermitage beside a stream and holy well, giving its name to modern Kilburn and preserving a small but formative strand of…
- Near Kilburn
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kilclief Castle
County Down
Kilclief Castle is Lecale’s earliest tower house, where unusual service turrets, machicolation (an opening in a parapet floor for dropping missiles…
- Near Kilclief
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kildare Castle
County Kildare
A single stone tower is all that still stands of the stronghold Strongbow raised over Kildare town in the twelfth century, at the start of the Angl…
- Near Kildare
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kildonan Dun
argyll-and-bute
Most duns are round. This one is D-shaped, and its double stair up the rampart and a round wall niche both survive intact.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kilkenny Castle
County Kilkenny
Kilkenny Castle is the defining Norman and Butler landmark of the city: a thirteenth-century defensive stronghold repeatedly remade as a chateau, p…
- Near Kilkenny
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Killagha Abbey
county-kerry
Killagha preserves the remains of a wealthy medieval religious community whose buildings later became a fortified home and then a burial ground.
- Near Castlemaine
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Killashee Round Tower
County Kildare
Killashee’s small round tower preserves evidence of a monastery said to date to AD 454, later passed to the Knights Hospitaller and layered beneath…
- Near Naas
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Killowen Castle
County Londonderry
Killowen Castle preserves evidence for a lost medieval fortress on the Bann and the changing names of a Derry riverside district.
- Near Coleraine
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Killymoon Castle
County Tyrone
Killymoon Castle is a Regency Gothic rebuilding by John Nash, set above the Ballinderry River in a designed woodland and parkland landscape.
- Near Cookstown
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kilmartin Glen
Argyll and Bute
Within a six-mile radius of the village of Kilmartin, in Argyll north of Knapdale, stand more than 800 ancient monuments, of which some 150 date fr…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kilpeck Priory
Herefordshire
Its monks were refugees from a Welsh raid on Llanthony Priory, and the earthworks of their short-lived home now lie behind a working farmhouse, tra…
- Near Kilpeck
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kiltinan Castle
County Tipperary
Kiltinan Castle is one of Ireland’s oldest inhabited castles, a thirteenth-century Butler stronghold later remodelled and repurposed as a prominent…
- Near Clonmel
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kinbane Castle
Antrim
Kinbane Castle is a largely ruined sixteenth-century MacDonnell coastal castle whose narrow limestone headland, English siege damage and long MacAl…
- Near Ballycastle
- Rough ground
-
Carved stone · Medieval
King Doniert's Stone
Cornwall
King Doniert's Stone is a rare inscribed Cornish cross fragment whose ninth-century text may commemorate the documented King Dungarth, linking loca…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Kinsham Grange
Herefordshire
A supposed priory beside the River Lugg that most likely never existed: a rare case where the record itself, not the ruin, is the story.
- Near Leominster
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Kirkistown Castle
County Down
Kirkistown preserves a 1622 Plantation-era tower house and bawn, where rebuilding after about 1500 stands above a landscape associated with a lost…
- Near Kirkistown
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Knappogue Castle
County Clare
Knappogue Castle is a restored late medieval tower house whose MacNamara, Cromwellian, aristocratic and modern tourism phases preserve a remarkably…
- Near Quin
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Knocklayd
Antrim
Knocklayd is a prominent Antrim Hills summit whose quartz passage tomb, surrounding standing stones and extraordinary townland boundary make it bot…
- Near Ballycastle
- Some walking
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Knockmore
County Fermanagh
Knockmore brings together Fermanagh scarpland geology, protected upland habitat and fifteen summit caves, including Lettered Cave’s inscriptions fr…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lammana Priory
Cornwall
A small Benedictine priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: linking Looe Island to the mainland, where two monks served chapels…
- Near Looe
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lancaster Blackfriars
Lancashire
Lancaster Blackfriars marks the former site of a medieval friary (a house of friars, who worked among townspeople rather than withdrawing from them…
- Near Lancaster
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Launceston Priory
Cornwall
An Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: whose lost buildings were proposed for a Cornish cathedral, then redisco…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Leamaneh Castle
County Clare
Leamaneh combines a late-medieval O'Brien tower house with the ruined shell of a seventeenth-century mansion, making its changing fabric a record o…
- Near Kilfenora
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leeds Priory
Kent
Leeds Priory was a major Augustinian house on the River Len, whose excavated footprint documents more than four centuries of religious and economic…
- Near Canterbury
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leicester Austin Friars
Leicestershire
Leicester Austin Friars was a modest Augustinian Hermit priory, a monastery run by a prior, with the unusual feature of two cloisters and a documen…
- Near Leicester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Leigh Cell
Devon
A recorded monastic site near Churchstow, and almost the only evidence of a religious presence in this part of south Devon: though what survives of…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lessingham Priory
Norfolk
Lessingham Priory is a 1090 Norfolk foundation known almost entirely through the record of its existence, illustrating how completely a medieval ho…
- Near Lessingham
-
Tomb or burial place · Medieval
Letterbrat
County Tyrone
Letterbrat combines a Tyrone townland’s portal tomb, a Stone Age tomb of upright stones carrying a single great capstone, with a working quarry exp…
- Near Omagh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lewisham Priory
Greater London
Lewisham Priory connects early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) landholding across the Channel with Henry V’s sup…
- Near Lewisham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Limavady Castle
County Londonderry
Limavady Castle preserves an O’Cahan stronghold attacked in 1542 by local rivals and English forces, anchoring its ruin in sixteenth-century conflict.
- Near Limavady
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Liscarroll Castle
County Cork
Liscarroll Castle is a 13th-century Hiberno-Norman fortress whose later seizures, recapture and use as a military outpost trace changing power in n…
- Near Liscarroll
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Liskincon
County Tyrone
Liskincon is a small Tyrone townland whose Scheduled rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth bank) preserves an ancient fort wit…
- Near Omagh
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lisnagade
County Down
Lisnagade is a large protected multivallate ringfort whose three massive banks and deep ditches preserve an early historic enclosure, with finds su…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Little Dunmow Priory
Essex
Little Dunmow preserves the Lady Chapel of an Augustinian priory: a monastery headed by a prior: founded in 1104, connecting medieval patronage, bu…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Little Horkesley Priory
Essex
Little Horkesley Priory was a Cluniac daughter house whose short institutional history connects Essex with Thetford and Lewes before the survival o…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Little Marlow Priory
Buckinghamshire
Known today mainly through a stray Latin alias in a 1326 lawsuit, this small Buckinghamshire nunnery quietly outlived three centuries before Henry…
- Near Little Marlow
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Liverpool Castle
Merseyside
Liverpool Castle guarded King John’s new port for five centuries; its removal in 1726 marks the transformation of a fortified medieval harbour into…
- Near Liverpool
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Llandaff Castle
cardiff
A twin-towered gatehouse is all that visibly remains of the fortified medieval residence built for the bishops of Llandaff beside their cathedral.
- Near Llandaff
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Llanthony Abbey
powys
Eric Gill drew Gill Sans and Perpetua in these buildings. Forty years earlier, monks and local farm boys reported seeing the Virgin Mary in the fie…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Loders Priory
Dorset
Loders Priory illustrates the precarious history of an English cell dependent on a Norman abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot), repe…
- Near Loders
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lossenham Friary
Kent
As England’s third Carmelite house, Lossenham makes a vanished landscape legible through reported foundations, a stone coffin, and the community’s…
- Near Canterbury
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Loughinisland Churches
Down
Loughinisland’s three church ruins make one island graveyard a record of changing worship, from medieval fabric to seventeenth-century rebuilding a…
- Near Downpatrick
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lulworth Abbey
Dorset
Lulworth Abbey briefly sheltered refugee French Trappist monks after the French Revolution, recording a small but vivid episode of international mo…
- Near East Lulworth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Lydford Castle
Devon
Lydford Castle charts Norman control, medieval tin and forest law, imprisonment and the long afterlife of ‘Lydford Law’ in one of England’s earlies…
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Lyminster Priory
West Sussex
A house of Benedictine nuns, possibly a Saxon royal minster: originally a missionary church; now kept as a title of honour: before that, whose chur…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Macosquin Abbey
County Londonderry
Macosquin was a Cistercian daughter house of Morimond whose medieval fabric vanished, leaving a thirteenth-century church window at its successor s…
- Near Macosquin
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Macroom Castle
County Cork
A Muskerry lordship castle reshaped by war, confiscation and nineteenth-century town planning, with its gatehouse and river-side ruins still embedd…
- Near Macroom
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mahee Castle
County Down
Mahee Castle is a compact Strangford Lough tower house whose causeway position, layered archaeology, and twentieth-century repairs reveal a changin…
- Near Comber
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Maltby Preceptory
Lincolnshire
Two conflicting medieval accounts disagree on which military order founded this Lincolnshire house first: the Hospitallers directly, or the Templar…
- Near Maltby
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Manor Farm, Ruislip
Greater London
Manor Farm, Ruislip is an unusually complete public medieval farm landscape, combining a Norman-era moat, a 13th-century aisled barn and a manorial…
- Near Ruislip
- Easy path
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Manor of Scadbury
Greater London
The Manor of Scadbury links medieval Chislehurst, the Walsingham family and Christopher Marlowe to a 300-acre nature reserve, preserving a former e…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Margaret's Castle
County Down
Margaret’s Castle is a protected fifteenth-century tower-house fragment whose turrets, murder-hole and vaulted ground floor help explain Ardglass’s…
- Near Ardglass
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Markree Castle
County Sligo
A Cooper family seat on the River Unshin whose nineteenth-century observatory hosted the world's largest refracting telescope and discovered astero…
- Near Sligo
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Marland Grange
Greater Manchester
Marland Grange records the long agricultural reach of Cistercian abbeys around Rochdale, even though its buildings have disappeared and their exact…
- Near Rochdale
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Marmont Priory
Norfolk
Marmont Priory was a tiny Gilbertine chantry whose 1204 foundation joined private commemoration, King John’s provision for Eleanor of Aquitaine’s s…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Marsh Barton Priory
Devon
Marsh Barton Priory records a small Augustinian house whose Exeter property and dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s)…
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Martinstown Castle
County Westmeath
Its close resemblance to Talbot's Castle in Trim is the main evidence for dating this ruin, making it a rare architectural echo of a documented Mea…
- Near Delvin
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Marton Priory
North Yorkshire
Marton Priory’s surviving mill earthworks and reused masonry preserve a rare material trace of an Augustinian double house dissolved in 1536.
-
Settlement · Medieval
Massereene Lower
Antrim
Massereene Lower is a County Antrim barony with Ireland's largest documented concentration of ringforts, making this administrative landscape unusu…
- Near Antrim
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Maumanorig
county-kerry
Within a circular enclosure, Maumanorig gathers a church site, hut remains, grave markers and an inscribed stone that names Colmán the pilgrim.
- Near Dingle
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mayne Preceptory
Dorset
Mayne Preceptory records the Knights Hospitaller’s medieval presence in Dorset, whose estates changed the name of Friar Mayne and supported a wider…
- Near Broadmayne
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Melcombe Priory
Dorset
Melcombe Priory was England’s last Dominican foundation, combining a short monastic history with a documented contribution to Melcombe Regis’s coas…
- Near Weymouth
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Menacuddle
Cornwall
Menacuddle is a scheduled fifteenth-century holy well in wooded St Austell, remembered both for its memorial restoration and for local wishing and…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mersea Fort
Essex
Mersea Fort was a Henry VIII coastal artillery fort guarding the River Colne and Colchester, with a later life in civil war defence, oyster governa…
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Millbrook Priory
Bedfordshire
A rare recorded case of two small Bedfordshire monastic cells, Millbrook and Beaulieu at Moddry, being formally merged into a single dependent hous…
- Near Millbrook
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Milton Blockhouse
Kent
Milton Blockhouse was a heavily armed but short-lived Henry VIII Device fort on the Thames, illustrating the scale of Tudor emergency defence for L…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Minster in Thanet Priory
Kent
A minster: a missionary church originally, now a title of honour: at Thanet preserves the legacy of a seventh-century double monastery associated w…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Minster Lovell Priory
Oxfordshire
A monastic house whose exact site in Minster Lovell has been lost entirely: remembered only by name and a rough position between two better-known v…
- Near Minster Lovell
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Miserden Castle
Gloucestershire
A large Norman motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongside) stronghold whose defende…
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mitchelstown Castle
County Cork
The site of Ireland's largest neo-Gothic house, whose 1922 burning ended a long Kingston family seat and supplied stone for Mount Melleray Abbey.
- Near Mitchelstown
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Moatenden Priory
Kent
Moatenden Priory was England’s first Trinitarian house, founded in 1224; its surviving moat and fishponds preserve the landscape framework of a med…
- Near Headcorn
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Moccas Monastery
Herefordshire
A single grid reference fixes its exact site, yet neither its founders, its order, nor its fate were ever recorded: a monastery known only by name.
- Near Moccas
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Modbury Priory
Devon
Modbury Priory records a long-lived Benedictine dependency in Devon, from its Norman foundation through the politics of alien priories, dissolution…
- Near Modbury
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Modeney Priory
Norfolk
Modeney Priory was a small Benedictine cell of Ramsey Abbey whose post-dissolution (Henry VIII's closure of the monasteries in the 1530s) ownership…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Molycourt Priory
Norfolk
Molycourt Priory is a near-vanished Benedictine house whose pre-Conquest origin, flood-impoverished fenland estate, absorption by Ely and elusive a…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monasternagalliaghduff
county-limerick
A ruined thirteenth-century nunnery whose church, courtyard and ‘Black Hag’s Cell’ preserve one of Ireland’s earliest recorded communities of relig…
- Near Newcastle West
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monastery of Saint David, Wales
Pembrokeshire
On the banks of the Afon Alun, at a place then known as Glyn Rhosyn, Saint David founded a church and monastery that would take his own name in Wel…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monea castle
Fermanagh
Monea Castle is a Plantation-era fortress built over an earlier Maguire site, where a surviving crannog (a dwelling built on an artificial island i…
- Near Monea
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Monellan Castle
County Donegal
Its disappearance is a quiet case study in how Ireland's landed estates ended in the 20th century: not by ruin or war, but by state land redistribu…
- Near Ramelton
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monkland Priory
Herefordshire
Little beyond its name and a fixed map reference survives to document this priory, a monastery run by a prior, making it one of the more elusive re…
- Near Monkland
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Monks Kirby Priory
Warwickshire
A Benedictine house of 1077, headed by a prior, suppressed in 1415 when its estates passed to the Carthusians of Axholme.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Mount Melleray Abbey
County Waterford
Mount Melleray was Ireland's leading modern Trappist foundation: a refuge born from revolution that founded communities across the English-speaking…
- Near Cappoquin
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Mountjoy Castle
County Tyrone
Mountjoy Castle is a protected Tyrone fortification overlooking Lough Neagh, remembered for its capture during the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
- Near Omagh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Movilla Abbey
Down
Movilla connects early Irish scholarship, Viking disruption and Augustinian renewal: its late-medieval ruins mark a monastery once taught by St Fin…
- Near Newtownards
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Moyry Castle
County Armagh
Moyry Castle is a compact 1601 pass fort built during the Nine Years’ War, preserving a strategic route through the Gap of the North.
- Near Jonesborough
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Muntober
County Tyrone
Muntober pairs a substantial Tyrone townland with the protected Black Fort rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth bank) and a r…
- Near Omagh
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Narrow Water Castle
County Down
Narrow Water Castle preserves a sixteenth-century tower house at the mouth of the Newry River, built on the site of a Norman keep.
- Near Newry
-
Building or ruin · Pictish & early medieval
Nendrum Monastery mill
County Down
Nendrum’s tide-mill remains are the earliest excavated of their kind, showing early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Norma…
- Near Comber
-
Sacred place · Medieval
New Minster, Winchester
Hampshire
Winchester’s New Minster was a royal Benedictine abbey (a monastery headed by an abbot) and pilgrimage centre that safeguarded the burials and reli…
- Near Winchester
-
Crossing or structure · Medieval
Newenden Bridge
Kent
Newenden Bridge is a largely intact 1706 Kent–Sussex joint project whose sandstone arches and original timbers preserve an early-modern River Rothe…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newnham Castle
Kent
Newnham Castle is a compact Anarchy-period motte-and-bailey (an early Norman castle of a timber tower on an earth mound, with a walled yard alongsi…
- Near Newnham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newstead Priory
Lincolnshire
Newstead Priory records a medieval transition from hospital to Augustinian canonry, anchored by the River Gwash between Stamford and Uffington.
- Near Stamford
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newstead-on-Ancholme Priory
Lincolnshire
Newstead-on-Ancholme Priory preserves a rare physical remnant of a small Henry II Gilbertine foundation: a vaulted former priory room incorporated…
- Near Newstead-on-Ancholme
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Newtown Castle
County Clare
Newtown Castle is uniquely shaped among Irish tower houses: a cylindrical tower rising from a square pyramidal base, now restored as part of the Bu…
- Near Ennis
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Newtownards Priory
County Down
Newtownards Priory preserves a medieval Dominican church whose layered nave (the western body of the building, where the congregation gathered), cl…
- Near Newtownards
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Nuncotham Priory
Lincolnshire
Nuncotham Priory preserves the earthworks of a Cistercian nunnery whose records reveal both the ordinary constraints of episcopal discipline and th…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
O'Dea Castle
County Clare
O’Dea Castle is the restored tower-house centre of a County Clare clan stronghold whose history runs from medieval victory through Cromwellian dama…
- Near Crusheen
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Old Church of St Gwenllwyfo, Llanwenllwyfo
Isle of Anglesey
The Old Church of St Gwenllwyfo is a roofless medieval chapel whose reduced walls, lost furnishings and 12th-century font preserve the layered memo…
- Near Amlwch
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Olderfleet Castle
County Antrim
Olderfleet Castle is a protected Larne tower whose changing identities: from medieval Bissett stronghold to possible warehouse: reflect centuries o…
- Near Belfast
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Orford Priory
Lincolnshire
Orford Priory was one of nine Premonstratensian canoness houses in historic Lincolnshire, preserving a rare record of female religious life from a…
- Near Stainton le Vale
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Otham Abbey
East Sussex
Otham Abbey marks the short-lived first home of a Premonstratensian community later transferred to Bayham, while its chapel and later farmstead pre…
- Near Hastings
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Otterton Priory
Devon
Otterton Priory preserves the trace of a Norman-linked Benedictine community whose parish-church tower and reused monastic fabric are the principal…
- Near Otterton
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Oughtdoorish
County Tyrone
Oughtdoorish brings together a large Tyrone townland, a protected rath (a ringfort, a farmstead enclosed by a circular bank and ditch), and a name…
- Near Omagh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Painsthorpe Abbey
East Riding of Yorkshire
A community of Anglican Benedictine monks occupied a brick chapel grafted onto a Yorkshire country house for four years, before relocating in 1906…
- Near Beverley
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Panfield Priory
Essex
Panfield Priory is a lost Augustinian alien house whose buried foundations preserve a rare Essex link to the Norman monastery of St Étienne at Caen.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Parkavonear Castle
County Kerry
The keep (the great tower at a castle's heart) at Parkavonear breaks with the standard Norman pattern before a visitor even reaches the door: inste…
- Near Cahersiveen
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Peel Castle
Isle of Man
Peel Castle layers a Norse 11th-century fortress over an older Celtic monastic island and the cathedral of Sodor and Man; its intact outer walls, e…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penmaen Castle
swansea
Leslie Alcock's excavation found a timber gateway burnt down and rebuilt as a drystone gate tower: and suggested the rebuild was Welsh work on a No…
- Near Penmaen
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Penn Castle
County Cork
Penn Castle retains a fifteenth-century Power-family tower within later rebuilding, linking a medieval defensive core to Admiral William Penn’s res…
- Near Ballydehob
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Peterstone Priory
Norfolk
Peterstone Priory was an Augustinian house at Burnham Overy, founded before 1200 and incorporated in 1449, linking the village to Norfolk’s medieva…
- Near Burnham Overy
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Pheleley Priory
Oxfordshire
A small twelfth-century Benedictine community in a detached part of Bloxham, near Charlbury.
- Near Charlbury
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ponteland Castle
Northumberland
Ponteland lets you drink in a fourteenth-century tower house that survived Scottish raiding, Jacobean rebuilding, dereliction, and conversion into…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Portaferry Castle
County Down
Portaferry makes the changing role of a harbour tower unusually legible: defensive circulation survives beside evidence of a 1635 repair that resto…
- Near Portaferry
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Portora Castle
County Fermanagh
Portora Castle guards a narrow Lough Erne outlet and preserves a Plantation-era bawn, gun-looped flankers, and traces of later domestic use.
- Near Enniskillen
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Povington Priory
Dorset
Povington Priory records the economic reach of Normandy’s Abbey (a self-governing monastery, its head an abbot) of Bec into Dorset, where wool and…
- Near Tyneham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Preston Castle, Lancashire
Lancashire
Preston Castle preserves the recorded location of a lost castle built around an artificial mound and enclosed yard, whose surviving earthworks outl…
- Near Preston
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Preston Greyfriars
Lancashire
Preston Greyfriars records an early Franciscan presence in Lancashire, documented by 1260 and associated with members of the Holland family.
- Near Preston
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of Douglas
Isle of Man
The Priory of Douglas was a Cistercian nunnery whose prioress held the secular title Baroness of Douglas, combining monastic leadership with extens…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Priory of the Holy Trinity, Ipswich
Suffolk
The townspeople used it as their parish church until 1300, when the canons built St Margaret's next door to get them out.
- Near Ipswich
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Purt Castle
County Limerick
A tower house destroyed in the very rebellion that ended Geraldine rule in Munster, its ruin marking a hinge point in west Limerick's history.
- Near Newcastle West
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Quoile Castle
County Down
Quoile Castle is a protected riverbank tower house that illustrates the dense network of small fortified residences around Strangford Lough.
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
RAF Bentley Priory
Greater London
RAF Bentley Priory was the command centre of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, where Dowding’s air-defence system coordinated the prote…
- Near Stanmore
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rahan Castle
County Donegal
Rahan Castle records the changing fortunes of Clan Suibhne in Donegal, from a fifteenth-century stronghold through plantation-era transfers and pro…
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rathfriland Castle
County Down
Rathfriland Castle is a reduced Magennis stronghold whose single surviving wall preserves a seventeenth-century story of rebellion and deliberate d…
- Near Rathfriland
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rathlin Castle
County Antrim
Rathlin’s lost island castle sheltered Robert Bruce after defeat in 1306, then became the target of the 1575 assault whose killing of garrison and…
- Near Rathlin Island
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Reading Nunnery
Berkshire
A Berkshire nunnery founded in 979, in the last century of Anglo-Saxon rule, whose only surviving trace is the parish church built on its former gr…
- Near Reading
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Red Abbey, Cork
County Cork
Red Abbey’s stone tower is one of the few standing fragments of medieval Cork, surviving the Augustinian precinct’s destruction and later serving a…
- Near Cork
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Red Bay Castle
County Antrim
Red Bay Castle is a coastal Antrim stronghold shaped by Bissett and MacDonnell power, repeated destruction, and the wider contest for the Glens.
- Near Cushendall
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Reenconnell
County Kerry
On a hill rising 274 metres above the north-western Dingle Peninsula, some 5.7 kilometres north-north-west of Dingle town, stand the weathered rema…
- Near Dingle
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rheban Castle
County Kildare
Rheban’s roofless stone castle bears witness to a river frontier where Norman lords, Gaelic families and Confederate armies repeatedly contested au…
- Near Athy
- Rough ground
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rhyd-y-gors Castle
Carmarthenshire
A bluff above the River Towy, about a mile south of Carmarthen, marks where an ancient ford once crossed and where Rhyd-y-gors Castle briefly stood…
- Near Llandeilo
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rialton Grange
Cornwall
Rialton Grange records the former agricultural estate of the priors of Bodmin in St Columb Minor, a small surviving clue to medieval monastic landh…
- Near St Columb Minor
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Rochdale Castle
Greater Manchester
Rochdale Castle preserves the earthwork (a bank, ditch or mound shaped from soil rather than built in stone) outline of a post-Conquest motte-and-b…
- Near Rochdale
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roebuck, Dublin
County Dublin
Roebuck reveals how a medieval elite estate could be repeatedly remade after rebellion, through Gothic fashion, and finally for a modern university.
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roodstown Castle
County Louth
Roodstown’s unusually tall fifteenth-century tower house retains a roof-walk, murder-hole and fireplaces, revealing the ambition behind a Pale subs…
- Near Dundalk
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Round Island (Dorset)
Dorset
Round Island is a small private Poole Harbour island whose setting off the Arne Peninsula and narrow separation from Long Island give it a distinct…
- Near Arne
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Roxborough Castle
County Tyrone
Roxborough Castle was a Charlemont seat transformed into a French-château-style country house before its destruction during the Irish revolutionary…
- Near Dungannon
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Ruislip Priory
Greater London
Ruislip Priory records the administrative reach of Normandy’s Bec Abbey into England: an alien-priory manor centre that later passed to the institu…
- Near Ruislip
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rumburgh Priory
Suffolk
The monks here kept a particular devotion to St Bee, a Cumbrian saint, whom they commemorated at Michaelmas. Wolsey suppressed the house in 1528 to…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Rushen Abbey
Isle of Man
Rushen Abbey was the Isle of Man’s Cistercian centre of literacy and monastic life, where the Chronicle of Mann was compiled; its restored Ballasal…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Saddlescombe Preceptory
West Sussex
A Knights Templar estate of about 1228, run to fund the order's work in the east rather than as a monastery.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sandown Castle, Isle of Wight
Isle of Wight
Sandown Castle was Henry VIII’s short-lived Device Fort, a hybrid coastal artillery design whose construction was interrupted by French attack and…
- Near Sandown
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Saul Monastery
County Down
Saul Monastery brings Saint Patrick tradition, Viking and medieval disruption, and a surviving Augustinian abbey (a self-governing monastery, its h…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sclerder Abbey
Cornwall
Sclerder Abbey is a Grade II listed nineteenth-century former Carmelite monastery whose successive religious communities and current ecumenical lif…
- Near Penzance
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sean Ross Abbey
County Tipperary
A Georgian country house whose grounds hold a ruined medieval abbey, an unmarked burial ground for over a thousand children, and the real story beh…
- Near Roscrea
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sewardsley Priory
Northamptonshire
Sewardsley Priory links a twelfth-century Cistercian nunnery to the 2006 archaeological rediscovery that restored its lost location and plan to pub…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shankill Castle
County Kilkenny
Shankill Castle joins a Butler tower-house core to Georgian and Victorian landscape design, now animated by a living artist's home, gardens and an…
- Near Paulstown
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Shanmuckinish Castle
County Clare
Shanmuckinish Castle preserves the near-full height of a fifteenth-century Irish tower house, its collapsed wall exposing vaulted rooms, passages a…
- Near Ballyvaughan
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shobdon Priory
Herefordshire
A 12th-century church at a Herefordshire priory: a monastic house under a prior rather than an abbot: whose entire fabric was pulled down in the 17…
- Near Shobdon
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Shouldham Priory
Norfolk
Shouldham Priory was a rare Gilbertine double house for canons and nuns, founded around 1190 and now preserved as buried remains, earthworks and fi…
- Near Shouldham
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sidmouth Priory
Devon
Sidmouth Priory’s surviving chapel fabric and changing monastic affiliations trace a small coastal religious site from Norman patronage through dis…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Silkstone glassworks
south-yorkshire
Abigail Pilmey, wife of the founder, was one of the signatories who successfully petitioned Parliament against the Glass Tax in 1696.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Skendleby Priory
Lincolnshire
Skendleby Priory preserves the archaeology of a small Bardney Abbey cell, where 2005 excavation brought the believed St James Chapel remains into v…
- Near Skendleby
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Sketrick Castle
County Down
Sketrick Castle preserves a rare island tower house with a boat bay, spring passage, and a history of medieval capture and storm damage.
- Near Killinchy
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Skryne Castle
County Meath
Its Irish name outlives its walls: Caisleán Scrín Cholm Cille records a shrine to Colmcille on this hill long before Adam de Feypo raised his motte…
- Near Tara
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Slevesholm Priory
Norfolk
Slevesholm Priory was a Cluniac cell of Castle Acre at Methwold, a completely lost monastic site whose absence above ground records the long impact…
- Near Methwold
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Snape Priory
Suffolk
Wolsey obtained a papal bull to suppress it in 1527–28. After his fall the site went to the Duke of Norfolk instead.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
South Abbey, Youghal
County Cork
South Abbey was one of Ireland’s earliest Franciscan foundations; although its medieval fabric has gone, its site preserves a continuous local reli…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Adamnan's Church, Lonan
Isle of Man
St Adamnan’s Church at Lonan preserves a remote Manx Christian site with 5th-century Celtic crosses, a likely early keeill and surviving medieval p…
- Near Baldrine
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Dominic's Holy Well
Cornwall
The name St Dominic’s Well in Truro masks an important location puzzle: the visible spring is likely not the historic friary (a community of friars…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St George's Priory, Thetford
Norfolk
St George’s Priory, a monastery run by a prior, reveals a rare institutional reversal: a poor Benedictine house became a nunnery under Bury St Edmu…
- Near Thetford
-
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Mawgan Monastery
Cornwall
St Mawgan Monastery preserves the deep religious continuity of Lanherne, from a sixth-century Celtic foundation through medieval manor life to succ…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Monica's Priory, Spetisbury
Dorset
St Monica’s Priory, a monastery run by a prior, tells a compact story of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious exile, as four different Catho…
- Near Spetisbury
- Easy path
-
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Saviour's Priory, Dublin
County Dublin
St Saviour's Priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: continues Dublin's Dominican tradition from a 1224 foundation through a ni…
- Near Dublin
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St Trinian's Church
Isle of Man
St Trinian’s is a roofless Manx keeill on an ancient Christian site, where a 7th-century cross, medieval barony and Whithorn Priory connection meet…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Blaise's Well
Greater London
St Blaise’s Well preserves a rare Bromley pilgrimage site where a mineral spring, medieval devotional practice and the former Bishops of Rochester’…
- Near Bromley
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Declan's Monastery
county-cork
A compact group of cathedral ruins, an oratory and a late round tower preserves more than eight centuries of religious building at Ardmore.
- Near Ardmore
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Francis Abbey
county-kilkenny
The ruined Franciscan church at St Francis Abbey carries Kilkenny’s medieval religious history into the later industrial landscape of the Smithwick…
- Near Kilkenny
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Abbey, Glencairn
County Waterford
St Mary's Abbey (a religious community led by an abbot), Glencairn is Ireland's only Cistercian community of nuns, founded from French refugee root…
- Near Lismore
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Mary's Dominican Church and Priory
County Cork
St Mary's is a continuing Dominican church, priory: a monastery headed by a prior rather than an abbot: and novitiate on Cork's Pope's Quay.
- Near Cork
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
St. Wolstan's Priory
County Kildare
St Wolstan's was Ireland's first dissolved monastery, preserving the remains of a Victorine priory, a smaller monastery headed by a prior, beside t…
- Near Leixlip
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Stainfield Priory
Lincolnshire
Stainfield Priory was Lincolnshire’s only Benedictine nunnery, a small house of St Mary that sheltered up to twenty nuns until 1536.
- Near Wragby
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Standon Priory
Hertfordshire
One of the country's least-documented religious houses: a priory, a monastery run by a prior, whose existence survives only as a bare entry in the…
- Near Standon
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Stewart Castle, Northern Ireland
County Tyrone
Stewart Castle links a Plantation manor and two seventeenth-century burnings to a Bronze Age (roughly 2500–800 BC, when metalworking spread) burial…
- Near Cookstown
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Stockport Castle
Greater Manchester
Stockport Castle controlled a strategic ford where the Goyt and Tame form the Mersey, and its 1173 role in the barons’ rebellion, early decline and…
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Struell Wells
County Down
Struell Wells is a managed holy-well landscape where pre-Patrick traditions, pilgrimages, chapel remains, and flowing water have shaped devotion fo…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sudbury Benedictine Priory
Suffolk
Founded by the master of the royal mint at Sudbury. Its barn, one of the best medieval barns in Suffolk, burned in 2011 and was delisted in 2023.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sudbury Priory
Suffolk
A stone sarcophagus turned up during demolition around 1820 and ended as a horse trough outside the Maldon Grey pub. It had been broken up by 1900.
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Sutton Camera
Herefordshire
Little survives of Sutton Camera beyond its name and a single map reference: a quiet reminder of how many small medieval priories in Herefordshire…
- Near Sutton St Nicholas
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Swyre Head
Dorset
Swyre Head is the high point of the Isle of Purbeck, valued for its broad coastal and inland views and for a summit shaped by later landscape inter…
- Near Kingston
- Some walking
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Syon Abbey
Greater London
Syon Abbey was England’s wealthiest religious house and its only community to survive the Reformation (the sixteenth-century closure of the monaste…
- Near Isleworth
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Takeley Priory
Essex
Takeley Priory is a buried Norman foundation linking Essex and Middlesex estates to the Abbey (a monastic house under the rule of an abbot) of Sain…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tallaght Monastery
County Dublin
Tallaght matters as the place where a monastery founded between Roman rule and the Norman arrival generated texts that still illuminate Irish devot…
- Near Tallaght
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tamlaght Finlagan Monastery
County Londonderry
Tamlaght Finlagan preserves an early Columba-founded monastic tradition transformed into a parish church, garrison church, and Second World War bur…
- Near Limavady
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tangy Loch Castle
Argyll and Bute
A causeway now vanished beneath the water once linked this island stronghold to the shore, leaving a ruin that in the seventeenth century belonged…
- Near Campbeltown
- Rough ground
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tarrant Abbey
Dorset
Tarrant Abbey was a wealthy Cistercian nunnery whose buried remains and surviving lay church preserve a remarkable women’s religious foundation in…
- Near Tarrant Crawford
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tattycor
County Tyrone
Tattycor is a small Tyrone townland where a protected rath (an early-medieval Irish farmstead ringed by an earth bank) and a sharply recorded ninet…
- Near Cookstown
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Temple Ewell Preceptory
Kent
Temple Ewell Preceptory records the succession of Knights Templar and Knights Hospitaller at a long-used Dover road site, from a Saxon wooden churc…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thame Abbey
Oxfordshire
A Cistercian monastery founded in 1137 by Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, and dissolved in the 1530s.
- Near Thame
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
The Abbey, Storrington
West Sussex
Built in 1871-2 out of the 1621 rectory it replaced, and altered by every tenant since: a billiard room and ballroom went in during 1930.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
The New Castle, County Down
County Down
The New Castle guarded a Shimna River ford at Newcastle for nearly four centuries before its 1830 demolition erased the fortified structure.
- Near Newcastle
-
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thremhall Priory
Essex
Thremhall’s moat and fishpond preserve the plan of an Augustinian house whose closure in the 1530s converted a religious estate into private countr…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Thwaite Priory
Lincolnshire
Thwaite Priory was a late-medieval Augustinian dependency of Thornton Abbey whose surviving fabric was incorporated into the Grade II listed Thwait…
- Near Welton le Marsh
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Tievebulliagh
County Antrim
Tievebulliagh is a Glens of Antrim mountain whose Neolithic (the late Stone Age, about 4000–2500 BC in Britain) porcellanite quarry supplied axes a…
- Near Cushendall
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tilsworth Castle
Bedfordshire
Two castles, not one: a lost Saxon motte on the knoll above, and the fortified moated manor below it that a forged letter, a poisoning plot and eig…
- Near Tilsworth
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Togher Castle
County Cork
Togher is a substantially intact late-sixteenth-century MacCarthy tower house, retaining defensive bartizans, a winding stair and dungeon from the…
- Near Bandon
- Some walking
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tonnagh More
County Tyrone
Tonnagh More is a Tyrone townland where a protected rath (a ringfort, a farmstead enclosed by a circular bank and ditch) and stable 1840s populatio…
- Near Cookstown
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tower Dock
City of London
Tower Dock preserves the last visible head of a Thames inlet that helped protect the Tower of London and marked the edge of its historic Liberty.
- Near London
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tracton Abbey
County Cork
Tracton marks a lost Cistercian monastery whose vanished fabric contrasts with a sheela na gig and a horse bit from the centuries before Rome arrived.
- Near Carrigaline
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tregonan Grange
Cornwall
Tregonan Grange records the agricultural reach of Beaulieu Abbey into Cornwall and the near-total loss of a Cistercian outlying estate whose remain…
- Near Helston
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Tulketh Priory
Lancashire
A short-lived Cistercian foothold whose monks moved on in 1127 to found Furness Abbey, taking Tulketh's community north with them.
- Near Preston
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tully Castle
County Fermanagh
Tully Castle preserves a Plantation-era Lough Erne stronghold whose destruction in the 1641 rebellion ended Hume occupation and left a rare fortifi…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tullyhogue Fort
County Tyrone
Tullyhogue Fort was the O’Neill inauguration site, where ceremonial guardians and the Leac na Rí embodied the political sovereignty of Tyrone.
- Near Cookstown
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tullykelter Castle
County Fermanagh
Tullykelter Castle preserves a heavily overgrown Plantation-era ruin whose land grant, Scottish family, and troubled tenancies reveal Fermanagh’s s…
- Near Enniskillen
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Turlough Abbey
County Mayo
A monastic site with roots reputedly reaching back to Saint Patrick's own mission, marked today by an unusually low and squat round tower unlike an…
- Near Castlebar
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Tynte's Castle
County Cork
Tynte’s Castle retains a fortified late-medieval merchant tower in Youghal’s centre, its 1643 refurbishment and later prison use recording the town…
- Near Youghal
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Ullerwood Castle
Greater Manchester
Ullerwood Castle is a little-documented early medieval (roughly AD 400–1100, between the Romans and the Normans) stronghold on Manchester’s souther…
- Near Ringway
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Upleadon Preceptory
Herefordshire
A name on the map is almost the whole record: Upleadon's preceptory (a local estate of a military order such as the Knights Templar) tells of a van…
- Near Upleadon
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Urney Glebe
County Tyrone
Urney Glebe is a small Tyrone townland where a protected ecclesiastical site and carved cross slab preserve an early sacred landscape.
- Near Omagh
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Walden Abbey
Essex
Walden Abbey’s history connects the turbulence of the Anarchy, aristocratic burial and patronage, and the later transformation of monastic land int…
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
Wallace Monument
Stirling
Garibaldi helped pay for it. A statue of Wallace with Mel Gibson's face stood at the foot of the crag until the public loathing became unmanageable.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Walsall Castle
West Midlands
A moated manor house rebuilt by a baron as his personal 'new castle' in the 1380s, entertained a noblewoman and her children, then vanished so comp…
- Near Walsall
- Easy path
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Warbleton Priory
East Sussex
Warbleton Priory preserves substantial archaeology of an Augustinian house re-established after coastal loss at Hastings, with its church, domestic…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wareham Priory
Dorset
Wareham Priory records successive Saxon and Norman religious foundations on one site, ending in a Tudor house that still preserves the location as…
- Near Wareham
- Easy path
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Wark in Tyndale Castle
Northumberland
Wark in Tyndale’s surviving motte and enclosure preserve a castle’s long occupation despite the loss of its medieval buildings from view today.
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Weedon Lois Castle
Northamptonshire
Weedon Lois Castle was the baronial centre of Weedon, a late-eleventh-century Norman ringwork, a castle enclosure ringed by a bank, held by the Pin…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
West Mersea Priory
Essex
West Mersea Priory records the long reach of a Norman monastery across the Channel: a 1046 Essex foundation dependent on Rouen, transferred to Arch…
-
Sacred place · Medieval
West Peckham Preceptory
Kent
West Peckham Preceptory documents a late medieval Knights Hospitaller administrative centre in Kent, operating until Henry VIII’s Dissolution (Henr…
- Near West Peckham
-
Fortified place · Medieval
West Woodhay Castle
Berkshire
Built for show rather than defence, this Norman lord's mound was later reshaped into a garden viewpoint for the house that replaced it: a castle tu…
- Near West Woodhay
-
Sacred place · Medieval
White Abbey, Kildare
County Kildare
White Abbey links the de Vesci foundation and earls of Kildare to a Carmelite site whose ground, well and colour-name outlived Tudor closure.
- Near Kildare
-
Building or ruin · Medieval
White House, County Down
County Down
The White House is a protected seventeenth-century Ards Peninsula dwelling, tied to the Savage family’s division of Ballygalget, Kirkistown, and Ba…
- Near Downpatrick
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Winchcombe Castle
Gloucestershire
Winchcombe Castle was a short-lived Anarchy-period motte (the great earth mound at the heart of an early castle)-and-bailey, built for Empress Mati…
- Near Gloucester
-
Sacred place · Medieval
Wix Priory
Essex
Wix Priory is a rare surviving trace of a medieval Benedictine nunnery in Essex: although the convent buildings vanished, its priory church continu…
-
Fortified place · Medieval
Work of William Burges at Cardiff Castle
Cardiff
The jelly-mould ceiling of the Arab Room at Cardiff Castle, drawn in a Moorish style from William Burges's studies of Islamic art in Spain and Sici…
- Near Cardiff
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