The Castle Rolls
Castle Guides
History, architecture and the practical stuff - long-form essays that go deeper than a single entry, cross-linked into the full roll of 441 UK castles.
2 November 2026
Bastions and Star Forts: What Replaced the Castle
How cannon made tall medieval walls untenable, why Italian engineers answered with low, angled bastions, and where on the roll you can walk the Elizabethan ramparts of Berwick, Star Castle on Scilly, Carisbrooke, Pendennis and the Civil War earthworks at Donnington.
Photo: Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
23 October 2026
The Castles of the Welsh Princes
The stone castles the princes of Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth built before Edward I's conquest: why they stand where they do, the D-shaped towers that mark them as Welsh, and how they fell between 1277 and 1287. Dolbadarn, Dolwyddelan, Castell y Bere, Criccieth, Ewloe, Dinas Bran, Dolforwyn and Dryslwyn.
Photo: Beep boop beep, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
5 October 2026
The Castle Garrison: Who Actually Lived Inside
How many people really guarded a medieval castle: the constable, the porter and the watch, the knights who owed castle-guard, and why a great fortress held a few dozen men for most of the year. Conwy, Harlech, Caernarfon, Dover, Richmond, Carisbrooke, Beeston and the Tower of London.
Photo: Andrew Woodvine, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
21 September 2026
Timber to Stone: When Castles Were Rebuilt in Masonry
The move from earth and timber to masonry took far longer and happened far more unevenly than the textbook sequence suggests. Why a lord paid for stone, why most never did, why so many mottes got a shell keep instead of a tower, and the castles where both phases are still legible. Chepstow, Richmond, Windsor, Berkhamsted, Pickering, Totnes, Tamworth, Carisbrooke, Launceston and Montgomery.
Photo: Andrew Bowden from London, United Kingdon, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
7 September 2026
What Is an Oubliette? Castle Prisons and What the Record Shows
The oubliette, the bottle dungeon and the pit prison, and how to tell a real one from a relabelled cesspit. Where the word came from, why Warwick's most famous room is almost certainly a latrine shaft, and why the best-documented confinement in British castles is Georgian rather than medieval. St Andrews, Warwick, Lydford, Hermitage, Dundonald, Threave, Carlisle, the Tower, Chepstow, Pontefract and Colchester.
Photo: Son of Groucho from Scotland, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
24 August 2026
Castle Chapels: The Church Inside the Walls
Almost every castle of any size had a chapel and the larger ones had two, one for the lord and one for everyone else. Where they sat, what the chaplain did besides say mass, the painted walls at Chester, the collegiate foundations of the fourteenth century and what the Chantries Acts left standing. The Tower, Durham, Edinburgh, Ludlow, Farleigh Hungerford, Arundel, Windsor, Warkworth and Dunstaffnage.
Photo: Tim Green from Bradford, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
22 August 2026
How Did Castles Become Country Houses?
Between the fifteenth century and the nineteenth, working castles were rebuilt into comfortable seats: wide windows cut through walls built solid, floors inserted into tall medieval halls, keeps left standing for show. Rockingham, Broughton, Sizergh, Bolsover, Thornbury, Dunster, Raby, Powis, Chirk and Glamis.
Photo: Richard Humphrey, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
20 August 2026
Arrow Loops, Murder Holes and Machicolations
The three openings that did a castle's actual fighting, and how to read them on a visit: loop types and the weapons they suited, why the murder hole was better documented as a fire hose than as a way of pouring boiling oil, and the timber hoarding that machicolation replaced. Dover, Framlingham, Caernarfon, Carrickfergus, Raglan, Bodiam and Tattershall.
Photo: Chensiyuan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
18 August 2026
How Was a Castle Fed? Kitchens, Wells and the Siege Larder
The domestic engine room behind the walls: why kitchens were built apart from everything else, the wells sunk hundreds of feet through rock at Beeston, Conwy and Dover, the brewhouse and the salted larder, and the arithmetic that starved Beeston out in 1645 with one of the deepest wells in England underneath it.
Photo: Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
16 August 2026
Bishops' Castles: Why the Medieval Church Built Fortresses
Medieval bishops held land like earls and built like them too: the palatinate of Durham with its own exchequer, sheriff and mint, the six castles Henry of Blois raised in a single year, the building bishops King Stephen arrested in 1139, and why the Dissolution is the wrong ending for the story.
Photo: Tim Green from Bradford, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
14 August 2026
Castles of the Anarchy: Stephen, Matilda and the Adulterine Castles
The civil war of 1138 to 1153 and the castles it threw up: what adulterine actually meant, why the chronicle figure of 1,115 is a rhetorical flourish rather than a survey, the counter-castles Stephen dug outside other men's gates at Wallingford, Corfe and Burwell, and how little of Henry II's demolition can be proved.
12 August 2026
What a Castle Moat Was Actually For
Why castles had moats, and why the real answer is mining rather than swimming attackers. Kenilworth's dammed Great Mere and the 172-day siege it won, Caerphilly's flooded valley, the thirty-year argument over Bodiam, Beaumaris's tidal dock, and the water that has quietly drained away since.
Photo: Antony McCallum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
10 August 2026
How a Castle Was Actually Taken
Blockade, mining, escalade and the engines: how medieval castles were really reduced, and why hunger, disease and negotiated terms took far more of them than any assault. Rochester 1215, Dover 1216, Kenilworth 1266, Stirling 1304 and Harlech 1468.
Photo: Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
8 August 2026
Licence to Crenellate: Who Was Allowed to Build a Castle?
The royal permission to fortify a house: what the licences actually said, how many survive, why roughly three fortified manor houses in five have none, and why historians no longer agree that building without one was illegal. From Acton Burnell in 1284 to Bodiam in 1385.
Photo: Antony McCallum, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
7 August 2026
The Castle Gatehouse: How the Entrance Became the Strongest Point
How the gate went from a castle's weakest point to its strongest building: twin towers, barbicans, portcullises and murder holes, and the great gatehouse-keeps at Harlech, Denbigh and Caernarfon.
Photo: Pymouss, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
6 August 2026
Ringwork Castles: the Norman Castle With No Motte
The overlooked third of early Norman castle building: a bank and ditch round a level platform, with no mound at all. Why a builder chose a ringwork over a motte, and where you can still walk the ring - Castle Rising, Old Sarum, Restormel, Lydford, Ogmore and more.
Photo: Elliott Brown, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
5 August 2026
Scottish Border Castles and the Debatable Land
Why the Anglo-Scottish frontier ended up with the most fought-over castles in Britain - Berwick, Roxburgh, Carlisle, Norham, Hermitage and Caerlaverock - and what the Debatable Land was, the strip near the Solway that neither crown would govern until it was partitioned in 1552.
Photo: Simon Ledingham, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
4 August 2026
Scotland's Royal Castles
Which castles the Scottish crown actually held and lived in - Edinburgh and Stirling, the early Stewart houses at Dundonald, Rothesay and Doune, the working fortresses at Dumbarton, Blackness and Urquhart - and what became of them after the court left for London in 1603.
Photo: John McPake, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
4 August 2026
Castle Walks
UK castles where visitors describe an actual walk in their own reviews - coast paths, circular routes, woodland and lakeside trails - across every operator and all four nations.
Photo: Tim Simpson, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
3 August 2026
What Is a Shell Keep?
Why the Normans put a ring of stone wall round the top of a motte instead of a tower on it, what living inside one was actually like, and where the best shell keeps in Britain still stand - Restormel, Cardiff, Launceston, Windsor and more.
2 August 2026
Sea Castles: How Britain Defended Its Coast
Britain has been fortifying the same stretches of shoreline for seventeen centuries - Roman Saxon Shore forts, medieval harbour castles, Henry VIII's gun forts, Palmerston's Victorian follies and the guns of 1940 - and the same handful of headlands keeps being rebuilt for each new enemy.
Photo: Chris Holifield, https://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/21337, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
1 August 2026
Who Were the Marcher Lords?
Why the England-Wales border filled up with private castles built by barons who answered to almost nobody, what powers the Marcher lords actually held, and which of their strongholds - from Chepstow to Ludlow to the Three Castles of Gwent - you can still visit.
Photo: Gary Bembridge from London, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
30 July 2026
Castle Gardens: From Medieval Pleasance to Modern Revival
Castles had gardens from the start - the pleasance, the herber, the walled privy garden - and then the 18th-century landscape park swept most of them away. How castle gardens were made, lost, and rebuilt, and which ones on the roll you can walk round today.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons contributor, CC BY 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
29 July 2026
Irish Castles: Norman Motte to Plantation Bawn
How castle-building in Ireland ran through three distinct waves - Norman earthwork mottes and stone keeps after 1169, several thousand late-medieval tower houses, and the Plantation castles of the 1600s - and which castles on the roll you can still stand inside.
Photo: Adam Bishop, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
28 July 2026
What Is a Martello Tower?
Why Britain ringed its coast with 103 squat round gun towers between 1805 and 1812, how one small tower in Corsica beat off two Royal Navy warships and gave them their name, and which castles on the roll were rearmed in the same invasion emergency.
Photo: Ian Stannard from Southsea, England, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
28 July 2026
Castle Access Information
What UK castles say about access to their own sites - wheelchair routes, step counts, accessible parking and toilets - quoted from each operator with the date we read it. Including the places that state plainly they cannot be reached, because knowing that before you travel is worth as much as knowing a place is fine.
Photo: Worldfootage, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
27 July 2026
Why Are Some Castle Keeps Round?
Why the great square Norman keep gave way to the cylindrical tower in the late twelfth century - what a corner did to a besieged castle, what King John's miners proved at Rochester in 1215, and where you can still stand inside both shapes.
Photo: Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
24 July 2026
Castles With a Tea Room
UK castles with a tea room or on-site cafe, named by visitors in publicly available Google reviews across every operator and all four nations.
Photo: Billy McCrorie, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
23 July 2026
Who Was Master James of St George?
The Savoyard mason who ran Edward I's castle-building programme in Wales - where he came from, the castles he raised at Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris, and the honest argument over whether he designed them or simply made them happen.
Photo: Andrew Woodvine, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
22 July 2026
Slighted Castles
Why so many British castles are dramatic partial ruins - the Civil War policy of 'slighting', deliberately wrecking a castle so it could never be held against Parliament again, from Raglan's undermined great tower to Corfe blown apart with gunpowder.
Photo: Bob McCaffrey from Rickmansworth, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
21 July 2026
Wars of the Roses Castles
The castles that mattered in England's 1455-1487 civil wars - not mostly as siege targets, but as the family power bases, prizes and execution sites that decided who actually held the crown, from Sandal's battlefield motte to Middleham, Richard III's childhood home.
20 July 2026
The 25 Best Castles to Visit in the UK
Every visitable UK castle ranked by one thing only: a review-weighted score built from over a million Google reviews. The full national top 25, with the method shown in the open - no editor's favourites.
Photo: Christoph Matthias Siebenborn, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
19 July 2026
Visiting Castles on a Budget
The two honest routes to a cheap castle trip: over a hundred genuinely free castles, and the four multi-site passes - with which castles each pass covers, car-free options by train, and every number computed from the roll itself.
Photo: Daniel Phillips, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
18 July 2026
Castles Turned Into Prisons
How castles became Britain's prisons - from medieval hostage-holding to the purpose-built Georgian and Victorian county gaols raised inside the walls at Oxford, Lincoln and Lancaster, some still locking people up into living memory.
Photo: APK, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
17 July 2026
Follies and Fake Castles
Georgian and Victorian sham castles built purely for effect, never for defence - what separates a folly from a real castle, why the Victorians built them, and which fakes, from Burges's fairy-tale Castell Coch to neo-Norman Penrhyn, you can still visit today.
Photo: DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
16 July 2026
Windsor Castle
How a timber motte William the Conqueror raised above the Thames became the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world - the Round Tower, St George's Chapel and the Garter, and the 1992 fire that nearly gutted it.
Photo: Herbert Ortner, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
15 July 2026
Border Reivers and Peel Towers
Why the Anglo-Scottish border was defended by hundreds of small, plain stone towers rather than great castles, who the Border Reivers actually were, and which of these fortified homes you can still visit today.
Photo: Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
14 July 2026
Caernarfon Castle
Why Edward I built his most theatrical Welsh castle with polygonal towers copied from Constantinople, and why it's still where the Prince of Wales gets invested.
Photo: Herbert Ortner, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
13 July 2026
Alnwick Castle
How the Percy family has held the same Northumberland castle for over 700 years, and where Harry Potter learned to fly a broomstick.
Photo: Clementp.fr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
12 July 2026
Warwick Castle
How a Norman motte on the Avon became the power base of the 'Kingmaker', survived a devastating 1871 fire, and ended up owned by Madame Tussauds' parent company.
Photo: DeFacto, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
11 July 2026
Stirling Castle
Why 'he who holds Stirling holds Scotland', and how two of the most famous battles in Scottish history were fought to control this one crag.
Photo: John McPake, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
10 July 2026
Eilean Donan Castle
Why Scotland's most photographed castle spent nearly two centuries as a pile of rubble before one family rebuilt it from a dream.
9 July 2026
Edinburgh Castle
How a fortress on an extinct volcano became the most besieged place in Britain, why the Honours of Scotland are locked inside it, and what the One O'Clock Gun is actually for.
Photo: Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
8 July 2026
The Tower of London
How a single stone keep William the Conqueror raised to intimidate a conquered city grew, over eight centuries, into a fortress, a menagerie, a mint, a prison and the strongroom for the Crown Jewels - and stayed all of them at once.
Photo: [Duncan] from Nottingham, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
7 July 2026
Scottish Tower Houses
Why Scotland built over 800 vertical stone tower houses - more than any other kind of castle it ever produced - and which survivors, from fairy-tale Craigievar to the tower that made Sir Walter Scott, you can still climb today.
Photo: Colin Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
6 July 2026
Henry VIII's Device Forts
Why Henry VIII spent a fortune on squat, clover-shaped gun forts along the English coast in the 1540s, and which survivors - from Deal's flower-plan fortress to the RAF base built inside Calshot's keep - you can still visit today.
Photo: Lieven Smits, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
5 July 2026
Motte and Bailey Castles
What a motte and bailey castle actually is, why the Normans threw up hundreds of them after 1066, and which survivors - from Windsor's Round Tower to Lincoln's rare second motte - you can still stand on today.
Photo: Herbert Ortner, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
4 July 2026
The Concentric Castle
How a single idea - a wall inside a wall - produced the most sophisticated castles ever built in Britain, and why it was almost the last. From Caerphilly to Beaumaris.
Photo: Balon Greyjoy, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
3 July 2026
Dog-Friendly Castles
Every UK castle where a real visitor has said, in their own review, that they brought a dog along - drawn from publicly available Google reviews across every operator and all four nations, not one region or one heritage body's own list.
Photo: TCExplorer, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
2 July 2026
Wedding Venue Castles
UK castles that visitors describe as wedding venues, drawn from publicly available Google reviews across every operator and all four nations.
Photo: Bs0u10e01, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
1 July 2026
Castles With Gardens
UK castles whose gardens visitors single out as a highlight, drawn from publicly available Google reviews across every operator and all four nations.
Photo: Wdejager, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, cropped
30 June 2026
Haunted Castles
UK castles where visitors themselves raise a ghost story or haunting in their own reviews, drawn from publicly available Google reviews.
