Hidden Histories of England and Wales

Written by Simon Williams

There is a kind of snobbery about famous castles. Windsor is magnificent. Warwick is genuinely imposing. But because millions of people visit them each year, the experience of standing inside them carries a peculiar weight of expectation, like seeing a painting you have already encountered ten thousand times in reproduction. You recognise it before you arrive. You know its outline before you step through the gate.

The castles I find most rewarding are the ones that do not announce themselves. A crumbling brick tower rising from a Norfolk moat with no queue outside. A sandstone ruin above the Wye Valley where a famous mortar once cracked the walls open. A Suffolk fortress that nobody remembers until you mention that this is where a queen gathered her forces and changed the course of English history. These five are not hidden in any literal sense. They stand in plain sight. But they sit just outside the circle of famous names, and that is precisely what makes them worth seeking out.

What I keep returning to is the density of their stories. These are not footnotes to English history. In each case, the castle you are looking at was, at the moment that mattered, right at the centre of events. Follow that thread carefully enough, and the ruins start to feel very much alive.

Caister Castle: England's Pioneer in Brick

Caister Castle stands in a field in coastal Norfolk, its tall round tower rising from the remnants of a wide moat. Most visitors drive past without stopping. That is a significant oversight.

What makes Caister remarkable is not its scale but its material. When Sir John Fastolf commissioned the castle in 1432, brick construction of this ambition was genuinely unusual in England. Caister is recognised as one of the earliest brick-built castles in the country, and its moated, water-ringed design draws comparison not with any English precedent but with the Wasserburg of the Rhineland and Flanders: the water-ringed fortresses Fastolf would have encountered during his decades of campaigning in France. Caister is the only English example of this continental type.

Fastolf himself is a compelling figure. He fought at Agincourt in 1415 and accumulated considerable wealth through the Hundred Years' War. Caister was the physical expression of his ambition: a home that announced its owner's standing without apology. The 90-foot tower that still stands is the most visible remnant of what was once a sprawling fortified residence.

After Fastolf's death in 1459, the castle became the object of a bitter dispute between the Paston family, who claimed it under his will, and the Duke of Norfolk, who had no intention of relinquishing it. The Paston Letters, some of the most intimate private correspondence to survive from medieval England, document the struggle in vivid and sometimes desperate detail, including a siege of the castle in 1469. The Pastons eventually prevailed, but the fight for Caister consumed years of their lives.

I find the material fact the most striking thing here. Those early brickwork walls tell you that a man looked at what France could do and decided England should catch up. That is Caister in a sentence.

Goodrich Castle: The Mortar That Ended an Era

Goodrich Castle guards the River Wye from a sandstone promontory in Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border. English Heritage manages the ruins now, and they are magnificent. But the detail that first stops me is a residue of violence embedded in the north-west tower wall: the consequence of one of the most determined sieges of the English Civil War.

In the summer of 1646, Parliamentary forces under Colonel John Birch laid siege to a Royalist garrison of around two hundred men commanded by Sir Henry Lingen. For the assault, Birch had ordered the casting of a mortar designed specifically for this job. "Roaring Meg" is the only surviving mortar from the English Civil War, now displayed at Hereford Cathedral. It fired hollow iron balls packed with gunpowder, and Birch moved it forward under cover of darkness to attack the north-west tower at close range. The tower collapsed.

Down to their last four barrels of gunpowder, the Royalists could hold out no longer.

On 31 July 1646, Sir Henry Lingen surrendered, and the Royalist garrison marched out of the ruins of Goodrich to the tune of "Sir Harry Lingen's Fancy."

There is something almost unbearably poignant about that detail. A defeated commander, a diminished garrison, a medieval fortress reduced to rubble, and the whole scene scored by a tune named after their own captain. Walk Goodrich today and look closely at the walls. The evidence of what happened here is not abstract. It is in the stone itself.

Framlingham Castle: Where a Queen Found Her Throne

Framlingham Castle in Suffolk does not look like a castle at first approach, because it has no keep. Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, built it in the late twelfth century using a curtain wall with thirteen mural towers instead, a design that was then genuinely radical. The castle was complete by approximately 1213. King John laid siege to it in 1216, which should tell you something about the kind of attention it attracted from the very start.

The moment I return to, though, is the summer of 1553. Edward VI had died, and the succession was in dispute. Lady Jane Grey had been placed on the throne by Protestant nobles determined to exclude the Catholic Mary Tudor. Mary's response was to come to Framlingham.

This is where she gathered her support. The earls and knights who backed her cause rode not to London, not to Windsor, but to this castle in Suffolk. Her force grew rapidly. Within days, the support for Jane Grey had collapsed entirely. Mary entered London and was proclaimed queen, the first regnant queen of England. The reign of Mary I began here, in a castle that most visitors today have never heard of.

Stand on the wall walk at Framlingham and look out across the mere below. A queen looked out from these walls while her cause was deciding itself in the countryside around her, and England's history turned on what happened next.

Nunney Castle: A French Dream in Somerset Stone

There is something slightly unexpected about Nunney Castle. It sits at the centre of a small Somerset village, surrounded by a moat, and from a distance it looks less like an English medieval fortress and more like something you might find on the Loire.

That is no accident. Sir John de la Mare obtained his royal licence to build in 1373, having spent years fighting in France during the Hundred Years' War. He made his fortune the way many soldiers of his generation did: by capturing wealthy opponents and ransoming them back to their families. With that money he built a castle that reflected what he had seen. Nunney is modelled closely on the bastilles of France, with four round corner towers clustering tight around a central rectangular body, more vertical than horizontal in its proportions.

De la Mare was successively High Sheriff of Wiltshire and then of Somerset and Dorset. He was a man of substance and ambition, and Nunney was his statement. As much as it was a defensive structure, it was a building designed to impress: to show that its owner had been somewhere and come back transformed by the experience.

The castle was besieged and slighted during the Civil War. The north wall eventually collapsed in 1910. What remains is still striking: the tower rising sheer from the moat, the corner turrets, the scale of what one soldier's wartime fortune could build. If you visit only one castle in Somerset that is not on the usual list, make it this one.

Beeston Castle: The Well, the Rock, and the Lost Fortune

Beeston Castle sits on a rocky crag in Cheshire, visible for miles across the Cheshire Plain. Ranulf de Blondeville, Earl of Chester, began building here around 1225, choosing the position for obvious reasons: the views are extraordinary, the rock provides natural defence on every side, and the approach from the plain is difficult in all directions.

The documented history is rich enough without the legend. But the legend is very good.

Richard II is supposed to have hidden his personal treasure at Beeston in 1399, before sailing to Ireland to suppress a rebellion. He chose the castle's great well as his hiding place: one of the deepest castle wells in England, at approximately 370 feet. The treasure reportedly comprised enormous quantities of gold coin and precious objects. Richard did not come back to collect it. He was captured at Flint Castle on his return from Ireland, deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, and murdered in captivity. Henry IV reportedly recovered Richard's gold from its various hiding places. But the story at Beeston persisted.

Every few decades, someone searches the well. Electronic surveying has revealed at least three passages leading off from the shaft. No treasure has been found. A fourth passage, investigators have noted, remains uninvestigated.

I am not suggesting the treasure is there. I am suggesting that this is a castle where the gap between fact and legend is narrow enough to feel genuinely interesting, and where the view from the inner bailey on a clear day stretches all the way to the Welsh hills.

Why These Castles Reward a Closer Look

Each of the five castles in this article was, at the moment that mattered, at the centre of events. Fastolf was not building a ruin; he was building the most technologically advanced residence in Norfolk. Goodrich in 1646 was not a backwater; it was a contested fortress in an active war. Framlingham in 1553 was not a sleepy corner of Suffolk; it was the place where the future of England was being decided. These are not minor footnotes.

What changes when you visit them, compared with the famous castles, is the quality of attention you bring. Without the scaffolding of prior expectation, you have to look more carefully. You have to actually read the walls: to notice the early brickwork at Caister, the embedded musket balls at Goodrich, the sheer vertical mass of Nunney. The famous castles are already interpreted for you before you arrive. These require more of you, and they give more back.

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This article is part of the Castles in England and Wales series. Explore all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/castles-in-england-and-wales.

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