United Kingdom: Cumbria – Carlisle Castle

🏰 Carlisle Castle

I headed to the Castle, managed by English Heritage, a short walk from the Cathedral at the northern end of the city centre.

It’s an imposing thing, even on a grey, drizzly Tuesday morning. The castle sits up on a natural ridge above the River Eden, built of the same deep red sandstone as everything else in Carlisle, and from a distance it has the look of something that has absolutely no intention of going anywhere. Which, given its history, is entirely appropriate. The place has been standing in one form or another for nearly a thousand years, and it has seen off rather a lot of people who wanted to knock it down.

The story begins in 1092, when William Rufus — that’s William II, son of William the Conqueror — marched north to assert English control over Carlisle. The Scots had been claiming the city and the surrounding county of Cumberland as their own, and William was having none of it. He expelled the existing population, replaced them with English settlers from the south — essentially a medieval version of gentrification that the original residents presumably found even less charming than we do today — and planted a castle on the ridge above the river, on the site of a much earlier Roman fort. That first fortification was most likely timber and earth, the sort of thing a medieval army could throw up reasonably quickly, but it did the job. Henry I ordered it properly rebuilt in stone in 1122, and from that point forward, Carlisle Castle became one of the key pieces on the northern chessboard of English history.

The castle’s strategic position meant it spent the next four centuries being perpetually fought over. It was besieged more times than any other castle in England — at least seven times by Scottish forces alone between 1173 and 1461, which must have been deeply tiresome for anyone trying to live or work there. It changed hands between the English and the Scots on multiple occasions, sitting uncomfortably on the border of two kingdoms with a habit of disagreeing violently about where exactly that border lay. By the mid-13th century it had been designated the headquarters of the Warden of the Western March — the Crown’s appointed official responsible for managing the border territory, keeping order among the various armed families who occupied both sides, and generally preventing the whole region from descending into permanent chaos. It was, on the evidence, an uphill struggle.

Edward I — Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots, and by any measure one of medieval England’s more energetically aggressive monarchs — used Carlisle Castle as his principal military base during his Scottish campaigns. He held Parliament here not once but twice, in 1295 and again in 1306–07, making Carlisle temporarily one of the most politically significant addresses in the country. He died in 1307 at Burgh-by-Sands, a few miles to the west, having set out for yet another Scottish campaign, which suggests that Carlisle was essentially his idea of a permanent forward operating base. The man was relentless.

In the 16th century, Henry VIII, not to be outdone in the matter of leaving his mark on things, had the castle’s defences substantially modernised. Military architecture had been transformed by the development of artillery, and the old medieval walls that had kept out archers and siege ladders were not going to stop a cannon. Henry brought in a Moravian military engineer called Stephan von Haschenperg, who constructed the half-moon battery in 1541 — a distinctive curved artillery platform that is still one of the most visible features of the castle today — and added an artillery position on top of the keep. It was cutting-edge military technology for its day, which is a slightly sobering thought when you’re standing in front of what looks, to the modern eye, like a fairly solid bit of medieval masonry.

The castle’s most famous prisoner arrived in May 1568. Mary, Queen of Scots — having abdicated the Scottish throne under pressure, escaped from Loch Leven Castle where she’d been held prisoner, and lost the battle of Langside within a fortnight of her escape — crossed the Solway Firth into England and threw herself on the mercy of her cousin Elizabeth I. Elizabeth’s mercy, it turned out, took the form of keeping Mary in comfortable but firm confinement, and Carlisle Castle was her first English prison. She was kept in what was known as the Warden’s Tower, and her upkeep cost Elizabeth around £52 a week in food, wine, and general maintenance of a deposed queen’s dignity. Legend has it that Mary would watch football matches from her window — the game played at the time bore a passing resemblance to what we’d recognise today, if you substituted all the rules for a general melee involving a pig’s bladder and a large field. If the legend is true, she watched because there was nothing else to do. Which is the same reason most of us watch football, when you get down to it.

Then, in 1596, came one of the more extraordinary episodes in the castle’s long career. William Armstrong — known as Kinmont Willie, one of the most notorious Border Reivers of his generation — had been seized and imprisoned here, arguably in breach of a border truce. The Border Reivers were the armed raiding clans who had spent the previous two centuries making life comprehensively miserable for the settled population on both sides of the border, stealing livestock, burning farms, and generally operating as a large-scale protection racket on horseback. Armstrong’s arrest infuriated the Scottish Warden of the Western March, a man called Walter Scott of Branxholme — an ancestor of the novelist Sir Walter Scott, which perhaps explains something about that family’s storytelling instincts. Scott organised an armed raid on the castle. His men brought ladders, scaled the walls in the middle of the night, located Armstrong in his cell, and got him out. The whole operation was carried out so efficiently that the English garrison, to their considerable embarrassment, barely had time to respond. It’s the sort of story that sounds like it was made up, and quite possibly some of the details have improved with retelling, but the rescue of Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle is a matter of historical record.

The castle’s later history runs through the Jacobite Rising of 1745, when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s forces briefly held it before being dislodged, leaving Jacobite prisoners behind in the keep. According to the guides, those prisoners were so desperately thirsty in their captivity that they licked moisture from the damp sandstone walls. Whether or not you take that entirely at face value, you can still see the marks in the stone — smooth patches at about head height where generations of visitors have been told this story — known as the Licking Stones. They are oddly affecting, and rather grim. From the 18th century until the 1960s, the castle served as the regimental headquarters of the Border Regiment, and Cumbria’s Museum of Military Life is housed within the inner ward, which is included in the English Heritage entry fee and is well worth a look.

I climbed the ramparts and had a good look over the city. On a clear day you can presumably see for considerable distances — towards the Solway coast to the west, the Pennines to the east, and over the border into Scotland to the north. On a wet August morning you can see quite a lot of grey cloud and the rooftops of Carlisle, but even that was worth it. It is very easy to understand, standing up there, why anyone who wanted to control this particular corner of England would want to put a large building on this spot and make sure it stayed put.