United Kingdom: Essex – Mountfitchet Castle

🗺️ A Father’s Day Near an Airport, With Rather More History Than We Bargained For

It was Father’s Day, and as is traditional in our house, we spent the first five minutes of the morning doing what we always do, which is standing in the kitchen saying “where shall we go, then?” to each other in the hope that the other person has had a better idea than wandering round the garden centre again. Eventually Emily and I landed on Mountfitchet Castle, a Norman reconstruction tucked away near Stansted Airport in Essex, not all that far from where we live in Halstead. I will confess I hadn’t given the place much thought before that morning, beyond a vague memory of seeing the brown tourist sign for it every time I’d driven past on the way to catch a flight, usually too stressed about whether I’d left the iron on to pay it any proper attention.

What struck me almost immediately, once we’d arrived and parked up, was the sheer oddness of the location. You’ve got jets thundering overhead every few minutes, climbing out of Stansted, and below them a nearly thousand-year-old Norman village sitting quietly in a river valley as though nobody had told it the twentieth century happened, let alone the twenty-first. I rather liked that. Progress and the past, cheek by jowl, with neither one taking the slightest notice of the other. It’s the sort of contrast that, as a Londoner who’s spent half his life either stuck in traffic or stuck at an airport, I found strangely comforting. Some things plod on regardless of how fast everything else is going.

For anyone who’s never heard of the place, and I’d guess that’s most people, Mountfitchet has what you might call a proper pedigree. This isn’t some theme park knocked up in a field last year — the site itself goes right back to the Iron Age, when it was used as a hill fort, presumably by people who’d worked out long before the Normans turned up that a lump of high ground over a river valley was a sensible spot to keep an eye on things. The Romans had the same idea later on and used it as a signal station, which I imagine involved a great deal of standing about in togas waving flags at colleagues on the next hill along the Stort Valley, in scenes that I daresay were every bit as thrilling as a long-haul departure lounge.

After the Romans packed up and went home, the site didn’t sit empty for long. The Saxons moved in, and after them the Vikings had a go at occupying the place too, which tells you rather a lot about how desirable a bit of high ground with a decent view was considered to be in those days — everybody wanted it, and everybody, it seems, was prepared to have a scrap over it. Then, in 1066, William the Conqueror and his lot turned up and rather rudely took the whole place off whoever happened to be living there at the time, which was rather typical of the Normans, if the history books are anything to go by.

One of William’s men, a Norman nobleman by the name of Robert Gernon, was given the land as a reward for services rendered during the Conquest. He went by the rather marvellous nickname of “Robert of the Moustache,” which is the sort of nickname I’d quite like to have myself, although at sixty I suspect mine would be rather more grey than moustachioed. Robert built a wooden motte-and-bailey castle on the site, and it became the chief seat of his barony — the administrative headquarters, if you like, for that part of Norman Essex. His family, who took the name de Montfitchet from the place, held onto the estate for five generations, before the line died out in 1267. By that point the original wooden castle had apparently been rebuilt in stone, only for King John to come along not long afterwards and have a thoroughly destructive go at it, in the way that medieval kings tended to do when they fell out with the local nobility. After King John’s little tantrum, the castle fell into ruin and was more or less left to the brambles and the rabbits for the best part of seven hundred years.

It might well have stayed that way indefinitely had it not been for a local farmer named Alan Goldsmith, who in the 1970s had the rather brilliant idea of clearing the whole site and rebuilding the castle as it would have looked back in 1066, at the time of the Conquest. It took a fair few years of work, as you’d expect, but it eventually opened to the public in 1985. What makes it genuinely unusual, and not just another bit of heritage marketing, is that it remains the only timber motte-and-bailey reconstruction standing on its original site anywhere in the world — which, when you say it out loud, is actually rather a remarkable claim for a quiet corner of Essex to be able to make. The place also has a reputation for being haunted, supposedly, although the only thing that troubled either of us that day was Emily’s enthusiasm for the gift shop, which I suppose counts as its own kind of haunting if you’ve ever tried to leave one with a child in tow.

🐐 Set Upon by Livestock Within Ten Yards, and Into the Castle Proper

We paid at the gate, and Emily, who has never in her life knowingly passed up the chance to feed an animal, insisted we buy a bag of feed before we’d gone more than ten yards into the place. This turned out to be a sound piece of judgement on her part, because we were set upon almost immediately by an extraordinary cross-section of livestock that seemed to have been told we were coming. Peacocks strutted about the place as though they personally owned the freehold, guinea fowl scattered underfoot making the sort of racket that guinea fowl specialise in, chickens pecked away at absolutely everything within reach, goats nosed hopefully at our pockets in the manner of pickpockets who’d given up on subtlety, and a small herd of fallow deer wandered over and looked thoroughly unbothered by the whole circus, the way deer do when they’ve clearly seen it all before.

The animals apparently roam free across the entire ten-acre site, much as livestock would have done in genuine Norman times, which is a nice touch of authenticity, even if I doubt the original Norman peasants had quite so many tourists handing out feed pellets. What I thought was rather a good thing, once we’d read up on it afterwards, was that most of the animals are rescues rather than show animals — refugees, in other words, from battery farms and similar grim beginnings — which made the whole encounter feel a good deal less like a standard petting zoo and a good deal more like something worth supporting, even if Emily’s only real interest at the time was in whether the goats would eat directly from her hand, which, gratifyingly for her, they did.

From the animals we worked our way properly into the castle and village itself, and I have to say, it really is a remarkably thorough piece of reconstruction. There’s clearly been a great deal more thought gone into it than I was expecting, given how unassuming the place looks from outside.

The motte — that’s the steep earth mound, for anyone who, like me, has forgotten most of what they were taught about this sort of thing at school — rises up dramatically with a timber keep perched on top of it, and you understand straight away why the Normans were so keen on this style of fortification. Get yourself and a handful of armed men up there, and you’d give any attacker the most thoroughly miserable afternoon of their life trying to dig you out. Down on the lower ground sits the bailey, a good acre of enclosed space surrounded by a wooden palisade, and within it the whole business of a working Norman settlement has been laid out for visitors to wander through at their leisure.

There’s a great hall, where the lord of the manor would have held court and entertained whoever needed entertaining, important or otherwise. There’s a scattering of simple cottages showing how the considerably less important people of the manor lived, which is to say, not nearly so comfortably. There’s a wooden church, complete with a bell that tolled gently across the grounds the entire time we were there, lending the place a peaceful, almost church-fete sort of atmosphere despite the centuries separating us from it. And there’s a blacksmith’s hut that, frankly, looked as though it could still turn out a perfectly serviceable horseshoe if somebody pressed it into service tomorrow.

What I particularly liked was that everything’s apparently been built using materials and methods that would have been entirely familiar to the original Norman builders — oak brought down from Suffolk, reed thatch from Norfolk, and even the plaster mixed, rather alarmingly, using horse and pig hair along with manure, which is the sort of historical detail you could happily have done without learning right before lunch.