United Kingdom: Suffolk – Orford Castle

Eight Hundred Years and Still Standing: A Day Out at Orford Castle, Suffolk

We’d been meaning to get out to Orford for a while, and on a perfectly typical English summer’s day — the sky the colour of an old tea towel, but at least dry — we finally made it happen. Karen had been keen to see the castle for ages, and I’ll be honest, I was happy enough to go along for the ride. What we found was a good deal more interesting than either of us expected.

Orford is a small, quiet village on the Suffolk coast, about twelve miles north-east of Ipswich. It doesn’t shout about itself. There’s a market square, a couple of pubs, a church, and then there, rising up above everything else, is the castle keep. You can see it from some distance away, and it has the good grace to look exactly like what it is — old, solid, and not messing about.

🏰 A King With Something to Prove

The castle was built between 1165 and 1173, on the orders of Henry II. If you remember your school history, Henry was the one who had Archbishop Thomas Becket murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 — not exactly a great look — but before all that unpleasantness, he was busy being a rather effective king. Suffolk at the time was something of a problem area for the crown. The county was effectively run by the Bigod family, headed by Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who held castles at Framlingham, Bungay, Walton and Thetford and was, by all accounts, a considerable nuisance. When Henry came to the throne in 1154 there wasn’t a single royal castle in the whole of Suffolk, which tells you everything about who was really in charge.

Building Orford Castle was Henry’s way of saying: not any more. The location made good sense too. Orford in the 12th century was a busy and prosperous port, second only to Ipswich in importance for the county — hard to believe now, looking at the sleepy village it’s become. The Pipe Rolls, which were the financial records of the Crown, show that the whole project came in at £1,413. For a building that’s still standing 850 years later, that looks like pretty decent value.

The design of the keep is something special. Rather than the usual square tower, Henry’s builders went for a circular central tower with three rectangular towers projecting out from it — a polygonal keep, which was unusual for England at the time and is thought to have been influenced by Byzantine architecture. The historian R. Allen Brown called it “one of the most remarkable keeps in England,” and he wasn’t wrong. It stands about 90 feet tall, and the curtain wall that once surrounded it has long since crumbled away, leaving the keep standing alone and looking faintly magnificent, even on a grey day.

After Henry died in 1189, the castle passed to his son Richard I — Richard the Lionheart — and then went through a fair few hands over the following century. King John garrisoned it during the First Barons’ War. In 1217 it was briefly captured by the French Prince Louis, who arrived in East Anglia with support from the barons. It later passed to Roger Bigod (the family hadn’t entirely gone away, it seems), and by 1336 Edward III had granted it to the Ufford family, who made some improvements — glass windows and wood panelling — though the castle was probably only used occasionally by that point.

🐟 The Strange One: The Wild Man of Orford

This is where things get properly peculiar, and it’s worth telling because it gives you a sense of what life was like in medieval Suffolk.

Around 1167, not long after the castle was built, local fishermen hauled up their nets off the coast of Orford Ness and found, caught among the fish, a man. Naked, covered in hair, apparently human but unable or unwilling to speak a word. He was brought to the castle, where he was held for six months. The castle garrison tried to get something out of him — the chronicles say he was questioned, or tortured, which probably amounted to the same thing. He said nothing. He ate raw fish. They took him to Orford church to see if the sacraments might produce a reaction. They didn’t.

Eventually they let him swim in the sea, with nets around him to stop him escaping. He got out anyway, swam off, and was never seen again. The chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall wrote the whole thing up, and later accounts describe the man as a merman. Whether you believe any of it is up to you, but the story clearly stuck. There are wild man carvings — woodwoses, they’re called locally — on baptismal fonts in twenty or more churches along the Suffolk and Norfolk coast, and it’s generally thought that the Wild Man of Orford is the reason. You can find out more about him inside the castle, which we did, and Karen was rather more entertained by the whole business than she let on.

🗝️ What It’s Like to Visit

The castle is managed by English Heritage, and it’s open daily from ten in the morning. We parked nearby — there’s a small car park, free for English Heritage members — and walked up to the entrance. Tickets are very reasonably priced, and booking online saves you a bit, which is always worth knowing.

Inside, you work your way up through the keep from the basement to the top, going through the various chambers, the chapel, and what was once the kitchen. The stonework is impressive — broad staircases, proper ashlar stone, built to last and clearly having done so. There are multimedia guides and hands-on displays, which we both appreciated, and a model that shows what the whole castle would have looked like when it was first built, with the full curtain wall in place. It’s quite something.

The museum run by the Orford Museum Trust occupies the upper hall and has a good selection of local finds and changing exhibitions. Worth a look. Then you get to the roof, and even on an overcast day — perhaps especially on an overcast day, when the light is flat and clear — the views over Orford Ness and out to the sea are genuinely lovely. The Ness itself is a long shingle spit, one of the largest in Europe, and it stretches away along the coast in a rather dramatic fashion.

We spent a good couple of hours there in total, which for a site of this size felt about right. Not rushed, not stretched. On the way back down we stopped in the market square for a cup of tea and a think about what we’d seen, which is, I’d argue, the correct way to end any visit to an ancient castle.

Orford isn’t the most famous castle in England. It won’t get the tourist coaches that Warwick or Windsor pull in. But it has a quiet confidence about it — the keep standing there as it has done for the best part of nine centuries, looking out over a coastline that has changed beyond all recognition since Henry II decided he needed to put the Bigods in their place. Well worth the trip.