Old Wardour Castle
Old Wardour Castle is a ruined late medieval fortified house set within the rolling Wiltshire countryside near the village of Tisbury, and it stands as one of England's most romantically picturesque castle ruins. Unlike the typical rectangular keep designs of English medieval fortification, Old Wardour was built on a distinctive hexagonal plan, a design inspired by continental European fashion and quite unlike almost anything else in Britain. This unusual form, combined with its state of picturesque but substantial ruin, makes it genuinely arresting to approach and explore. English Heritage cares for the site, and it attracts visitors drawn by both the architecture and the atmosphere — the place has a quality of stillness and melancholy grandeur that is difficult to manufacture and impossible to fake.
The castle was originally built around 1393 for John, 5th Baron Lovel, who obtained a licence to crenellate from Richard II. The design was influenced by castles Lord Lovel had seen in France and central Europe, and the hexagonal tower arrangement set around a small internal courtyard was quite radical for England at the time. Intended as much as a statement of wealth and sophistication as a defensive structure, it was conceived as a residence for high living rather than hard fighting. In the early sixteenth century the castle was acquired by Sir Thomas Arundell, and it remained in the Arundell family for generations. The family were staunch Catholics, which drew them into considerable danger during the religious and political upheavals of the Tudor period, and this Catholic identity would shape the castle's ultimate fate.
The most dramatic chapter in the castle's history unfolded during the English Civil War in the 1640s. In 1643, Parliamentary forces besieged Old Wardour and its tiny Royalist garrison — a garrison that consisted largely of Lady Blanche Arundell and a handful of servants, perhaps twenty-five people in total. Lady Blanche held out for several days against a Parliamentary force numbering in the hundreds before surrendering on honourable terms. The Parliamentarians then occupied the castle, and the following year Royalist forces besieged it in turn. This second siege, ironically mounted by the Arundells' own side to reclaim their home, resulted in a tremendous explosion — probably from a mine detonated beneath the structure — that caused catastrophic damage to much of the building. After the wars, the castle was deemed beyond practical repair, and the Arundell family built a new Palladian mansion, New Wardour Castle, nearby, leaving Old Wardour to fall gracefully into ruin.
In person, the castle impresses through its sheer scale and the sculptural drama of its broken stonework. The hexagonal tower rises to a considerable height on some sides, with one substantial face still retaining multiple floors and window openings that frame views of sky and landscape. Stone staircases within the walls survive in places, allowing access into what remains of the interior chambers. The grotto at the base of the castle — an eighteenth-century addition made when the Arundells landscaped the grounds as a picturesque garden feature — adds an unexpected subterranean dimension to the visit. Around the ruin there is a roughly circular lake and carefully shaped landscape, the trees now mature and the whole setting feeling layered with time. Birdsong echoes around the stones, and on quiet days the place has an almost theatrical hush.
The surrounding area is quintessential south Wiltshire: gentle chalk downland and clay vales stitched together with ancient hedgerows, stone-built villages, and meandering lanes. The village of Tisbury lies a short distance to the north and is worth exploring in its own right, with a magnificent tithe barn and a fine medieval church. The Nadder Valley runs broadly through this area, and walkers will find good footpaths connecting the countryside around the castle. The new Wardour Castle — a grand Palladian house completed in the 1770s — is visible a short distance away and is now a private school, though it can be glimpsed from public approaches. The broader area includes other points of interest such as Fonthill, Stourhead to the west, and Shaftesbury to the south, making Old Wardour a natural stop on a wider day exploring this quiet and historically rich corner of England.
Visiting is straightforward: the castle is signposted from the A30 and approached along a lane through the estate, with a car park provided close to the entrance. English Heritage manages the site and charges an admission fee for non-members, though members enter free. There is a small gift shop and toilets on site. The castle is generally open from late March through to late October, with reduced winter opening; it is worth checking current hours in advance. Sensible footwear is advisable since some of the interior surfaces are uneven. The site is accessible to pushchairs across the grounds, though some internal areas are more restricted. The castle is most atmospheric visited on a weekday morning in late spring or early autumn when visitor numbers are low and the light falls obliquely across the pale stonework.
One of the more charming curiosities of Old Wardour is its role in popular culture: the ruined castle was used as a filming location for the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, standing in for the interior of Nottingham Castle. This fact tends to delight younger visitors considerably. The eighteenth-century landscaping of the grounds reflects the Picturesque movement's appetite for evocative ruins as garden ornaments — in a faintly ironic way, the Arundells turned the catastrophe of the Civil War into an aesthetic asset, framing their ruined ancestral home as a designed object for contemplation. The castle's unusual hexagonal plan also continues to puzzle and attract architectural historians; it remains one of the few examples in England of this particular approach to fortified residential design, and studying it offers a rare window into the cosmopolitan ambitions of late medieval English nobility.