Corfe Castle
Corfe Castle rises from a natural chalk and limestone hill in the Purbeck Hills of Dorset, commanding the only gap through the ridge and occupying a position of strategic importance that has been fortified for over a thousand years. The dramatic and atmospheric ruins visible today, with their shattered walls and towers tilted at impossible angles of arrested collapse, are the result of a deliberate slighting ordered by Parliament after the Civil War siege of 1646, the explosions and subsequent dismantling leaving the fabric in permanent ruin. The result is one of the most evocative castle landscapes in England, a ruin whose broken profile communicates both the grandeur of the original building and the violence of its deliberate destruction.
The castle had a long and sometimes dark history before its Civil War end. King Edward the Martyr was murdered here in 978, securing the throne for his half-brother Aethelred the Unready. King John used the castle as a prison and is said to have starved twenty-two French knights to death in the dungeons in 1203. The castle served as a key element in the royal control of the Purbeck stone quarrying industry, which produced the dark limestone used for decorative work in medieval churches and cathedrals across England and made this corner of Dorset economically significant far beyond its size.
The Civil War siege is Corfe's most celebrated episode. Lady Mary Bankes defended the castle against Parliamentarian forces for nearly two years while her husband was away with the Royalist army, her resistance becoming one of the celebrated loyalist stories of the conflict. The castle fell only through treachery in 1646 and was ordered demolished shortly after, Lady Bankes keeping its keys until her death as a symbol of rightful ownership. The keys are preserved to this day at the family estate of Kingston Lacy.
The village of Corfe Castle below the hill, its stone cottages arranged around the castle's commanding presence, is one of the most attractive in Dorset.