Lindisfarne Castle
Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island off the Northumberland coast is a small but dramatically positioned castle perched on a rocky outcrop above the harbour at the south end of the island, originally built as a Tudor fort in the mid-sixteenth century to protect the harbour and later converted in the early twentieth century by the architect Edwin Lutyens into a compact and architecturally inventive country house for the magazine editor Edward Hudson. The National Trust has managed the castle since 1944 and it remains one of the most visited buildings in Northumberland.
The fort was built between 1549 and 1550 using stone from the recently dissolved Lindisfarne Priory, a practical act of resource reuse that connected the new secular fortification directly to the religious past it was replacing. The fort saw relatively little military action but was briefly seized in 1715 by two Jacobite soldiers who held it for a day before being retaken, an incident whose brevity and absurdity makes it one of the minor comic moments of the Jacobite period.
Edwin Lutyens's conversion of the fort between 1902 and 1906 for Edward Hudson transformed a utilitarian military structure into an intimate and architecturally inventive house of considerable originality. Lutyens worked with the existing fabric rather than demolishing and rebuilding, adapting the vaulted rooms and barrel-roofed passages of the fort into living spaces of characterful charm. The ship cabin quality of the interior spaces, their low ceilings and small windows making them feel like the interior of a well-appointed vessel, reflects both the island setting and Lutyens's skill at making limited space feel complete and satisfying.
The walled garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll a short distance from the castle, now restored by the National Trust, adds a further designed landscape element to the island visit.