Ritton Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Ritton Castle is a fortified earthwork site on a shelf on the north-west flank of Brooks Hill, in the parish of Worthen with Shelve, in south-west Shropshire, not far from the Welsh border. The slopes fall steeply to the north, south and west, giving a wide view over the neighbouring valley and the hills that frame it. The site combines two works from very different periods. A first univallate hillfort, roughly rectangular in plan and measuring about 116 m by 215 m, enclosed nearly one hectare between the 8th and 5th centuries BC; it was approached by a causeway to the north-east. In the Middle Ages, its northern corner was cut off to form a circular ringwork, protected to the south by a powerful bank of earth and stone with an outer ditch, the rest of the former fort probably serving as a bailey. Today only earthworks survive in a wooded, rural setting, together with the traces of a small 19th-century hamlet linked to a nearby lead mine. Protected as a scheduled monument, the site retains strong buried archaeological potential for the study of the Iron Age and of medieval lordly settlement in the Welsh Marches.