Alton Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Alton Castle crowns a rocky spur overlooking the Churnet Valley, facing the Alton Towers estate, in Staffordshire. Its silhouette bristling with steep roofs and turrets, often compared to a Rhineland castle, is the work of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, master of the English Gothic Revival, who built it in the mid-19th century on the ruins of a medieval fortress. The site has long been fortified: a stone castle was founded here in the late 12th century for Bertram de Verdun, protected to the north by a sheer cliff and to the south by a rock-cut ditch and a curtain wall. Having passed to the Earls of Shrewsbury in the 15th century and been damaged during the Civil War, it was largely in ruins when John Talbot, 16th Earl, a fervent Catholic, commissioned a new residence from Pugin, complemented on the same hill by St John's Hospital. After serving as a convent and school for the Sisters of Mercy, the castle has belonged since 1995 to the Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham and has housed a youth retreat centre since 1996. The medieval remains are protected as a scheduled monument.