Astley Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Astley Castle stands on a moated island in north Warwickshire, a few kilometres from Nuneaton. This fortified manor house, licensed to be crenellated as early as 1266, was later turned into a country house, with dressed sandstone masonry, a continuous battlemented parapet and mullioned windows dating from the 15th to the 19th century. The site is inseparable from the Grey family of Ruthin, who held it from 1420 until the mid-16th century. It is associated with three queens of England: Elizabeth Woodville, who lived here as the wife of Sir John Grey before marrying Edward IV; their daughter Elizabeth of York; and Lady Jane Grey, the "Nine Days' Queen" of 1553, whose father Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, held the manor. Gutted by fire in 1978, the castle was no more than a shell when the Landmark Trust chose to consolidate the ruin and slip a contemporary house designed by Witherford Watson Mann inside it. The scheme, combining new brick with old stone, won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2013, the first restoration and the first single private house to receive the award. The building is now let as a holiday home for eight people.