Riber Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Perched on a height of about 200 metres overlooking Matlock and the Derwent Valley, Riber Castle is one of the most recognisable silhouettes in Derbyshire. It is not a medieval fortress but a vast crenellated Gothic Revival house, commissioned in the 1860s by John Smedley, a hosiery manufacturer from Lea Mills and a promoter of hydrotherapy at Matlock Bank. The building consists of a central block flanked at each corner by three-storey square towers, the whole enclosed by a crenellated curtain wall punctuated by outer towers. The stone, a local gritstone, was hoisted up the hill by means of pulleys. The difficulty of bringing water to it earned it the popular nickname "Smedley's Folly"; Historic England itself describes it as a late pastiche and a monumental "folly". After the deaths of Smedley and then of his widow, the house went through a succession of uses: a boys' school, a food store during the Second World War, then a wildlife park from 1963 to 2000. Long left as a ruined shell, it has been undergoing conversion into private apartments since 2023.