Brough Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Brough Castle overlooks the village of Church Brough, in eastern Cumbria, at the entrance to the Stainmore Pass, which links the Eden valley with Yorkshire. The castle was built inside the Roman fort of Verteris itself, on the road from York to Carlisle, whose ditches were recut to form an outer bailey. The ruins comprise the shell of a late 12th-century square keep, a curtain wall, the remains of a gatehouse, a great hall and the semicircular tower known as Clifford's Tower. Taken and burned by the King of Scots in 1174, strengthened by the Vieuxponts and then the Cliffords, the castle was ravaged by fire in 1521. Lady Anne Clifford restored it in 1659 before it was stripped in the 18th century. Placed in state guardianship in 1920 and managed by English Heritage, it is today a freely accessible ruin set in a pastoral landscape between the Pennines and the Yorkshire Dales. The site thus combines two millennia of military occupation on a single promontory.