Slingsby Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

In the heart of the village of Slingsby, north of Malton, stand the ruins of an ambitious early 17th-century house that inherited the name "castle" from the fortified medieval manor house it replaced. Of that first building, fortified under royal licence in the 14th century by the Hastings family, only the line of the moat remains. The present building was begun by Sir Charles Cavendish, grandson of Bess of Hardwick, to designs attributed to John Smythson, son of the celebrated Elizabethan architect Robert Smythson. It is a rectangular block of limestone rubble, arranged around a small inner courtyard, with stair turrets at its four corners and set over an extensive vaulted basement. The mullioned windows under triangular pediments reflect Jacobean taste. The house seems never to have been finished or lived in: its builder, a Royalist, went into exile in 1644. The estate then passed to various heirs before being joined to the Castle Howard estate in 1751. Now protected as a scheduled monument and listed Grade II, the ruins are on the Heritage at Risk Register; considered dangerous, they are not open to the public.