Willimoteswick Castle - Northumberland (original) (raw)

History

NY 770636/Ruin/Access by appointment

C16 manor house, incorporating earlier building remains (C12/C13 barmkin) and largely rebuilt c.1900. The gatehouse, is still well preserved and the barmkin, now the farmyard in which stands the old farmhouse with turrets at either end, is the principal upstanding remain.

Air photographs show a number of earthwork features to the south and east of the manor house, including the foundations of possible buildings and other structures, a trackway, boundaries and ridge and furrow cultivation.

Not recorded in the 1415 survey, in the 1541 survey recorded as “At Willymonteswyke ys a good toure & stone house joyninge there unto of the Inherytence of Nycolas Rydley kepte in good rep'ac'ons. Willimoteswick is traditionally the birthplace of that Bishop Ridley who with Latimer was burnt at the stake in Oxford in 1555.

The roof of the gatehouse must have disappeared before the middle of the 19th century because the first edition Ordnance Survey map clearly marks the line of a wall inserted in the ground floor to make a forge.

The farm is occupied today by the sixth generation of the Storrow family.

” Willimontswick; Willymonteswyke; Willimowteswike; Willymonnteswyke"