Tattershall Castle

Tattershall Castle is one of the most remarkable medieval structures in England — a great tower of exceptional scale and architectural ambition, built in the 1440s for Ralph Lord Cromwell, Treasurer of England under King Henry VI. Rising to nearly 35 metres above the flat Lincolnshire landscape, the castle's keep is constructed almost entirely from brick: a bold and innovative choice at a time when stone was still the conventional building material for great lords' towers, and a demonstration of Cromwell's wealth, sophistication, and Continental connections.

The National Trust has cared for Tattershall Castle since 1926, when it was given to the Trust by Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India, who had dramatically rescued the building from near-complete destruction — the great Gothic fireplaces that are among its most celebrated features had already been sold and were on their way to America when Curzon intervened to buy them back. This rescue is one of the founding stories of the National Trust's work to preserve threatened historic buildings.

The great tower — or keep — that survives at Tattershall is the principal building open to visitors, and it is an extraordinary achievement. The building is of four stories above a basement, each floor containing a single great chamber heated by the remarkable terracotta fireplaces and lit by large windows with fine stone tracery. Climbing through the floors gives visitors both a vivid sense of medieval domestic life at the highest social levels and a progressively more spectacular view across the Lincolnshire Wolds, the Fens, and on clear days as far as Lincoln Cathedral on the horizon.

The wider castle site retains the earthworks of the original moat and outer enclosures, giving a clear sense of the scale of the medieval fortified complex that surrounded the tower. The adjacent collegiate church of Holy Trinity, though managed separately, is closely associated with Lord Cromwell's patronage and contains important medieval monuments and stained glass.

Tattershall village is a quiet and attractive Lincolnshire settlement, and the castle forms the centrepiece of a landscape that has changed remarkably little since the medieval period — the flat fields, the great skies, and the distant towers of the Lincolnshire churches are exactly what Lord Cromwell and his contemporaries would have known.