Defence of the Realm Castles: Britain's Fortified History

Castles have stood indomitably in Britain for centuries.

Over almost 1,000 years,

they've played a seminal role in the history of these islands.

During the Norman Conquest,

they were used as instruments of invasion...

BLAST AND SCREAMING

..and throughout the Middle Ages as a means to colonise the land

and determine the destiny of both Wales and Scotland.

But it was the centuries following the Middle Ages

that would see castles undergo their greatest transformation yet.

Now, these strongholds were to be tested by the latest weapons of war.

Firing the cannon!

CANNON BLASTS

And to incorporate this new fire power,

they had to be entirely redesigned.

But their military use was slowly to give way

as they became the architectural playthings

of the fashionable aristocracy.

The castle was to be the setting for seducing a sovereign.

And from near-extinction, they were to be revived

and venerated in both literature and art...

..to take on the symbolic power of myth.

The mighty castle would be transformed

from strongholds built for conflict,

to the romantic ruins of our imagination.

In 1464, this bold and brooding fortress, Bamburgh Castle,

here in Northumberland, came under violent attack.

But the offensive didn't come from marauding invaders

across a hostile sea, nor from the lawless border region

to the north where encroaching Scots had already attempted two sieges.

It came from inland, from the English themselves,

at a time when the country was in the grip of civil war,

a War Of The Roses,

fought between the rival families of Lancaster and York.

By 1464, Bamburgh Castle

remained the last outpost of Lancastrian power in the north,

and in June, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick,

otherwise known as Warwick The Kingmaker,

arrived here with a large Yorkist army

to lay siege to the castle in the name of King Edward IV.

For nine months, its sturdy walls had held fast,

but alongside his archers and men at arms,

Warwick now had the latest siege weapon at his disposal.

Three of the largest cannon in the realm,

each weighing a tonne or more, were brought in by sea to finish the job.

These great guns were now lined up in front of the castle walls,

and Warwick issued his ultimatum, passing it to his herald to deliver.

Written by Warwick himself on behalf of King Edward IV,

it was to be handed to the commander of Bamburgh as his last chance.

This ultimatum was a dire warning to the Lancastrians,

and it shows just how much Edward valued the castle

for its strategic importance.

Not only did he want to capture Bamburgh Castle,

he wanted to take it intact.

As it so clearly states, "If ye deliver not this jewel,

"which the King specially desireth to have whole,

"unbroken, with ordennaunce.

"If ye suffer any great gun laid into the wall,

"it shall cost you the chieften's head."

But the Lancastrians stood their ground,

so Warwick The Kingmaker gave the command

and all the great guns fired simultaneously.

GUNFIRE

It was reported that the stones of the walls flew into the sea,

and with its subsequent quick surrender,

Bamburgh became the first English castle

ever to be captured by cannon fire.

What happened here showed that the latest siege weapon

was a worthy match for these high and mighty castle walls

and that the castle would have to adapt,

it would have to incorporate this fire power

if it was to remain the impregnable stronghold it had always been.

And it was the eventual winners of the Wars Of The Roses,

the Tudors, who would make that change happen.

Within a generation,

Henry VIII was to place the country in a very vulnerable position.

His marriage to Anne Boleyn and her controversial execution

had led to a break with the Catholic Church

and the subsequent dissolution of the monasteries.

A sequence of events that would usher in

the reformation of the Church of England.

This reformation made England and the 'infidel' Henry,

as the Pope had labelled him, the prime target.

With the alliance of Charles V of Spain

and Francis I of France in 1538,

such was the threat posed by these combined powers of Catholic Europe

that Henry realised the pressing need to defend his realm

at all costs.

And for that, he would need a new kind of castle altogether.

Henry realised he would need a line of powerful new sea defences,

and it's strongly believed that he himself

had a hand in their innovative layout

which borrowed heavily from French and Italian fortifications.

This unique drawing by his team at Hampton Court

shows off a working design for the new Henrician Castle

with the emphasis on fire power through numerous gunports

or, as it was noted then, 'splays as the King's grace hath devised.'

Low, thick, semi-circular structures called bastions

would serve as platforms for heavy guns,

while lighter guns could be fired from ports piercing the towers,

to shatter enemy warships threatening from the sea.

But which parts of England's coastline

were most susceptible to invasion?

Henry sent agents out across the land

to assess the most vulnerable parts of the coast.

They sent their reports back to court

and they were fashioned into detailed maps just like this one.

In order to emphasise the areas at risk of enemy landings,

the map-maker has exaggerated the size of the beaches

and he's also shown where an enemy can't land

by exaggerating the size of the cliffs.

Defensive measures include real and proposed forts,

and he's also shown church towers

and beacons for conveying the news of an invasion to court.

Henry's chain of coastal forts were built at terrific speed,

20 within a two-year period.

It was the largest defence programme since Saxon times,

and it was largely paid for

by the proceeds from the dissolution of the monasteries.

So religious faith now paid for royal castles.

And two of Henry's finest castles are to be found here in Cornwall,

facing each other at the mouth of the River Fal.

These two headlands with their respective castles,

Pendennis here and St Mawes over there,

safeguard the Fal estuary leading to Falmouth.

A vast and deep body of water,

it was considered a very tempting target by our enemies.

It was a perfect natural harbour

and the first safe landfall for ships crossing the Atlantic,

coming from the Mediterranean or even further afield.

It would be a perfect toehold in England.

The close proximity of these two castles was due to the limited

firing range of their cannon.

With only one castle, enemy ships would have been able

to evade their firepower and enter the estuary.

Pendennis Castle still offers us

a glimpse into the working life of these fortifications.

This is the original Tudor gun room.

And with its seven gun embrasures,

you get a sense of just how powerful this place was

and also of the cramped, smoky and noisy conditions for the gunners.

It was also a very dangerous environment, with risks

of explosion from loose gun powder or of guns overheating.

But to get an even better idea of the defensive power

of castles like these,

I'm going to get my hands on one of these beasts.

So here it is, a replica Tudor cannon.

I'm particularly excited

because I've never fired one of these before.

The first thing we've got to do is load the charge

and, for that, I need a powder scoop.

I'm going to fill this scoop with coarse gun powder,

which is the type of gun powder you use for the charge.

The next thing to do is to very carefully

put this scoop into the bore...

..and then push it all the way down...

..to the end of the chamber.

And when it's down there, we just give it a twist,

give it a shake,

and that means all of the gun powder will come out of the chamber

at the end of the cannon.

The next thing to do is to get some wadding.

They would have used dried grass like this or maybe some old rope.

So I'm going to make that into a ball.

And then put it down here.

I need to push that in with a ramrod.

I'm going to push this all the way in,

and this'll compress all the gun powder

up at the end of the chamber.

I have to tamp down the charge,

unfortunately no cannonball this time.

The next thing we need to do is to prime the touchhole.

Now, for that, we need special, fine priming powder

because the touchholes are quite small.

Time to safety up.

OK, I'm ready to fire the cannon.

And for that, I need this evil-looking thing here

which is called a linstock.

-SHOUTS:

-Firing the cannon!

CANNON BLASTS

CANNON BLASTS

CANNON BLASTS

Impressive maybe,

but many of Henry's coastal forts never even fired a shot in anger,

though deterrence was always one of their most important functions.

As one of Henry's ambassadors said in 1539,

"What a realm will England be

"when his grace has set walls that run around us.

"England will then be more like a castle than a realm."

All of these fortifications are designed to restrict

the options of your opponent, so in doing so,

they succeed, even if they do not face conflict.

In a way, by building fortresses, what Henry VIII is showing

is that he doesn't intend to be intimidated

and that in order to overcome him, his opponents will have to

stage a full-scale invasion, which lessens the chance that they will.

The deterrence these coastal defences provided

is most evident here at Deal in Kent,

the largest and most elaborate of Henry's new castles.

Deal stands squat to the ground, like a battle tank,

to present as little and as low a target as possible.

And, astonishingly,

it has 145 gunports for cannon of various sizes and for handguns.

Few castles anywhere, of any period,

have so much fire power built into them.

Henry was extremely proud of Deal's design and layout...

..so much so, that when his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves,

first landed on English soil in December 1539,

she was banqueted here in the incomplete shell of the castle.

But to really appreciate this castle,

you have to see it as the Tudors never could...

from way up there.

With its six overlapping bastions,

the characteristic geometrical layout

of the Henrician castle is here at its most elaborate,

giving, whether by accident or design,

the striking impression of a Tudor rose.

With Britain's frontiers now firmly protected,

there seemed little need for our ancient inland castles

to be defensive strongholds.

The castle now became a symbol of wealth and nobility.

During his reign, Henry VIII had picked out

Kenilworth in Warwickshire as a prized ancient castle

that should be maintained,

as he stated, "For our resort and pleasure."

It provided the very latest in comfort and residential splendour.

The way it was lit, the way the domestic space was divided up,

the way it was set in the heart of the landscape, full of gardens,

parks and sporting facilities.

This is a palace, not a castle.

By the time of the accession of Henry's daughter Elizabeth I

in 1558, Kenilworth was in the hands of her childhood sweetheart,

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,

who continued to transform the castle in a bid to woo his Queen.

However, one person stood in the way of their union - Dudley's wife.

And her mysterious death the following year,

apparently after falling down a flight of stairs,

far from freeing Dudley to marry,

plagued him with accusations that he'd arranged her death.

But, guilty or not, Dudley was now an eligible nobleman

and a serious contender for the Queen's hand.

Though cautious of the scandal surrounding his wife's death,

Elizabeth still made several visits to Kenilworth.

Her fourth stay, in July 1575, was for an unprecedented 19 days,

the longest halt of any royal tour in her reign

and a reflection of the high favour in which she held Dudley

at this time.

For him, this was a last, desperate bid to win his Queen

and he pulled out all the stops.

To the thunder of guns, the explosion of fireworks

and a fanfare by six trumpeters dressed in silk

and standing on 8ft-high stilts,

the Lady Of The Lake, guardian of Excalibur

appeared over there on a floating island

in the middle of a vast body of water,

or a mere, that once surrounded this castle.

And she did so alongside an 18ft mermaid

and musicians riding a 24ft dolphin.

The Lady Of The Lake then declared that she'd been safeguarding

this castle since King Arthur's day and that she now offered it all up,

along with all of its power therein, to Queen Elizabeth.

And Elizabeth's reaction?

Well, she certainly enjoyed the spectacle but she was heard to quip

privately that surely everything

she was being offered was hers anyway.

Dudley's conjuring of Camelot served a strong purpose.

The Tudors claimed a direct lineage with King Arthur

and it was a further attempt to legitimise Elizabeth's reign

after she had been declared a 'bastard queen' by the Pope.

Kenilworth was to be a showpiece for her golden age.

It's reputed that Elizabeth and her entourage,

which included 31 barons and 400 servants,

cost Dudley some £1,000 a day,

that's roughly 175 grand in today's money,

and that's on top of the £60,000, some 10.5 million quid,

that he'd already spent improving the castle,

including that very handsome tower behind me

which was used as Queen Elizabeth's luxury state apartments.

Here's an interesting artefact from the Queen's apartments

and it's not what you might think.

It looks like a heavily-carved overmantel,

but, in fact, it's believed to be

the headboard from Queen Elizabeth's bed.

Here, you can see a carved 'E',

and over on the other side is an 'R' carved into the wood.

Now, it stands of course for Elizabeth Regina,

but it could as easily stand for Elizabeth and Robert.

Aside from her favourite pursuits such as dancing and hunting,

Dudley laid on bear-baiting, Italian acrobatics,

and even a poet dressed as a singing holly bush who,

in florid verse,

tried to convince Elizabeth to stay for a few more days.

And it's even said that the festivities were witnessed that day

by a ten-year-old local lad named Will Shakespeare,

and what he saw made it into A Midsummer Night's Dream.

HE PLAYS A MELODY

For the duration of her 18-day visit, the clock which once adorned

the southeast turret of the central tower behind me,

you could still see exactly where it was today,

was dramatically stopped

to indicate that time itself stood still for the Queen.

This was a moment frozen in history.

Kenilworth was a new realm,

a realm based on the ideas symbolised by Camelot -

something enduring, something noble, something worth protecting.

Whilst the Tudors may have turned castles into playthings

for the fashionable aristocracy, it would be many years

before castles entirely lost their military purpose.

And in the Stuart Age that followed,

the defensive function of the castle would be enshrined in law.

In 1628, the leading jurist of the day, Sir Edward Coke,

published this book, a legal treatise

called The Institutes Of The Laws Of England,

in which he laid down the whole concept

of something called Castle Law.

In this law, he designated a person's abode as a place

where they had certain protections and immunities.

And it contains a line that has remained in common parlance

ever since.

"For a man's house is his castle,

"and each man's home is his safest refuge."

But in 1643, the second year of the English Civil War,

it wasn't a man but one extraordinary woman

who embodied Coke's dictum that a man's home is his castle.

I've come to Corfe Castle in Dorset, probably my favourite castle,

for its wonderful setting.

And it was here that one of THE most extraordinary

and largely untold stories of the English Civil War took place.

GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING

This Civil War, fought between Oliver Cromwell's

Parliamentarians and the royalists under King Charles I,

caused ancient castles, fortifications and even town walls

to suddenly acquire a value and function

that had been almost forgotten.

SHOUTING

GUNFIRE

And by 1643, with most of Dorset

in the hands of the parliamentary forces,

Corfe Castle was holding out as a royalist stronghold.

But when its owner, the Lord Chief Justice Sir John Bankes,

was called away to attend the King,

his wife, Lady Mary, assumed control of the castle.

And together, with her six daughters and a force of just five men,

Lady Mary now prepared to withstand any assault levelled at her.

The first attempts to take the castle were pathetic

to say the least.

A small group of Parliamentarians pretended to be a stag-hunting party

but their ruse was seen through.

And then another, astonishingly, pretended to be a group of tourists

wanting to look around the castle, but Lady Mary

sent them all packing and ordered the gates closed to all comers.

Fearing further and more serious attempts on the castle,

Lady Mary stocked up on provisions and called in reinforcements.

And it was just in time because in June, 1643,

the Parliamentarians launched a major siege

with a force of between 500-600 Roundheads

and two siege engines nicknamed The Boar and The Sow.

The siege ensued for six weeks.

The Parliamentarians were unable to breach the castle walls

and proved easy targets for the royalist marksmen.

With Lady Mary's garrison commander

successfully protecting the Outer Bailey down there,

Lady Mary herself took control of the Inner Ward up here.

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE

GUNFIRE

One account of the siege describes how Lady Mary herself

and her daughters had to repel assailants on siege ladders

by heaving down stones and hot embers from the walls.

The siege ended with the loss of over 100 Parliamentarians,

as opposed to only two of the castle defenders.

Lady Mary was clearly no pushover and, for rebuffing the siege,

she gained the nickname Brave Dame Mary.

For the next two years, Corfe Castle continued to hold out

as a royalist stronghold,

but its luck would not last.

One night in February 1646, under cover of darkness,

a royalist officer well-known to Lady Mary,

called Lieutenant Colonel Pitman,

arrived here at the South West gatehouse

with what appeared to be a royalist relief force.

But what the welcoming garrison didn't know

was that Pitman had already been captured

and had turned his coat, switched sides,

in order to save his life.

The relief force was nothing of the sort

but really Parliamentarian soldiers in disguise.

But by the time that they realised it was too late.

Pitman and about 50 of his soldiers had been granted entry

and they set about seizing the castle.

After several hours of fighting, Brave Dame Mary

and her garrison surrendered.

So Corfe was finally taken, but only by treachery.

And what of Lady Mary?

Here at Kingston Lacy, a few miles from Corfe,

which subsequently became the Bankes' family home,

a fascinating relic survives from the siege of Corfe Castle.

Brave Dame Mary may have lost her castle

but she did retain her dignity

and, for all of her fortitude and extreme courage,

she was allowed to keep the keys to her castle.

And she was allowed to keep all of them, from this absolute monster

right down to this little chappie here,

a symbolic reminder of this extraordinary moment

in our castle history.

Lady Mary's resilience

had been a huge embarrassment to the Roundheads

and, upon Corfe's capture,

Parliament realised they needed to make an example of it,

so, with immediate effect,

they ordered the destruction of the castle.

However, they hadn't reckoned on its solidly-engineered structure.

Despite the most determined attempts

to destroy the castle with gun powder,

they simply couldn't raze it to the ground.

The marvel of Corfe's construction meant

that its immense masonry held fast.

Its walls bowed out and slid down the slope here,

but they simply refused to be destroyed.

With its custodian Brave Dame Mary defeated,

it's almost as if the castle itself was resisting history's attempts

to extinguish it.

Yet for Charles I, there wasn't a safe castle

in which to make a last stand.

Instead, he was entirely at the mercy

of the victorious Parliamentarians.

Whilst Parliament and the army debated what to do

with their troublesome King,

Charles had slipped quietly away from Hampton Court,

where he'd been placed under house arrest,

and he made sail across the Solent for the Isle Of Wight.

He believed it was the perfect vantage point

where he could stay in touch with his supporters

both at home and on the Continent.

But as soon as he reached his intended destination,

here at Carisbrooke Castle,

and surrendered himself to its governor Colonel Hammond,

Charles realised he'd made a serious misjudgement.

Far from helping Charles to escape, Colonel Hammond became his jailer.

Charles was no ordinary prisoner and, to begin with,

he and his large entourage enjoyed considerable freedom,

hunting and hawking and careering about the island

in their carriages.

The meals he ate were hardly the food of prisoners,

20-course feasts were prepared for him.

This is the King's bedchamber.

Guards were set at his door to make sure that he couldn't escape,

but he still managed to communicate with the outside world.

There's even a letter that he sent from this room...

..and it's fascinating because it's written in code.

Even after generations of scholarship,

we still don't know what this cipher means,

so it's a challenge for all you code breakers out there.

As well as composing secret messages,

Charles was also planning his getaway.

The King's chief ally in the castle was Henry Firebrace and,

as relations with Parliament deteriorated,

together, they plotted his escape.

So the plan was for King Charles to escape out of his window here

down a rope that Firebrace would have left in his room,

and Firebrace would then meet him here.

Together, they would cross the castle yard

to the base of the wall on the southern side.

Here, Charles would climb the steps to the battlements.

The plan was to come here because it's a short drop

to the ground below, and he could then scramble down the slope,

meet a friend with a fast horse

who would then whisk him away to a waiting boat.

But none of this happened

cos Charles was unable to fit through his window.

The one thing he'd said to leave up to him,

but he was unable to deliver.

Something to do with all of those meals?

Charles was now thrown wide open to ridicule,

as shown by this illustrated pamphlet

that was distributed at the time.

A further escape attempt ended in failure

and forced Parliament's hand.

In November 1648, Charles was escorted back to the mainland

before being tried and found guilty of high treason against the realm.

Two months later, he was beheaded.

So, poor old Charles got the chop,

but I rather like the irony of what happened here,

how a castle fit for a king so easily became a prison for one.

But although Carisbrooke had served the Parliamentarians well

in detaining the monarch,

they had ideological objections to the whole idea of castles.

They saw them as symbols of aristocratic and royal privilege.

As the Civil War came to an end, Parliament began to draw up

a big and worrying plan for castles throughout the land,

namely slighting.

Slighting - in other words, partly destroying the fortifications

so that they shouldn't be useful again -

is the penalty that the victorious Parliamentarians inflict,

particularly on royalist-sympathising towns

and on royalist aristocrats.

It is a potent symbolic demonstration of the new order

and it is also practically significant

cos it means that they are less likely to be able to resist a siege.

Here at Kenilworth,

which had been such a spectacular showpiece for Elizabeth I,

Parliament now made a very lasting point.

Slighting the north face of this magnificent central tower

was unnecessary from a military perspective,

but it was the castle's most visible feature

and its most potent symbol of the old royalist order.

By tearing this place down, Parliament was displaying

how it had torn open the heart of the monarchy.

They even dug up the formal gardens, and drained the Great Mere.

Kenilworth finally lost its reflected glory.

By the 1650s, over 100 castles

and fortified towns had been slighted across the country.

But what Parliament hadn't quite realised,

as witnessed at both Corfe and Kenilworth,

was that slighting a castle was no easy feat.

You could use gun powder,

but the quantities you needed to bring down a castle were vast,

and it rapidly became prohibitively expensive.

Or if you wanted to re-use the material,

you needed teams of labourers, you needed masons, miners

and carpenters.

Tearing these places down was often as challenging as putting them up.

Aside from the task of demolition itself,

deciding which castles were to be slighted

seemed to be equally difficult...

..with the House Of Commons and House Of Lords constantly

at odds with each other over which castles to ruin

and which to maintain.

And when it came to Windsor Castle here, which had been captured

by Oliver Cromwell in 1642 and used as a prison,

the bill to slight it, the proposal even to demolish it,

was said to have been beaten down by just a single vote.

It's fascinating to think that there was once a time

when Windsor Castle, perhaps our most iconic castle,

and the castle that symbolises our history and monarchy

on an international stage,

was being seriously considered for demolition.

But although Windsor and other prominent castles survived,

in truth, the slighting of castles during this period,

was the single most radical change

to the established architecture of England until the Second World War.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660

and the end of internal conflict...

..the castle began to be seen in an entirely different light.

During the restoration and beyond, the castle underwent a distinct

transformation in the public imagination.

No longer a structure used to defend or uphold the realm,

it came to symbolise a great historical past,

almost as if it was defending the idea of a realm.

This was something well understood by one of the leading architects

of the day, Sir John Vanbrugh

who, in 1707, wrote that he wished to give his designs

"something of the castle air"

and to make "a very noble and masculine show."

And it's this little gem in Blackheath, South London,

built by the architect for his family in 1718

which best captures this ambition.

For four years in his youth, Vanbrugh had been imprisoned

as a spy in the French Bastille.

But far from burying this experience,

he drew on it to recreate a fortress or castle

in miniature, complete with square flanking towers, a turret

and even its rumoured secret escape tunnels running down to the river.

Vanbrugh's notion of a "castle air" gained ground

during the early 18th century, and architects of stately homes

across the country began to be inspired by this castle style.

Vanbrugh's castle style led into a period of particular reverence

for the medieval.

This kind of revivalism really did embolden architects

to do new things in architecture.

They were looking back to a particular period

with its pointed arches, quatrefoil windows,

the romance of it all, for something that was quintessentially British.

It was really a sort of pretence of history.

It was a staging of the past in the present

to show a patron and an architect's sensibility and understanding

and an intellectual knowledge of that history.

And the chief exponent of this revivalism

was the writer and politician Horace Walpole.

As the son of the first Prime Minister

and a relative of Admiral Nelson,

Walpole was steeped in the values of England's ruling class.

In 1747, Walpole had chanced upon two cottages

known as Chopped-Straw Hall, here on the banks of the Thames

in Twickenham, and he set about transforming them.

"I'm going to build a little Gothic castle," he wrote to a friend,

"with battlements, pinnacles,

"even a great round tower looming large in his vivid imagination."

And today, it still closely resembles the earliest colour

sketches that were made of it.

Walpole's Gothic castle took its vast numbers of visitors

on something of a mood journey back to the Middle Ages,

to ancient strongholds,

knights in armour and all the panoply of chivalry.

Walpole wanted the experience to convey feelings of both gloom

and warmth, and he even coined a term that conveyed both.

Rather brilliantly, he called it "gloomth."

Walpole's Gothic castle, which he christened Strawberry Hill,

stunned 18th-century society.

It was unlike anything else in the country

and was soon to become a tourist Mecca.

Walpole delighted in entertaining the gentry,

foreign ambassadors and occasionally even royalty.

Such was the public's demand to see Strawberry Hill

and sample a bit of "gloomth" for themselves

that Walpole had to confine it to four visitors a day

with published rules for their guidance,

but strictly no children allowed.

These are visiting cards, and they were recently discovered

trapped behind the mantelpiece.

And they give you a real sense of people

desperate to come in and see this magnificent building.

They're written on the back of old playing cards,

and this one is from a tea merchant and, as it says,

"They will be extremely obliged to him

"to let them see his house at any time this morning."

And the name of that tea merchant was Mrs Twining.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, living in this fantasy fortress

began to rub off on Walpole

for here, one morning in 1764, he awoke from a dream

in which he'd imagined himself to be in an ancient castle...

..where, on a great staircase, he'd been confronted

by a gigantic fist in armour.

And so vivid was his dream that later that day,

Walpole sat down and began to write a story based on his vision.

The book that emerged, The Castle Of Otranto,

is now widely considered to be the very first Gothic novel,

containing all the classic tropes of mystery and horror.

It was an immediate success, it sold out across Europe

in a matter of weeks,

and it lead the poet Thomas Gray to comment

that it had made us all afraid to go to bed at night.

"A clap of thunder at that instant shook the castle to its foundations.

"The earth rocked, and the clank of more than mortal armour

"was heard behind.

"The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the castle behind Manfred

"were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso,

"dilated to an immense magnitude,

"appeared in the centre of the ruins."

With his novel The Castle Of Otranto and this incredible building

which he described as "the prettiest bauble you ever saw,"

Walpole had combined both the real and imaginary.

His Gothic revival conjured

a new, romanticised view of the noble castle,

one inhabiting both our dreams and our nightmares,

and now presiding over a mythic realm.

You could conceive of Strawberry Hill

as one great big folly.

It inspired other landowners, other patrons,

to have the confidence to build their own follies

within their landscape.

But this was a very desirable thing to have within your grounds.

It added an air of history to your landscape,

an air of always being there.

But it was part of this wider lust for the past,

this wider reverence for the medieval past

and a fascination with all things Gothic.

But follies gave that kind of romance to your landscape.

You could invite your friends,

you could even attract tourists to come and see your folly.

Around 1740, an architect named Sanderson Miller

began building castle follies on the estates of his wealthy patrons.

This one at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire,

widely thought to be his finest, is one of the 30 or so

that he completed across the country.

The surprising thing about these castle follies

is that Sanderson Miller built them as ruins.

This is exactly what the very first visitors would have seen,

and so convincing was it that they asked about the sieges

it had endured and the blood that had been spilt inside its walls.

Our old friend Horace Walpole was among those

who marvelled at Miller's creation,

saying that it had the true rust of the Wars Of The Roses.

"I wore my eyes out with gazing," he wrote,

"my feet with climbing and my vocabulary with commending."

The castle ruin now became part of an emerging Romantic sensibility

born out of a reaction

against the growing industrialisation

of the countryside.

It produced a new aesthetic known as the 'picturesque,'

a concept coined by the Reverend William Gilpin

in his series of books written for the leisured traveller.

Gilpin instructed his travellers

to examine the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty.

And he told them that the elegant relics of ancient architecture,

such as castle ruins, deserved our veneration.

In this wonderful passage from one of his books,

he even sets out the principles of the perfect castle ruin.

"..after all, that art can bestow,

"you must put your ruin at last into the hands of nature to finish.

"If the mosses and lichens grow unkindly on your walls,

"if the ivy refuses to mantle over your buttress

"or to creep among the ornaments of your Gothic window,

"if the ash cannot be brought to hang from the cleft

"or long, spiry grass to wave over the shattered battlement,

"your ruin will still be incomplete."

And it wasn't just writers who were embracing these aesthetic ideals.

The young Joseph Turner was already at the forefront of painting

this new Romantic age.

And he had a particular penchant for the castle itself,

and it was Norham on the Scottish border

that especially caught his eye.

Turner first saw Norham Castle from a stagecoach

on his way to Berwick in 1797.

He was only 22.

Of all the English castles built to repel the Scottish,

Norham was the most savagely fought over

until finally succumbing to a Scottish siege in 1513

when the Great Tower was shattered by cannon fire.

The cannons had long fallen silent by the time Turner

came to paint the castle.

And he would like to recount later in life

that it was his first depiction of it that had launched his career.

And this is the exact spot where Turner first placed his easel

and to which he would return time and again throughout his life.

Eyewitnesses who saw him here would later recount

how he took off his hat when the castle first came into view,

made a respectful bow to the ruins, saying that it gave him

as much to do as his hands could execute.

In all of his paintings and sketches of Norham,

Turner was speaking for a generation who, like him,

looked upon the noble castle as a window into an illustrious past.

Turner had first visited Norham during a time of mounting unrest,

and soon there would be new battles

and fortifications for him to record...

..when, in 1803, Britain, yet again, came under threat

from its old adversary - France.

Turner had always been drawn to castle imagery, roaming the country

sketchbook in hand, searching for castles to draw.

But on the eve of war with France,

his depiction of those castles became even more prescient,

particularly his sketches of the south coast.

He was observing a nation readying itself for war.

In the background, you might have Dover Castle as a totem of the past.

It represents history, time gone by, all the events,

the battles that have gone on there,

but then in the foreground, he noted details of soldiers

building fortifications, ships testing their guns.

He would sell those to printmakers and prints would be made.

These images became a great comfort to many people.

They were desirable,

and they fuelled this patriotic fervour,

this feeling that Britain was strong, Britain was ready for war.

France was now seen to pose a far greater threat than ever before,

in the shape of its emperor - Napoleon.

In the early-19th century, he dominated the European mainland,

and the threat of invasion was very real.

He'd assembled a flotilla of invasion barges

and he'd built up his fleet to challenge the Royal Navy.

But as Britain once again faced imminent attack,

its old sea defences,

which had begun with Henry VIII's coastal forts,

were deemed no longer fit for purpose.

So a new line of what were called Martello towers

would be needed to defend the beaches.

A chain of Martello towers was built all along the south and east coast.

They took their name from a fortress in Corsica, Mortella.

It's typical of the English that we got the name wrong.

But it's also typical of the English

that we learnt from the strengths of our enemies,

because the tower at Mortella took part in an epic engagement.

On 7th February, 1794, two British warships with a combined

fire power of over 100 guns had launched an attack

against the French at their strategic stronghold

of Mortella Point on Corsica.

But despite heavy bombardment from the Royal Navy,

Mortella stood firm, as recounted in a report prepared

by the admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet - Lord Hood.

The walls of the tower were of a prodigious thickness.

And the parapet, where there were two 18-pounders,

was lined with base junk,

a kind of cable made with grass and filled up with sand.

And although it was cannonaded for two days,

within 150 yards and appeared in a shattered state,

the enemy still held out.

The number of men in the tower were 33.

Only two were wounded, and those mortally.

So when it came down to it,

only to 18-pounder guns were enough to defy the Royal Navy.

The tower was eventually taken by a land assault,

but what happened at Mortella Point

had a very lasting effect on the British.

Impressed by its almost impregnable design

and the small number of soldiers needed to mount,

the Martello Tower now became Britain's latest incarnation

of the defensive castle.

And between 1804 and 1812, 103 of them were built,

ranging from East Anglia to the south coast.

This is Tower 24 in Dymchurch in Kent.

It's the last remaining Martello Tower where you can still see

the original layout.

Now, these stairs are not original.

There would have been a ladder which you could pull up

in an emergency, a little bit like a drawbridge.

At the top of this tower is a bit of a historical treasure.

Remarkably, this is the original cannon,

and it lay on the ground outside this tower for more than a century

before this place got turned into a museum.

Now, to give you a sense of the changing technology,

this bad boy could fire out to sea more than a mile, and using ropes

and tackles attached to these strong points

all around the top of this tower,

it could be dragged around to fire in any of 360 degrees.

They could fire anywhere they wanted.

But with Napoleon's defeat, the Martello Towers

never fired a shot in anger,

just like many of Henry VIII's coastal forts.

However, their show of force in defence of the realm,

again, redefined us as an island fortress.

And so intrinsic to the landscape were they

that Joseph Turner felt compelled to record their presence.

But as well as these new fortifications,

Turner, like so many of us, continued to return to the castles

of the past, and to Norham in particular.

At the age of 70, and 50 years after he'd first painted the castle,

Turner came to capture it for the last time

and for all time.

Turner's final and magnificent painting of Norham is of a castle

and particularly a great tower prevailing in an ethereal mist.

And what I think he's showing us

is how our history of conflict and violence never completely

vanishes from our pastoral idyll.

Those ancient battlefields are still just here all around us,

under the ploughed fields.

The castle continues to be the most potent symbol

of these islands' past.

It stands as a reminder to 1,000 years of history...

..from being the instruments of foreign invasion

and nationalist expansion

to the strategic strongholds of civil wars

and the Romantic ruins

that inspired a generation of writers and painters.

At the end of the 17th century,

the Marquess Of Halifax wrote a pamphlet that begins with a question

for all Britons,

"What shall we do to be saved in this world?" he asks.

And his answer, "You must look to your moat,"

specifically meaning the English Channel.

Because if you think about it, our entire nation is a castle.

The white cliffs of Dover are our castle walls,

and the English Channel is our moat.

Of course, in a globalised world, the Channel offers about as much

defence as our ancient castles themselves...

..but that, in the end, is the point.

Castles have long since passed from the realm of history

into that of myth,

and that's perhaps why they continue to hold

such an enduring fascination for us.