Pontefract Castle

Before I dive into Pontefract Castle, I thought I'd give you a comparison to my last entry on Kirk Hammerton. Pictured above are the remains of an Anglo-Saxon church. This is pretty much all that is left of most of them, so hopefully that helps illustrate how rare a place like the church at Kirk Hammerton is. Alright, moving on.

Here's the 13th century donjon from Pontefract Castle. It is one of only a few surviving multilobed donjons, with perhaps the most famous/complete being Clifford's Tower in York. I'll get pictures up of that one of these days. Pontefract was originally built just after the Norman Conquest and was originally just a motte with a timber tower on top and a bailey. In laymen terms, this means there was a big artificial hill with a tower on top and an enclosed area below the hill with service buildings, usually built on top of another smaller hill. The stone construction you see above was built in the thirteenth century as part of a general program of bigger & better & stone at Pontefract. Pontefract is one of those castles that are hard to imagine when you visit because it has been dismantled so much. At its furthest extent in the seventeenth century, it looked something like this:

That multilobed donjon? That's the bit on the left. So you can see that much of the castle is no longer standing. And that, my friends, is a story in and of itself. But to skip ahead a bit, Pontefract was destroyed largely because it WAS so big and important. It was the stronghold of the de Lacy family, who were major players in medieval England; they held the Lordship of Bowland, were the Earls of Lincoln- one of the girls married Robert the Bruce of Scotland for crying out loud. Hugh de Lacy was among the Anglo-Normans who took over parts of Ireland, becoming the king of Meath and building a couple of big castles there. Just one of those big dynastic power families. In the 1300s, it passed into the hands of the dukes of Lancaster, and King Richard II was killed here.

Pontefract's next major use was in the 1600s, when it served as a Royalist stronghold during the English Civil Wars. It served them pretty well too, withstanding 3 sieges by the Parliamentarians. After the end of the second Civil War, it was intentionally dismantled so that it could not be used in war again, leaving us with the ruins you can see today. This is a very similar story to that of Scarborough Castle, if you remember the giant hole in the wall I showed you that was intentionally put in to decrease the castle's military value.

Still, it is a neat little place to visit. Here's the backside of the motte looking towards the donjon (a fancy word for keep) from the bailey. And it wasn't just the walls and tower that were dismantled. Even the chapel, below bit the dust.

These are the remains of the oldest Norman chapel on the site, thought to date back to the 11th century. Unusually, when the chapel expanded, they built a whole new one slightly off to the side and just let this one be covered over after snagging a lot of the stones for rebuilding.

And here's the bailey from the top of the motte. This whole area would have had the outbuildings- kitchens, crafts areas, etc. Not much is left aside from a bit of the perimeter wall. I'm amused by the industrial tower puffing away in the distance.

And we're one more entry closer to Scotland!