Tamworth Castle

The site was a residence of the Mercian kings in Anglo-Saxon times. When Tamworth became the chief residence of Offa, he built a palace here from which charters were issued sedens in palatio regali in Tamoworthige, the earliest dating from 781. Little of that glory survived the Viking attack of 874, which left the town, in the old phrase, "for nearly forty years a mass of blackened ruins". Tamworth was rebuilt in 913 by Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, who fortified it with an earthen burh — though that did not prevent the town being sacked again by the Danes in 943.

After the Conquest the site passed to William's steward, Robert Despenser, who raised a wooden motte-and-bailey castle during the 1080s in the south-western corner of the earlier burh. Through marriage it came to the Marmions, hereditary champions of the Dukes of Normandy and then of the Kings of England, who held it for six generations from around 1100 to 1294 and began remodelling it in stone. It was nearly lost altogether: when Robert Marmion, 3rd Baron Marmion of Tamworth, deserted King John in 1215, the king ordered his son Geoffrey imprisoned, his lands confiscated and the castle slighted. The archaeologist Tom McNeill notes it is unclear whether the order was ever carried out; after John's death, Robert's sons regained their father's lands.

The castle passed by daughters and nieces to the Frevilles and then to the Ferrers of Groby, whose arms came to dominate the Jacobean interiors. In the Civil War it fell to Parliamentary forces on 25 June 1643 after a two-day siege and was garrisoned — by July 1645 holding ten officers and 77 soldiers under the military governor Waldyve Willington — which is why it escaped the slighting visited on so many others. After periods of neglect and refurbishment under the Shirleys, Comptons and Townshends, it was bought by Tamworth Corporation for £3,000 in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, and opened to the public as a museum by the Earl of Dartmouth in 1899.

Tamworth Castle has been open to the public as a museum since 1899 and remains in the ownership of Tamworth Borough Council. A causeway leads up to the gate tower — look for the herring-bone masonry laid diagonally at its base, a survival from the castle's earliest stonework. Inside, the H-plan accommodation within the shell keep takes you from the 13th-century three-storey north range, through the oak-timbered 15th-century Great Hall, to the Jacobean south range. Allow time for the heraldry: the arms of the Ferrers and the families they married into are stamped across the interiors.

Organised public ghost hunts are also held at the castle; these are run by event companies, so book through the official channels and check the details before you go. Dress for a stone keep on a mound above two rivers — it holds the cold. By day, the grounds reward a wander down towards the Lady Bridge and the Holloway, the route of the 1810 gatehouse and carriageway, with St Editha's square church tower closing the view much as J. M. W. Turner painted it in 1832.