Bamburgh Castle

Bamburgh Castle sits on a black crag of dolerite above one of the finest beaches in England, and from the dunes to the south it looks exactly like the idea of a castle: long walls following the edge of the rock, a square Norman keep at the heart, the North Sea pounding below and the Farne Islands floating offshore. The rock is part of the Whin Sill, a sheet of hard volcanic rock, and it has been a stronghold for as long as there are records of this coast.

Before the stone castle there was a royal fortress. A Brittonic stronghold known as Din Guarie may have stood here in the 5th and 6th centuries; in 547 the Anglian king Ida took it, and around 600 it was named Bebbanburg after Bebba, wife of King Æthelfrith. For a time this was a seat of the kings of Northumbria. Archaeology from that age, including burials of the 7th and 8th centuries, is displayed in the castle, and Bernard Cornwell's Saxon novels made Bebbanburg famous again as the home of the fictional Uhtred.

The present castle grew from Norman work; the great keep was probably built under Henry II by 1164. During the Wars of the Roses, in 1464, a siege led by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, made it, by tradition, the first castle in Britain to fall to gunpowder artillery. It decayed for centuries afterwards. In the 18th century trustees of Lord Crewe, Bishop of Durham, repaired the keep and used it for charitable work, and in 1894 the Victorian industrialist William Armstrong bought it and restored it lavishly by 1905. The Armstrong family still owns it, and the castle is a Grade I listed building.

Inside are the restored state rooms with their furniture and paintings and a museum devoted to Armstrong's engineering and armaments, with aviation artefacts from both world wars. But the setting is the masterpiece. Walk the beach at low tide in the evening, when the walls turn gold, or look back from the dunes toward Lindisfarne, about five miles to the north.

Getting there

The castle stands above the village of Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast. Ashington, the nearest large town, is about 49 km away; Newcastle International Airport (NCL) is about 64 km to the south. The most practical railway station is Berwick-upon-Tweed on the East Coast Main Line, from where bus X18 runs to Bamburgh in about 40 minutes and stops in front of the castle; the same route continues south toward Alnwick and Morpeth. There is a car park at the castle and another in the village.