Bothal Castle

Bothal Castle is a castle and later private house in the village of Bothal, beside the River Wansbeck, between Morpeth and Ashington in Northumberland. The village and the castle sit in North East England, the region made up of Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne and Wear, and part of North Yorkshire. The building occupies the end of a natural spur above the meeting of the Wansbeck and Bothal Burn. The ground is level toward the north, and the other sides fall by steep slopes to the river and by a ravine on the east.

That choice of ground is unusual among the fortresses of Northumberland, most of which were placed to be seen for miles. Bothal has no skyline. It is hidden in a deep ravine cut below the coastal plain, and the clearest views of it are from the open fields to the west and from the south bank at the stepping stones.

The castle is a Grade I listed building and a scheduled monument. It has also been called a scheduled ancient monument. The gatehouse and the adjoining wing to the west, and the remains of the curtain wall south of the residential block, were first listed on 14 April 1949. The Welbeck Estate Office and the outbuildings around the stable yard were listed on 18 December 1986.

The village conservation area, drawn around the castle, the church, and the single street, was designated in 1986. The gatehouse is recorded at grid NZ 23985 86520, and the curtain remains at NZ 24017 86464. The house is still lived in by the Cavendish-Bentinck family and it also holds the Welbeck Estate Office. It is in excellent repair, and visitors are not allowed to enter.

The name is Old English. Old English, also called Early English or Anglo-Saxon, was the language brought to Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-fifth century, and the first Old English literature dates from the mid-seventh century. It had four main dialects, Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian, and West Saxon. Northumbrian is the dialect of the kingdom in which Bothal lies.

One explanation takes Bothal as a word for a dwelling, or for one particular hall. Another derives it from Bota's halh, land by the river belonging to a man named Bota, thought to have been a distinguished Angle from a nearby settlement such as Ashington, Pegswood, or Ulgham. A third explanation is the Old English botl, a dwelling, the element also heard in Harbottle and Shilbottle. The name is placed somewhere between the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlements of the fifth century and about 1100.

The earliest recorded spelling is Bothalle, in 1233. Later spellings are Bothal in 1250, Bottal in 1346, and Bottell in 1428. In the nineteenth century, and earlier, local speech pronounced the name bottle. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English was replaced for several centuries as the language of the upper classes by Anglo-Norman, and 1066 is treated as the end of the Old English era.

The wider region already had a long history before any stone castle. The kingdom of Northumbria ran from the Firth of Forth, then a Pictish border, south of York to the Humber. Its last independent king, Eric Bloodaxe, reigned in 947 and 948 and died at the Battle of Stainmore in 954, after which Eadred, grandson of Alfred, ruled all England. In 793 a raiding party from Norway attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne.

A chronicler set the harrying of the church on 8 June. In 876 the raiders were recorded as sharing out the land of the Northumbrians and turning to the plough. Cuthbert, Bede, and Hilda of Whitby belong to this northern church, and Bede's Ecclesiastical History was written at Wearmouth and Jarrow. The castle at Newcastle was built shortly after the conquest, in 1080, by Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror.

Bothal's own early centuries are much less documented. Little or no archaeological investigation has been undertaken at the castle, or in the village around it. There is no recorded prehistoric or Roman link on the site except a group of primitive graves unearthed in the nineteenth century when a driveway was made for the rectory at Bothal Haugh. Signs of settlement begin in the Anglo-Saxon period.

A sceatta, a small Anglo-Saxon coin dated from 680 to 710, was found in a garden in the village. Fragments of Anglo-Saxon crosses are built into the chancel walls of the church of Saint Andrew, and they indicate a church of the tenth or eleventh century. Foundations of a small stone church, possibly of about 900, have been traced under the floor, and some of its stones were reused later. Many of those stones are reddish from calcination, which has been taken to mean that the building was burned, perhaps during Scottish raids in the twelfth century.

A study published in 2019 examined two representations of the crucifixion on late pre-Conquest carved stones from Bothal. Aerial photographs show ridge and furrow in the fields to the west and a curved cropmark at Bothal Barns. The earliest records treat Bothal as an Anglo-Saxon foundation, and there is evidence that the land was royal, first of the kings of Northumbria and then of the kings of England, administered by the earls.

The Norman Conquest is the event that changed who held that royal north. In January 1066 the childless Edward the Confessor died, and his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson succeeded him. In September the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada invaded northern England, won at Fulford on 20 September, and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later, on 28 September, the Duke of Normandy landed at Pevensey with an army of Norman, French, Flemish, and Breton troops.

On 14 October, at Hastings, Harold was killed, and the duke, later styled William the Conqueror, became king. He was not secure until after 1072. He confiscated the lands of the English elite who resisted, granted lands to his followers, and built castles on military strong points. The Domesday survey was complete by 1086.

His son William II, called William Rufus, inherited that settlement. In 1095 Robert de Mowbray, earl of Northumbria, refused to attend the king's court, the Curia Regis. William led an army against him, defeated him, dispossessed him, and imprisoned him. The forfeited earldom was broken into baronies tied to the royal castle at Newcastle.

In 1095 William Rufus gave Bothal to Guy I de Balliol. Guy was a Picard baron from Bailleul-en-Vimeu, near Abbeville, on the frontier between Ponthieu and Normandy. He was established in the north in the 1090s as part of the division of the forfeited earldom. The grant is explained as the planting of a new family on a frontier, to protect and advance the kingdom, and as a return for support in William's campaigns on the eastern frontier of Normandy in 1091 and 1094.

Those were the years in which William also pushed back Malcolm III of Scotland, took Malcolm's homage in 1091, built Carlisle Castle in 1092, and saw Malcolm and his son Edward killed at Alnwick on 13 November 1093 by forces led by Robert de Mowbray. Guy's northern territories included large stretches of forest in Teesdale, where Barnard Castle was later founded by Bernard de Baliol, and the Northumberland townships of Bothal, Woodhorn, Newbiggin, and Cresswell. His nephew Bernard I de Balliol succeeded to the estates before some point between 1130 and 1133, so Guy was dead by then. Guy's daughter Alice married William Bertram, Baron of Mitford, who probably built a hall house at Bothal.

One account says there was no one both willing and empowered to raise a motte and bailey here in that first Norman generation, because the place was a detached piece of a large barony and Guy had no need, and no right, to fortify it.

What stood on the spur before the fourteenth century is disputed, and the disagreement should stay visible. The Bertrams are said to have been lords of Bothal from the late twelfth century until 1406. A building is thought to have stood on the site of the present castle by about 1150, called a manse or a mansum, of which nothing survives, and that building is also said to have been likely fortified before the Norman Conquest. A separate account dates a castle to about 1150 and treats the place as both a probable timber castle and a certain masonry castle.

Another finds no sign of a mound, allows that there may never have been one, and sees only an enclosure defended by stockaded banks of earth, with a fortified gateway on the north covered by a ditch and a mound. The same account finds no masonry now visible that is earlier than the thirteenth century. The later gatehouse has been supposed to stand on a former motte, and the person who proposed that site allowed that the motte might not have existed. The curtain itself is thought to contain, in some stretches, walling of the Bertram mansum from before the licence of 1343, with other parts later in the Middle Ages, and with nineteenth-century patching.

The church records the same family. A Norman church appeared in the late twelfth century, probably built by Richard Bertram, called the first lord. His son Robert was the first of the family to be styled Baron of Bothal, a grant of Richard I around 1199. That Robert altered the church, adding a chancel, a south chapel, and a north aisle, and replacing the north wall with an arcade.

The south aisle is attributed to a later Robert Bertram, built around the same time as the castle gatehouse.

The fortified castle, as opposed to the hall or manse, belongs to the later Middle Ages. The Middle Ages in Europe run from about the fifth century to the late fifteenth, and the late part of that period was marked by famine, plague, and war. Between 1347 and 1350 the Black Death killed about a third of the people of Europe. Bothal's licence falls just before those plague years, in a decade when the English crown was at war with Scotland as well as with France.

On 15 May 1343, at Westminster, by privy seal, in the seventeenth year of Edward III, Robert Bertram was granted a royal licence to crenellate his dwelling place of Bothale in Northumberland. The enrolled words are a licence for Robert Bertram to crenellate his mansum of Bothale. He is identified as Sir Robert Bertram, with the dates 1307 to 1363, high sheriff of Northumberland and at that time governor of Newcastle, a man who distinguished himself against the Scots. One account gives the licence of 1343 instead to Sir Robert de Ogle, and treats the heraldry carved on the battlements as proof of that date.

The building that followed is generally taken to be the gatehouse of about 1343. After the licence, the gatehouse keep is said to have been built, the great hall enlarged, the curtain strengthened, and angle towers raised at the south-west and south-east corners. The Blanche Tower, also written Blanke Tower and Blank Tower, stood west of the gateway and was named for Robert Bertram's second wife. It is thought to have been built in the late fourteenth century.

The same border war explains why a dwelling place was turned into a castle, and it also explains why two neighbouring families, Bertram of Bothal and Ogle of Ogle, were armed at the same time. The Ogles were a Northumbrian family settled at Ogle in the parish of Whalton, eight miles south-west of Morpeth, and Bothal is three miles east of Morpeth. Their rise is tied to warfare with Scotland. The earliest spellings of the family name are Hoggel, Oggehill, Ogille, and Oghill.

In August 1341 David Bruce reached as far as Newcastle, and Sir Robert de Ogle, who died in 1362, captured five Scottish knights. In that same year Edward III allowed him to fortify his manor house at Ogle, which became Ogle Castle, and gave him free warren on his demesne. The licence for Ogle is dated 1341, or the previous year, and it is a different grant from the Bothal licence of 1343. In 1345 Ogle and John de Kirkby, bishop of Carlisle, resisted a Scottish foray into Cumberland in which Sir William Douglas, the knight of Liddesdale, burned Carlisle and Penrith.

In a skirmish in which the bishop was unhorsed, Ogle ran the Scottish leader Alexander Stragan, or Strachan, through with his lance, and was himself badly wounded.

On 17 October 1346 both men fought at the battle of Neville's Cross, officially called Durham. Durham is the name carried by County Durham, the county palatine long governed by its bishops outside the ordinary pattern of English shires. The county name appears as Dunelmensischira, or Durhamshire, from about 1100, and as Comitatus Dunelmensis, County Durham, in 1344. Robert Bertram captured the Earl of Wigtown and William Douglas.

He then allowed the earl to escape, and he spent the next year in the Tower of London. Robert de Ogle took three prisoners at the same battle: the Earl of Fife, Henry de Ramsay, and Thomas Boyd. A tradition says that the captive King David was taken first to Ogle Castle, not to Bothal. In 1355 the Scots took Berwick by surprise on the night of 6 November, while William, Lord Greystock, was with the king in France.

Ogle, commanding as Greystock's lieutenant, held the castle until help came. Two of his sons were killed in the defence. Greystock was condemned to lose life and property, and was later pardoned on the plea that the king had ordered him to France. Ogle died in 1362.

His son Robert had already died. That son had married Ellen, the only child and heiress of Sir Robert Bertram of Bothal, the man who in 1343 had received the licence to build the castle. A splendid gatehouse, carved with contemporary shields, still remains from that work. The daughter's name is also written Hellen and Helen.

One account says the estate passed to the Ogles in the fourteenth century by her marriage to Sir Robert Ogle, who died about 1363. Another keeps the Bertrams as lords until 1406. The manor of Causey Park came with Bothal Castle through Helen Bertram's first marriage to Robert Ogle, the knight who died in 1363.

Their son Robert succeeded his grandfather while still under age, and John Philipot became his guardian. Bothal Castle came to this Robert on the death of his mother's third husband, David Holgrave, in 1405 or 1406. He at once settled the castle on his younger son, John, who had taken his grandmother's surname of Bertram. Robert Ogle, the father, died on 31 October 1409.

The day after that death, his elder son, Sir Robert, laid siege to Bothal and drove his brother out. Another account places the dispute in 1410 and says that Sir Robert Ogle III besieged the castle for four days in an attempt to unseat his younger brother John, and that the attempt failed. A third account names the defender Sir John Ogle, says that his elder brother Sir Robert took the castle, and says that Sir Robert was later compelled to give it back. John, under the Bertram name, took the case to parliament.

The castle then remained with his family until that direct male line ended. The end had come before 1517, when the fourth Lord Ogle styled himself lord of Ogle and Bottell. Even so, Robert, the first Baron Ogle, seems to have been at least temporarily in possession in October 1465.

That title, Baron Ogle, is a peerage of England, created in 1461 for Robert Ogle. It fell into abeyance in 1691. The man created baron on 26 July 1461 was Sir Robert Ogle, called the principal Northumbrian gentleman to support the house of York. He was the son of an earlier Sir Robert Ogle of Ogle and Bothal, who lived from about 1370 or from 24 December 1372 until 12 August 1436, and of Maud, or Matilda, Grey.

The father had been constable of Norham, sheriff and escheator of Norhamshire and Islandshire, which were exclaves of the county palatine of County Durham, a member of parliament for Northumberland six times between 1416 and 1435, high sheriff in 1417, and warden of Roxburgh Castle in 1425. He was beaten by Sir Alexander Ramsay at Piperden in 1436. The son was already a commissioner for a truce with Scotland in 1434, and in the next year he appears as captain of Berwick, a post worth about £194 in peacetime and a further £200 in war. The Scots captured him on a border raid and ransomed him for 750 marks.

The crown customarily paid the ransoms of men taken in its service, but he was still seeking that money seven years later. He was sheriff of Northumberland in 1437 and 1438. In 1455 he brought 600 men from the Scottish Marches to the Yorkist army at the first battle of St Albans, and a chronicler says he took the marketplace. He was also constable of the bishopric of Durham, and the bishop then was a brother of the Earl of Salisbury, so the men he brought have been read as the bishop's contribution to the Neville cause.

After Towton he and Sir John Conyers hunted the deposed Henry VI and besieged him at Carham. He was given command of the forfeited Percy castles of Alnwick, Warkworth, and Prudhoe. He received the office of warden of the east march in 1438. In October 1461 he made a further truce with Scotland.

In 1465, when Warwick's brother Montague received the earldom of Northumberland, those Percy estates were transferred, and Ogle was compensated with the lordship of Redesdale, Harbottle Castle, and other forfeited lands in Northumberland. He died on 1 November 1469 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Owen, or Ewyn, the second baron. The later barons were Ralph, the third, who lived from 1468 to 1513; Robert, the fourth, from 1490 to 1530; Robert, the fifth, whose birth is given as 1513 or 1527 and whose death is 1545; Robert, the sixth, from 1529 to 1562; and Cuthbert, the seventh, from about 1540 to 1597.

Between the family lawsuit and the late sixteenth century the outer court grew. The Yethouse Court, in front of the gatehouse toward the village, and the Ogle Tower at the north-west corner of that court, were probably added between 1470 and 1576. A house built in the 1840s is said to occupy the ground where the Blanke Tower and the Ogle Tower had stood.

In 1562 Robert, Lord Ogle, the sixth baron, died at Allerton Mauleverer. Allerton Mauleverer is a village in North Yorkshire, in the parish of Allerton Mauleverer with Hopperton, about five miles east of Knaresborough. The name meant Aelfweard's farm, and the Mauleverer family held it in the twelfth century. In 1086 the lord was King William.

An inventory taken after the death at Allerton Mauleverer lists some of the furnishings still at Bothal Castle, among them bed hangings, window cloths, and painted cloths, which were used as a cheaper alternative to tapestry.

A survey of the estate in 1576, written up as a book of the barony, shows a house that was still large and well supplied. The castle measured 490 feet in circumference. It contained a gatehouse keep, a great hall, a parlour, seven bedchambers, a gallery, a buttery, a pantry, a larder, a kitchen, a bakehouse, a brewhouse, a stable, and the Yethouse Court, which contained a prison. There were also a porter's lodge, various chambers, a common stable, the Blank Tower, a garden, a nursery, a chapel, the Ogle Tower, and many other buildings the survey did not specify.

Another telling of the same survey names a great chamber, seven bedchambers, the bakehouse, the brewhouse, and a court called the gatehouse in which there was a prison. The gardens and orchards were famous in that account. They grew herbs and flowers, apples, plums of every kind, pears, damsons, nuts, wardens, cherries both black and red, walnuts, and very fine liquorice.

In August 1583 Cuthbert Ogle, the seventh baron, negotiated a marriage between his daughter Jane and Edward Talbot, a son of George Talbot, sixth Earl of Shrewsbury. Shrewsbury's agents visited Bothal and described the house as a battled castle, not unlike Nether Haddon, where Master John Manners lived. Edward Talbot, later eighth Earl of Shrewsbury and eighth Earl of Waterford, was the younger brother and nearest male heir of Gilbert Talbot, the seventh earl. His birth is given as a christening on 25 February 1561, and also as 1552.

He was a son of George Talbot by Gertrude Manners, daughter of the first Earl of Rutland. He entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1579, and in November 1580 he and his brother Henry had an audience with Elizabeth. He was knight of the shire for Northumberland in 1584 and 1586, a justice from about 1592, sheriff of the county in 1601 and 1609, and a member of the Council of the North from 1603. In 1583 he married Joane Ogle, also written Jane, daughter of Cuthbert.

None of their children survived him. He succeeded his brother in 1616. His death is dated 8 February 1617, in London, in his fifty-seventh year, with burial in Westminster Abbey, and it is also dated 1618, and the span 1552 to 1616 is also given. Some of the Shrewsbury estates passed to the daughters of his elder brother and in time to the dukes of Norfolk.

The heir of the barony was not Jane but Catherine Ogle. She was the only surviving heir of Cuthbert, who died in 1597. Her birth is given as 1568, 1569, or 1570, and her death as 1629. In 1591 she married Sir Charles Cavendish of Welbeck.

One account says that through that marriage, in 1591, the estate passed to the Cavendish-Bentinck family, later dukes of Portland. Another says the Ogles held Bothal until 1629. The barony itself was in abeyance from Cuthbert's death in 1597 until 3 December 1628, when Catherine was created Baroness Ogle. She and Charles were the parents of William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, who was also Earl of Ogle.

Sir Charles Cavendish was born on 28 November 1553 and died on 4 April 1617. He was a son of Bess of Hardwick and of William Cavendish, who died in 1557. He was educated at Eton and at Clare College, Cambridge, travelled to Venice in 1570 and to Rome in 1574 with his stepbrother Gilbert Talbot, and was knighted in 1583, the year of the Bothal marriage negotiation between Jane Ogle and Edward Talbot. He was a builder as well as a landowner.

In 1613 he acquired Bolsover Castle and Welbeck Abbey from Gilbert Talbot, seventh Earl of Shrewsbury. He died in 1617 and was buried at Bolsover, and his son set up the monument to his parents in the church there.

King James came to Bothal in the middle of that change of family. James VI and I was king of Scotland from 24 July 1567 and king of England and Ireland from 24 March 1603. He was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. After the union of the crowns he lived in England and returned to Scotland only once, in 1617.

On 5 May 1617 he stayed at Bothal Castle for two nights on his way north. The host is given as Charles Cavendish or as Charles's brother William Cavendish. Charles's own death is dated 4 April 1617. From Bothal the king went on to Alnwick Abbey, the home of Francis Brandling, still on his way to Scotland.

The castle's later owners are set out in more than one sequence, and the dates do not all agree. One account says the estate passed to the Cavendish family first in the person of Sir William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and it places the years 1676 to 1691 beside that name, and says he was born at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. The barony list gives William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, the dates 1592 to 1676, and his son Henry Cavendish, second Duke of Newcastle, the dates 1630 to 1691. William was a leading Royalist in the civil war, a commander whose generalship has been judged limited, and later an authority on the training of fighting horses.

During the civil war he is said to have placed his family at Bothal, and there is a reference to his visiting his children there in 1642. By the time Henry became second duke, Bothal appears to have fallen into disrepair, and the duke was an absentee landlord. The estate then passed by way of John Holles, third Duke of Newcastle, and Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, to the Bentinck dukes of Portland. The barony of Ogle has been in abeyance since Henry's death in 1691.

An illustration of the castle's neglect by the early eighteenth century is the Saunders view of 1724. On the Earl of Oxford's instruction, Bothal School was founded in 1725. The schoolhouse and the master's house stood next to the churchyard. Christopher Stafford, rector of the parish, left £80 to teach eight scholars a year.

In the 1820s the school and the endowment were still in being. Seventy children were taught. The schoolmaster received £10 a year and his house from the Duke of Portland, nearly £3 from the endowment, and a quarterage of two shillings from each scholar. The school closed when a new school opened in Ashington in 1873.

The ruined gatehouse was brought back into use in the nineteenth century. In 1828 William Sample was appointed agent to the Bothal estate by the fourth Duke of Portland, and the Sample family has kept that stewardship. William Sample persuaded the duke to pay for a restoration of the gatehouse, carried out in 1830 and 1831. Brick and stone from the ruins were reused where they could be.

A shed-like structure that blocked the arch was removed. A drawing of about 1840 by Gastineau shows that shed-like construction in the arch. The large Sample wing against the west side of the gatehouse was built in 1858 and 1859, during the stewardship of Thomas Sample. It incorporates some medieval walling.

It was enlarged in 1909, when a further storey was added on the east, and the same work is described as an extension and a heightening. The nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century work was done for the Sample family as agents of the Duke of Portland. The gatehouse roof is leaded. The wing is roofed in Lakeland slate.

The walls are squared stone with cut dressings.

The gatehouse is rectangular, with semi-octagonal turrets flanking the entrance on the north and a rectangular stair turret at the south-west. On the north it reads as three storeys and three bays, with a two-bay wing to the right. The entrance is a moulded pointed arch with a portcullis slot. Above it, the first-floor window has two trefoiled lights and a quatrefoil in the spandrel, and over that a square-headed window of three lights with a transom.

The flanking turrets have windows of three lights, mostly of the nineteenth century, except for single-light loops on the ground floor at the left. The parapet is crenellated, with gargoyles, a display of contemporary heraldry, and two worn stone figures of the kind also seen at Alnwick Castle. On the inner return of each turret a shoulder-arched door is blocked, probably in the early nineteenth century. The two-bay wing to the right has mullioned windows of three lights, those on the second floor blocked, and a crenellated parapet.

The left return keeps an original first-floor window of two lights and, above it, a transomed window of three lights.

Toward the bailey, the south side has a double-chamfered arch. Above it is an original window of two lights, and to the right a fifteenth-century transomed window of two lights with a panel-traceried head, brought from Cockle Park Tower in the restoration of 1830 and 1831. The second floor has transomed windows of three and four lights. The window of four lights is an insertion of the late nineteenth century.

There are small loops to the right and in the taller stair turret on the left. The wing to the left is of four storeys and three bays, with a projecting embattled porch under a moulded arch, and mullioned windows of two, three, and four lights, some of them transomed. A two-storey extension at the far left projects beyond the line of the curtain.

Inside, the gate passage has a pointed rib vault and four murder holes. A shouldered doorway is blocked in each wall, and two chamfered loops open on the west. The ground-floor chambers have round-arched rib vaults. The first-floor chamber has segmental ribbed rear-arches to the original windows, and some of those windows have seats.

The newel stair is capped by a ribbed umbrella vault, and the doorways are shoulder-arched. The wing has an open-well stair with a closed string and turned balusters. The first-floor drawing room has a fifteenth-century fireplace with an embattled lintel, brought from Cockle Park, and oak panelling that came from an East Indiaman. One wall, and the stair, carry plaster worked to look like panelling.

The curtain is a long, irregular enclosure around the top of the natural hill, built of squared stone of uneven quality. Some sections are probably part of the Bertram mansum from before 1343. Other parts are later medieval, and there is nineteenth-century repair. The east curtain, joining the south-east angle of the gatehouse, has two external buttresses.

Beyond a rounded projection, a nineteenth-century retaining wall incorporates older masonry toward the south-east corner. The south wall shows a chamfered plinth, probably of a south-east tower. Higher walling, with angle buttresses and blocked chamfered windows, stands at the south-east corner of the bailey. A nineteenth-century garden wall in the middle of the west side links to the west curtain, which is 1.6 metres thick and up to 7.5 metres high.

On its inner face are the remains of two fireplaces and a set of moulded corbels. The north end of that west curtain joins the nineteenth-century wing of the gatehouse.

The stable yard north of the castle continues the Yethouse Court named in the survey of 1576, and the Ogle Tower stood at its north-west corner. The outbuildings are of about 1858 and they reuse some medieval walling. An embattled screen wall runs north from the west end of the nineteenth-century wing, turns east, and then turns south, and the outbuildings stand against it. Medieval masonry is still visible on the outside of the western screen wall.

There is a flat-roofed single-storey office next to the wing, an L-shaped stable at the north-west corner, and a lower wall with arched coping linking a small gabled building to the east end of the stable. The doors are boarded, and the windows are casements of one and two lights with small panes.

Around the castle, the village remained an estate village. The earliest drawn plan is the plan of the Duke of Newcastle's estate in 1632, which shows few buildings, probably working buildings rather than houses, including a building in the garden orchard south-west of the gatehouse and two large buildings to the east in another orchard. A gap of about 170 years follows before estate plans of about 1800. The first edition of the mapped survey is dated 1864.

William Charles Ellis, rector from 1861 to 1923, and a brother of the seventh Lord Howard de Walden, who was the eldest joint heir to the barony of Ogle, built a new rectory at Bothal Haugh. It was a red-brick house in an Elizabethan manner, with an octagonal turret, and with hydraulic gear that opened the main internal doors as a person approached. The primitive graves were found while the driveway of that house was being made. Ellis also put up a private suspension bridge between the house and the church.

The original wooden bridge was replaced with railway wires around 1935, and the bridge, unlike the house, still stands. In 1887, during works he directed at the church, an ancient apse and other relics were uncovered. He is commemorated by a plaque on the south wall of the chancel. The row of estate cottages was remodelled in 1885.

The village hall was built in 1895. The Castle Inn, which had closed as a public house at some point between 1855 and 1887, was rebuilt in 1897. A defensive loophole in a wall looking along the road dates from the Second World War. It belongs to the village record rather than to the medieval castle.

No excavation of the castle has been reported, and the repeated statement of the local record is that little or no archaeological exploration has been carried out either at the castle or in the village. What is known of the building phases comes from the standing masonry, from the licence, from the survey of 1576, and from the later repairs. The medieval work that survives in use is the gatehouse, parts of the curtain, and medieval stone reused in the nineteenth-century wing and in the screen wall of the stable yard. The castle is not open to the public.

It can be seen from the fields to the west, from the south bank at the stepping stones, and from the church gates, looking up through the trees to the castle gate. There is no vehicular access, and one account says it cannot be seen from the public roads.