# Brough Castle

castle in Cumbria, England, UK

Brough, United Kingdom

Fortification. 1092 CE

## Story

• Brough Castle is a ruined stone castle at Church Brough, on a ridge above Swindale Beck, standing on the northern part of a Roman fort of about three acres.
• The fort, called Verterae, Verteris, and Veterae, was built about AD 79–80 on the road from York to Carlisle, and a castle was raised here around 1092 when William Rufus took Carlisle from the kingdom of Scotland.
• Six knights lost the castle to William I of Scotland in 1174, during the revolt against Henry II of England, and the square keep was rebuilt in the later twelfth century.
• The Cliffords held it for centuries until a fire after Christmas in 1521 left the bare walls, and Lady Anne Clifford repaired it from 1659 before a later fire and a long decay.
• Digging has found Roman buildings under the keep, a cremation cemetery, a bath-house, and, in October 2007, an unidentified stone structure just east of the gateway.

## Visiting

Entry is free. The site is open daily. From April to September it is open from 10:00 to 17:00. From October to March it is open from 10:00 to 16:00.
Opening hours are also given as 10:00 to 16:00 daily. The castle is closed on 24, 25 and 26 December and on 1 January. Smoking, vaping, barbecues and naked flames are not allowed.

## History

Brough Castle is a ruined stone castle at Church Brough, on a ridge above Swindale Beck at the western end of the Stainmore Pass. It stands on the northern part of a Roman fort of about three acres, whose name is written Verterae, Verteris, Veterae, and Verterea. The fort was built in about AD 79–80 on the road from York to Carlisle. One account keeps it in use until the fifth century, and another runs the occupation from Agricola’s governorship in AD 78–84 to the end of the fourth.

The first castle is tied to William Rufus. He invaded the north-west in 1091, and in 1092 he took Carlisle and annexed Cumberland and northern Westmorland, which until then had lain in the kingdom of Scotland. A castle here is dated around 1092, during that campaign, or immediately after it. Herringbone masonry in the north curtain is read as stone walling of about 1100, and the present keep stands on an earlier tower of that time.

In the revolt against Henry II of England, William I of Scotland took the castle. The year is given as 1173 and as 1174. Six knights held it, and Jordan Fantosme told of one who fought with spears and then with wooden stakes before the keep was burned. The square keep that replaced it is dated to the 1180s, to about 1189–99, and to about 1200.

King John granted the lordship, including Brough, to Robert de Vieuxpont in 1203. After the Second Barons' War the estate moved toward the Cliffords by guardianship and by marriage. Robert Clifford was killed at Bannockburn on 24 June 1314, and the castle was attacked in 1314 and again in 1319. Later lords rebuilt the hall and Clifford’s Tower, which is called circular, D-shaped, and semi-circular.

Henry Clifford, 10th Baron de Clifford, held a great Christmas at Brough in 1521. An accidental fire soon afterwards left nothing but the bare walls. One account says he died shortly afterwards. His life dates his death to 23 April 1523.

Lady Anne Clifford, born on 30 January 1590, gained possession of the estates in 1649 after a long dispute and repaired Brough from 1659. An inscription of late 1663 is taken to mark the finish of that work, and by 1665 she could spend Christmas there. A fire in 1666 is said to have ended habitation, yet a note of 19 April 1672 still sets out how the rooms were used. She died at Brougham on 22 March 1676.

Roofs and fittings were sold for £155 in about 1714–15. Stone from Clifford’s Tower went to Brough Mill in 1763. The south-west corner of the keep fell around 1800 and again on 20 May 1920.

Guardianship began in 1920, and another account dates the gift to the state to 1921. The freehold belongs to the Beckwith family. The ruin is in public care and is open to visitors.

Digging under the keep found a Roman building and an earlier tower. Eric Birley’s trenches are dated 1953 and 1954. Work in the early 1970s recorded about fifty cremations and a bath-house. From 16 to 26 October 2007 a drain trench found a stone structure just east of the gateway, either two walls with rubble or a blocked arch, and only in the south side of the cut.

A 2009 watching brief on the north and west recovered Roman pottery and saw no features. In 2010 the masonry was judged to be declining. The castle was first scheduled on 13 January 1915, and the scheduling was amended on 5 December 2014. It is not recorded as a world-heritage inscription.

## Photographs

- [Brough Castle, in Brough, Cumbria, England. View from the south east with Clifford's Tower in the foreground, and the keep on the left. — Supergolden](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/BroughCastleSE.jpg)
- [Brough Castle. Geese under the shadow of Brough Castle, a ruin open to visitors. — Carl Bendelow](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_17753.jpg)
- [Brough Castle, near to Brough, Cumbria, Great Britain. The photograph was taken late afternoon as the sun was setting and hence the wonderful glow achieved on — Tim Fields](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1605399.jpg)
- [Brough Castle, near to Brough, Cumbria, Great Britain. Originally Norman but often ravaged by invading Scots armies. — Colin Smith](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1477559.jpg)
- [Brough Castle, near to Brough, Cumbria, Great Britain. — John Lord](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1807192.jpg)
- [Brough Castle — Alexander P Kapp](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_380637.jpg)
- [Ash tree at Brough castle Ash tree on earthworks at Brough castle — rod collier](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/95/Ash_tree_at_Brough_castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1716703.jpg)
- [Brough Castle — malcolm tebbit](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1754599.jpg)
- [Brough Castle — malcolm tebbit](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1754602.jpg)
- [Brough Castle, near to Brough, Cumbria, Great Britain. Sun setting on the remains of Brough Castle — George Hopkins](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2042942.jpg)

## Sources

- [Brough Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brough_Castle) — Wikipedia
- [History of Brough Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/brough-castle/history/) — English Heritage
- [Description of Brough Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/brough-castle/history/description/) — English Heritage
- [Research on Brough Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/brough-castle/history/research/) — English Heritage
- [Significance of Brough Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/brough-castle/history/significance/) — English Heritage
- [Brough Castle](https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/brough-castle/) — English Heritage
- [Brough Castle and Brough (Verteris) Roman fort and civil settlement](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1007148) — Historic England
- [Archaeological Watching Brief Report on Land at Brough Castle, Church Brough, Cumbria](https://doi.org/10.5284/1003190) — Archaeology Data Service
- [An Archaeological Watching Brief and Evaluation at Brough Castle, Church Brough, Cumbria](https://doi.org/10.5284/1003123) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Henry Clifford, 10th Baron de Clifford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Clifford,_10th_Baron_de_Clifford) — Wikipedia
- [Henry II of England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_II_of_England) — Wikipedia
- [Lady Anne Clifford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Anne_Clifford) — Wikipedia
- [William Rufus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rufus) — Wikipedia
- [Roman Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire) — Wikipedia
- [Second Barons' War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Barons%27_War) — Wikipedia
- [Francis Grose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Grose) — Wikipedia
- [Jordan Fantosme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Fantosme) — Wikipedia
- [BroughCastleSE.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BroughCastleSE.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 17753.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_17753.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1605399.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1605399.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1477559.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1477559.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1807192.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1807192.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 380637.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_380637.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Ash tree at Brough castle - geograph.org.uk - 1716703.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ash_tree_at_Brough_castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1716703.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1754599.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1754599.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 1754602.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1754602.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Brough Castle - geograph.org.uk - 2042942.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brough_Castle_-_geograph.org.uk_-_2042942.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Brough Castle is a ruined stone castle at Church Brough in Cumbria, on the highest part of a ridge on the south bank of Swindale Beck, a tributary of the River Eden, a little downstream of the beck’s meeting with Augill Beck. The ridge commands the western end of the Stainmore Pass. The castle occupies the northern part of a Roman fort whose name is written Verterae, Verteris, Veterae, and Verterea. The stone castle measures about 85 metres from east to west and between about 20 and 45 metres from north to south, widening toward the east. Around it, banks and ditches still draw the playing-card outline of a Roman fort, although the earthworks themselves are read as eleventh-century work.

The fort belonged to the Roman Empire, the state that had grown out of the republic after 27 BC and that, in the west, ended with the fall of Ravenna and the deposition of Romulus Augustus in 476. Britain was one of its provinces. Verteris was built in about AD 79–80 as one of a chain of forts on the road from the legionary fortress at York, called Eboracum, to the fort at Carlisle, called Luguvalium. Another account places the occupation from the governorship of Agricola, AD 78–84, through to the end of the fourth century. The castle account says the fort was occupied until the fifth century. The enclosure is given as about 3 acres, or 1.2 hectares. The width between the ditch centres on the east and west is 100 to 110 metres. The ditch on the south, the west, and part of the east is up to 15 metres wide and 6 metres deep, with a rampart up to 1 metre high and an outer bank up to half a metre beyond the south ditch. The north-to-south size of the fort is unknown, because the castle covers it.

Excavation in 1953 was read as showing substantial stone buildings and defences, with room for a battalion of up to about 500 men. A large number of lead seals from the neighbourhood carry the name of the Eighth Thracian Cohort, cohors VIII Thracum, raised in Thrace, and that unit may have garrisoned the fort in the third century. The only garrison named for this station in later copies of the Notitia Dignitatum, a late list of posts, is the Numerus Directorum, an irregular and usually part-mounted unit with a complement of perhaps three or four hundred. That list has been taken to support occupation in the late fourth or early fifth century, when most Roman forces were withdrawn from Britain. There are doubts about the date and reliability of the western part of the Notitia, so the fort’s end is argued from the archaeology and the finds. Pottery from the site runs from the first century to the late fourth century, which is taken to mean that the fort was still in use late in Roman Britain. An inscription found at Brough may commemorate a repair or rebuilding by Virius Lupus, governor of Britain in AD 197–200. William Camden, in the sixteenth century, identified the place as Roman Verteris.

The ground between the early fifth century and the later eleventh is obscure. Northumbrian rule in the region collapsed in the second half of the ninth century. In the early tenth century the kings of Scots, and the kings of British Strathclyde who depended on them, filled that gap. Cumberland and northern Westmorland remained in the kingdom of Scotland until 1092.

William Rufus is the name commonly given to William II, king of England from 26 September 1087 until his death on 2 August 1100. He was the third son of William the Conqueror, born by 1060, and he took England while his elder brother Robert took Normandy. He did not marry and left no child. He was killed by an arrow while hunting, and his younger brother Henry seized the treasury and was crowned. In 1091 he invaded the north-west. In 1092 he marched north, took Carlisle, and annexed Cumberland and northern Westmorland to England. A new border was secured by a castle at Carlisle. The first castle at Brough is placed around 1092, during that campaign, or immediately after it. The Roman ditches were dug out again and the spoil was thrown up as banks on the old line. A further ditch was cut to separate an inner bailey from an outer one, and a stone tower was raised. There is no sign that the outer enclosure ever had stone walls, and it is not known how long it was kept or what stood inside it.

Surviving herringbone masonry in the north curtain is taken as evidence that stone walls were added to an inner bailey in about 1100, or in the late eleventh century, at the first foundation or soon after it. The present keep rests on the masonry of an earlier stone tower of that same period. Digging inside the keep in the 1920s found that the keep stands on an earlier tower, possibly of about 1092 to 1100, and also found part of a Roman building. One account of those works dates them to 1923 and shortly afterwards, and says the Roman building was part of a barrack block. Another account dates the first archaeological excavations to 1925. The north side of the site looks over the River Eden. One account calls the first castle a motte and bailey, with stone foundations under a timber body, and the rest of the old fort turned into a palisaded bailey. Opinions differ on the timber. John Charlton concluded that the greater part of the keep was stone. Robert Higham and Philip Barker later concluded that the fortification was primarily wooden.

Church Brough was laid out beside the castle at about the same time, a planned settlement in the Norman occupation of the lowland. Its market place survives as a green, with the burgage plots of the early settlement on the north side of that old market. The parish church of St Michael stands a short distance south and contains twelfth-century work and later work. The town never fully developed. A rival settlement, Market Brough, grew about 0.8 kilometres to the north, astride the medieval road from Stainmore toward Penrith and Carlisle. One account places that settlement before the end of the twelfth century, with its fair mentioned in 1314 and its market established by a royal charter in 1330. Another account places the founding of Market Brough around the time of the Scottish attacks of 1314 and 1319, as a Clifford attempt to take profit from trade in the valley, and says that it quickly overtook Church Brough.

Through the twelfth century the country between the kings of England and Scotland stayed in dispute. Brough and Appleby were the two principal castles of the lordship of Westmorland. The lordship was held in turn by Ranulph de Meschines and by the Morvilles. Henry II of England, born on 5 March 1133 and king from 1154 until his death on 6 July 1189, deprived Hugh de Morville of his estates for supporting the king’s sons in the rebellion of 1173. Henry’s eldest son, the Young King, rebelled that year and was joined by his brothers Richard and Geoffrey and by their mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. William I of Scotland, called William the Lion, invaded the north of England in support of that revolt. His army failed at Wark, failed at Carlisle, took Appleby, and then turned on Brough.

The year of the fall is given both as 1173 and as 1174. One account says the siege of which the chronicle speaks was in 1173. The narrative of the capture places it in the following year, 1174, when the castle was garrisoned for the king. Six knights held it. They resisted strongly. William took the outer defences and then besieged the keep, and he threatened to execute the garrison if they did not surrender. The keep was set on fire. That forced the surrender. Jordan Fantosme, an Anglo-Norman cleric and poet who died about 1185, wrote the verse chronicle of this war between Henry II of England and the Young King and William I of Scotland in 1173 and 1174. He told of one knight who fought on, first with spears and then with wooden stakes, until he was overwhelmed. Fantosme wrote as a partisan of Henry II of England, and he has often been treated as an eyewitness, though Richard of Ilchester, his bishop, is another likely source for him. William then destroyed what remained of the defences with Flemish mercenaries. Almost the entire keep was destroyed. Henry II’s forces defeated William at the battle of Alnwick, and Brough was recovered later in the same year.

The rebuilding of the keep is told in several ways. One account says Henry II had a square stone keep built in the 1180s, first by Theobald de Valoignes and then by Hugh de Morville, and that the keep was set into the bailey wall so that it could support the outer defence. Another account says that in 1179 Henry II of England granted the castle to Theobald de Valoines, who held it through the reign of Richard I, from 1189 to 1199, and who is the most likely builder of the present square keep. A third places that keep in about 1189 to 1199 and does not rule out Robert de Vieuxpont, who later built a similar keep at Brougham. The visit account dates the towering keep to about 1200, and the fabric is also called a tall late twelfth-century keep. The grant of 1179, after Hugh de Morville had lost his estates, sits against the account in which Hugh rebuilt the castle after Theobald. Thomas de Wyrkington did further work between 1199 and 1202 for King John and, in that account, turned the whole castle into stone. The castle reverted to the Crown about 1199.

In 1203 King John granted the lordship of Westmorland, including Brough, to Robert de Vieuxpont, also called Vipont, who died in 1228. Robert enlarged the castle to press his authority in a region where he was competing with his own wider family. He is called the most powerful figure in the north-west, a loyal servant of John through the king’s crises, and one of the men named among John’s evil counsellors. He had to defend his northern estates against further Scottish attack. The curtain walls are probably mainly his. He rebuilt the gatehouse and may have added domestic buildings. The gatehouse is thought to have been square and originally three storeys high, dating from shortly after 1200, or from his acquisition in 1203 to 1204. The outer part, with pointed buttresses beside the gate, looks like a later medieval rebuilding, though that is not certain. In 1206 John briefly put his captive niece Eleanor in Robert’s custody. In 1214 Robert bought the site of Brougham Castle and began work there as well. He died in 1228 owing the Crown £2,000. For scale, £600 was about three times the typical yearly income of a baron in 1200. He left a young son, named John in one account.

That son’s guardian, Hubert de Burgh, appointed the Prior of Carlisle to run the estate, and the castle was allowed to fall into ruin. Another account says that when the grandson, Robert de Vieuxpont the Younger, succeeded in 1241 he was a minor, and that the Prior of Carlisle administered the estates badly. In 1253 to 1254 the castle was described as decayed. The heir’s death is placed in the Second Barons' War. That war, from 1264 to 1267, was fought between barons led by Simon de Montfort and the royalists of King Henry III, and later of Henry’s son Edward. The barons wanted the king to rule with a council rather than through his favourites. In 1258 seven leading barons had forced Henry to accept the Provisions of Oxford. De Montfort was killed at the Battle of Evesham. During the war some of his supporters, including his sons Henry and Simon, massacred Jews in attacks aimed at seizing and destroying the evidence of baronial debts. One account says the heir John died supporting the rebels between 1264 and 1267, and that his lands were divided between his daughters Isabel and Idonea. Another says Robert the Younger died at the Battle of Lewes in 1264 and left two daughters, one of them Isabella, who died in 1291.

Isabel, or Isabella, inherited Brough and the eastern Vieuxpont estates. Henry III gave the guardianship of some of those lands to Roger de Clifford, and Roger married Isabel, taking all her lands and beginning the Clifford hold on the castle. The marriage is also dated 1268, and Roger Clifford, who died in 1282, is said to have come into Brough and Brougham on that marriage. He may have done important work soon afterwards, including the circular tower at the south-east corner that is called Clifford’s Tower, and he may have repaired the curtain walls. Their elder son Robert, born in 1274, inherited the other Vieuxpont estates in Westmorland when his aunt Idonea died in 1308, and he was created the first Baron Clifford. Another account says Robert Clifford controlled Brough by around 1308, rebuilt the east wall, built a new hall, and placed his own apartments in a new circular tower, Clifford’s Tower, perhaps like the rooms that survive at Appleby. A scheduling summary says that by the marriage he succeeded to the Vieuxpont heritage in the last decade of the thirteenth century, and that during his lordship he repaired Brough, rebuilt the hall against the east curtain, and added the circular tower. The east curtain is also dated to about 1300, early in the Clifford ownership. Clifford’s Tower is the only major tower on the curtain. It is described as circular, as D-shaped, and as a semi-circular projection of three storeys rising from a battered plinth.

Robert died fighting the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn, on 24 June 1314. In that same year a Scottish raid devastated Brough. The castle was attacked again in 1319, and the neighbouring village of Church Brough was badly damaged. After Bannockburn the Scots were the stronger party in the north for several decades. In the early 1320s the castle may have held a large garrison: 15 men-at-arms and 20 hobelers, who were light cavalry, are also counted as 15 men-at-arms and 20 cavalry. Those attacks led to a strengthening of the curtain walls. As an ally of Edward I, Robert had been drawn into Scottish affairs and had made Brougham, nearer the border, his principal seat. The Cliffords had the old Vieuxpont estates back together by 1333, and from Appleby, Brougham, Pendragon, and Brough they held the Eden valley.

In the 1380s Roger, the fifth baron, altered the castle, partly to improve the defence. He worked on most of the Clifford castles in the district. At Brough he rebuilt the south wall and replaced the hall with a more fashionable hall and chamber on the first floor. Clifford’s Tower was turned over to bedrooms, and some of the old hall became a solar. Except for that round tower, the work followed the northern fashion of the time, square lines and square towers rather than the rounder forms of the south. The bailey was cobbled at about this time. Roger Clifford, the grandson, who died in 1389, is also the man said to have completely changed the living quarters in the fourteenth century and to have been the last Lord Clifford for several generations to die of natural causes. The dates given for him are 1333 to 1389. The hall range against the eastern part of the south curtain is probably his, of the late fourteenth century. Only the outer wall still stands to full height, with some fourteenth-century tracery in the south wall. The hall stood over vaulted ground-floor rooms used as cellars and stores. In the fifteenth century the range was doubled in depth by new rooms on the courtyard side. It was unusually compact for a baronial house. A wall running north to south, now built into the south range, may be part of a late thirteenth-century chamber block linking an earlier hall to the tower. A twelfth-century hall, probably against the east curtain, has been partly found by excavation. It may have been rebuilt on the same line, but narrower, in the late thirteenth century.

Around 1450 the gatehouse was reinforced with buttresses and an extra courtyard was built in the bailey, possibly by Thomas Clifford. In the Wars of the Roses the Cliffords supported the house of Lancaster against the house of York. Thomas died in 1455. His son John died in 1461. One account says Brough was then seized for a time by the Yorkists, until John’s son Henry was restored to his lands in 1485 by Henry VII. Another says that when Edward IV, of the house of York, took the throne in 1461, the Clifford estates were confiscated because Thomas, the eighth lord, who had died in 1455, had taken the Lancastrian side, and that Henry, later the tenth lord, spent twenty-five years in hiding until Henry Tudor’s victory at Bosworth in 1485.

Henry Clifford, 10th Baron de Clifford, was born about 1454 and died on 23 April 1523. His father, John Clifford, the ninth baron, was killed on 28 March 1461 at Ferrybridge, the day before Towton, while fighting for Lancaster. One account says Henry was around five years old when his father died. Another says he was a boy of about seven. A later story said that John had killed Edmund, Earl of Rutland, a prince of the house of York, and that Edward IV wanted revenge, so the child’s mother hid him with shepherds and he grew up untaught. From that story he was called the shepherd lord. The tale was written by Edward Hall in the sixteenth century and repeated by Lady Anne Clifford in her family history. Historians have since doubted it. He was signing charters only a few years after his father’s death. In 1466 he was named in a bequest of a sword and a silver bowl. Edward IV pardoned him in 1472, and the pardon is also dated 16 March 1472. Henry Summerson’s account says the seven-year-old was not pursued by vengeful Yorkists, and that later stories of an illiterate shepherd do not fit a man who owned books of law and medicine. He may still have kept a low profile for a few years. Nothing is recorded of his career between that pardon and the end of the Yorkist regime, except that he stayed in the country. At Henry VII’s first parliament, on 15 September 1485, he was still legally attainted. He was knighted on 9 November 1485, and in that parliament his father’s attainder was reversed.

After Bosworth, on 22 August 1485, Henry VII needed men who could hold the north. In that same account of the months after the battle, Henry Clifford, 10th Baron de Clifford, was commissioned on 18 August to raise a force against dissent. Royal service made him rich and powerful, and it also made him enemies, including the city of York. In 1487, during the rising for Lambert Simnel, he was beaten outside York and lost his baggage. He fought at Flodden on 9 September 1513, in the English victory, with 207 archers and 116 billmen under a red wyvern banner, and he took three Scottish guns back to Skipton. He held a great Christmas at Brough Castle in 1521. Shortly afterwards an accidental fire destroyed the inhabitable parts of the castle. Lady Anne’s family history says the fire left nothing but the bare walls standing. One account says Henry died shortly afterwards. His life gives his death as 23 April 1523, after an illness that had already weakened him by September 1522, and says the castle burned shortly after the feast, after which he seems to have made Brougham his main residence. He was buried either at Bolton Priory or at Shap. His income at death was put at £1,332 2s. 4d. His son Henry, the eleventh baron, later Earl of Cumberland, had livery of the lands on 18 July 1523.

The castle then stood ruined for many years. It stayed with the Cliffords except for a brief time in the first half of the fifteenth century, the Yorkist seizure already noted. Lady Anne Clifford was born on 30 January 1590 at Skipton Castle and died on 22 March 1676 at Brougham Castle, in the room where her father had been born and her mother had died. She was buried in St Lawrence’s Church at Appleby. She was the only surviving child of George Clifford, third Earl of Cumberland, who died on 30 October 1605, and of Lady Margaret Russell. On her father’s death she became Baroness de Clifford in her own right, a barony created by writ in 1299, but the earldom and the estates went to her uncle Francis, the fourth earl. She was left £15,000. She fought for the estates, which she argued had been granted under a rule that let a daughter inherit. She was fifteen at her father’s death. James I backed her uncle. Anne of Denmark, in January 1617, urged her not to take the settlement the king wanted. She did not get the estates until Henry Clifford, fifth Earl of Cumberland, died in 1643 without a male heir, and she did not get possession until 1649. One account says the inheritance passed into her hands at that death in 1643. She had married Richard Sackville, third Earl of Dorset, on 27 February 1609. He died in 1624. In 1630 she married Philip Herbert, fourth Earl of Pembroke and first Earl of Montgomery, who died in 1650. Her daughters were Margaret, who married John Tufton, second Earl of Thanet, and Isabella, who married James Compton, Earl of Northampton. She was a royalist. Her estates fell to Parliament after the Battle of Marston Moor. Powerful friends in the parliamentary camp protected her, and she was able to enjoy her property. From 1653 until her death she was hereditary High Sheriff of Westmorland.

In 1649 she left London, where she had lived through the civil war of 1642 to 1649, and went north. She found the estates neglected and the five Clifford castles — Pendragon, Skipton, Brougham, Appleby, and Brough — ruined or in poor condition. She repaired them gradually. In her account of 1659 she wrote that in April, after she had gone there herself to direct the building, she caused her old decayed castle of Brough to be repaired. She visited the rebuilt castle briefly in September 1661. One account dates the restoration work to 1659–1661 and says she did more at Brough than anywhere else on her estates, trying to return it to its state before 1521. Her repairs were old-fashioned on purpose. She knew the style of her own day, but she drew on northern castle building and tried to recreate twelfth-century features in the keep. New windows, a ground-floor entrance to the keep, and new service rooms let her live in a late seventeenth-century way. By 1665 the castle had 24 fireplaces. She renamed the keep the Roman Tower, believing the Romans had built it. She lived partly in Clifford’s Tower, partly in the apartments, and, as the work went on, in the keep. By 1665 she could spend Christmas at Brough for the first time. An inscription recording the restoration was put up at the end of 1663, which is taken to mean the work was finished by then. She spent eight days at Brough in 1664, stayed from 10 November 1665 until 19 April 1666, and made three further long visits. When she was there she always used the chamber at the top of Clifford’s Tower.

A large part of the tower’s outer wall was apparently rebuilt in about 1660, in the same conservative manner as her other repairs. The tower may have fallen after the fire of 1521. Her own note of arriving from Pendragon on 19 April 1672 describes how the rooms were used. The first-floor rooms of the inner range, looking over the courtyard, seem to have housed the senior members of her household. From the west, or upper, end of the hall a stair in the wall led to a long withdrawing room of the same size as the hall. To the east an ante-chamber over a buttery led to her chamber on the top floor of Clifford’s Tower. The stables against the south curtain, between the gatehouse and the keep, are hers, and the break between the older wall and that later building can still be seen. The kitchen, bakehouse, and brewhouse were a single-storey range against the north curtain, added in the 1660s, and little more than the footings remain. In the keep she built a flight of stairs on the east, whose footings survive, and a new roof with a central gutter, perhaps to collect rainwater. Thomas Machell, who drew it, thought that roof designed in quite a contrary way. The keep is now entered by a door in the north wall, probably a seventeenth-century change, into a ground-floor room with garderobes and some seventeenth-century plaster. The original entrance was probably on the east, into a first-floor hall. Rows of openings high on the east and south sides may have been pigeonholes, or more likely part of a decorative frieze. The first roof was steep and hidden inside the wall tops. A lower roof was put on later so that there could be a third storey. Turrets remain at the south-east, north-east, and north-west corners. The south-west corner has fallen.

In 1666 another fire made the castle uninhabitable, in one account. After that, the remaining buildings in the bailey were turned into a law court, and Lady Anne Clifford died in 1676 with the castle unrestored. That sits against the visits after 1666 and against the room-by-room note of 19 April 1672. She wrote her will at Pendragon on 1 May 1674. Her elder daughter Margaret’s marriage brought the estates to the Tufton earls of Thanet. One account says John’s son Thomas stripped Brough around 1695 to help rebuild Appleby. Another says the castle was kept up until about 1714, when Thomas, the sixth earl, decided he needed only one castle in Westmorland and chose Appleby. In about 1714 to 1715 most of the roofs and fittings were sold for £155. James Richardson of Ravenstonedale may have bought and taken down most of the materials. The stables and parts of the gatehouse and hall were supposed to be kept for the manor court. They were not kept for long. An engraving of 1739 by the Buck brothers shows the hall and gatehouse range as a ruined shell and the stables apparently gone. A view of the castle in 1775 was made for The Antiquities of England and Wales by Francis Grose. Francis Grose, baptised on 11 June 1731 and dead on 12 May 1791, was an antiquary, a draughtsman, and a militia captain who from 1772 published small views of medieval ruins for readers who could not visit them. The fourth volume of that work came out in June 1776, and he then began a supplement. In 1763 much of the stone of Clifford’s Tower, or part of the tower, was taken down for Brough Mill. The castle was then completely abandoned, in one account. The south-west corner of the keep partly collapsed around 1800, and more of that corner fell in 1920. The fall is also dated 20 May 1920.

Later in the nineteenth century the Tuftons took more care of the ruin. In 1883 G. T. Clark published the first detailed study of Brough and Brougham and concluded that both were repaired in a very substantial manner. The same study is also dated 1882. In 1920 the first Lord Hothfield placed Brough in the guardianship of the Ministry of Works, also called a gift by Lord Hothfield to the Office of Works. Another account dates the gift to the state to 1921. Trial excavations and a long consolidation followed, perhaps only just in time, because the south-west corner fell on 20 May 1920. The castle is a listed building and a scheduled monument. It was first scheduled on 13 January 1915 and the scheduling was amended on 5 December 2014. The scheduled area covers the castle, the fort, part of the civilian settlement, a forework, and linear earthworks, in two separate pieces. One piece is centred near the castle and the other, centred at NY 79391395, covers more of the settlement east of St Michael’s churchyard. Grid references for the place are given as NY 791141, NY 79151410, NY 79391395, and NY 7911614055. Brough Castle Farm and the freehold of the castle belong to the Beckwith family. The ruin is in public care and is open to visitors. It is not recorded as a world-heritage inscription.

The finds from the Roman occupation are many, and a large share of them may have come from the civilian settlement rather than from the fort itself. The most notable are lead seals and bronze brooches. Most seem to have come from just north of the castle, where Swindale Beck and Augill Beck have been cutting into a Roman rubbish tip since the nineteenth century. Chance finds were especially numerous from 1820 to 1860. Among them were over 130 lead sealings, official and private, which imply that packed goods were opened at Brough for storage or for sending on. In 1866 Henry Ecroyd Smith called the place a neglected Roman station and described the coins, ornaments, brooches, and pewter or lead seals found there in unusual numbers. The seals were studied in detail in 1936 by I. A. Richmond. The quantity of lead and bronze has been taken to show that the settlement had important metalworking, but no trace of those workshops has been found. Only two Roman inscribed stones are known from Brough. Both were built into St Michael’s church and were found during repairs in about 1879. One, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, was at first thought to be carved with runes. The writing is a Greek epitaph for a boy of sixteen, Hermes, from Commagene, who died at Brough. Greek inscriptions from Roman Britain are very few.

Eric Birley dug two small trenches in 1953, and the same work is also dated 1954. One trench, on the west, was meant to find the west gate of the fort and did not. It found a great depth of sterile clay from the Norman deepening of the Roman ditch, and a chalk or cobble feature read as the footing of the main fort wall, or as a stone revetment whose upper part the castle builders had removed. Walling of two Roman structures was also found. The second trench, near the centre, or on either side of a causeway into the south moat and the gatehouse, found two stone buildings of apparently Roman date, one of which may have been the headquarters, the principia, together with a drain, cobbles, and slight remains of a granary. In 1971 and 1972, also described as the early 1970s, M. J. Jones of Manchester University dug to the east, north-east, and south-east of the fort because of road works and a proposed building at Brough Castle Farm. The team recorded a Romano-British cremation cemetery about 300 metres east of the castle. About 50 cremations were recorded, and many more were probably destroyed by the road. The western edge of the cemetery seemed to run near the centre of the new road, and seven further cremations were recorded a few metres east of that line. They also found Roman buildings of timber and of wattle and daub, of several phases, thought to be the civilian settlement, and, on the farm about 50 metres south-east of the fort, the bath-house. The bath-house is also placed about 50 metres east of the fort, of several periods, with pottery from the early second century to the late third. South of the road from the farm, floors, some of them flagged, walls of wattle and daub and of stone, and pits were found, with a little mid-second-century pottery in the topsoil and no stratified date for the structures. East of the churchyard, at least two periods of timber building with clay floors produced pottery from the late first or early second century to the third. Between the old road and the new one, stone structures over earlier timber were read as two properties at the south end of Church Brough, occupied from the fourteenth century to the late seventeenth. A geophysical survey in 1976, trying to trace the cemetery east of the new road, was inconclusive.

Since the early 1990s, smaller interventions have recorded part of a collapsed castle wall and pottery of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the eastern moat; a quern and architectural fragments between Ash Garth and the east side of the castle and fort, suggested as medieval and possibly taken from the castle; an unidentified stone construction just east of the present gateway in the south moat; a drain under the cobbles in the farmyard of Church Farm; the foundations of the north curtain, with an offset of a possible thirteenth-century buttress, evidence of rebuilding possibly of 1245, and seventeenth-century latrines; and Roman pottery and animal bone on the steep slope north of the castle, suggesting a Roman midden. Trenches against the north curtain, dug because the wall was subsiding, found that the foundations were not adequate to carry it. In 1994 and 1995 field-walking near the castle found three Roman coins and fragments of Roman and medieval pottery. In 1996 the castle, the fort, and the ground around them were surveyed at a scale of 1 to 500. The cobbled surface over the whole courtyard, found in the excavations of the 1920s, is of uncertain date and may include late medieval fabric and seventeenth-century repair. The bailey is also said to have been cobbled at the time of the late fourteenth-century alterations. Earlier medieval layers may survive under those cobbles. The southern two-thirds of the fort have not been built over in any large way since the Middle Ages.

A watching brief from Tuesday 16 October to Friday 26 October 2007 followed a new drain in the castle moat, including the entrance. Most of the trench showed nothing of archaeological interest. Just east of the present gateway there was a stone construction that could not be fully identified, because the trench was too deep to enter. It was either two facing walls with rubble between them, or an arch packed with stone. It appeared in the south-facing side of the trench and not in the north-facing side, so it did not run far, and there was no matching feature west of the entrance. A watching brief and evaluation reported in 2009 lasted four days and watched land drains north and west of the castle, partly in the moat and partly down the north-facing bank. Roman pottery was recovered. No archaeological features were seen. In 2010 the condition of the castle was judged to be declining, with some parts at particular risk, and erosion is still a threat to the masonry.

The moat remains up to 8.5 metres deep in places, with a counterscarp bank on all sides, though on the north the bank has partly slipped down the hill. A causeway 10 to 12 metres wide crosses to the south gatehouse, and a second, narrower causeway lies near the south-west corner. East of the moat a roughly triangular forework has a ditch and counterscarp on the south and part of the east, and the river cliff on the north. It may be the east end of an early courtyard that was cut off when the curtain and moat of the early fourteenth century were made. Inside it are the foundations of a later walled enclosure, read in the 1996 survey as a possible seventeenth-century garden. Further outworks cross the ridge. The eastern ditch is some 16 to 19 metres wide and up to 2 metres deep. The inner western outwork, about 40 metres beyond the moat, averages about 13 metres wide and is up to 3.8 metres deep. The outer western outwork, about 55 metres further west, runs about 95 metres from the river cliff, with a ditch 8 to 13 metres wide and up to 2.8 metres deep. The castle’s defensive position, on a steep slope above Swindale Beck, belongs to a time when this part of England was in constant danger of attack from Scotland. What remains is the late twelfth-century keep, the tower, and the fourteenth-century hall range, standing almost to their full height, over a Roman fort and a civilian settlement that the castle builders reused and never entirely erased.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/brough-castle