Brougham Castle

Brougham Castle is a medieval stone castle about two miles south-east of Penrith, in Cumbria, standing on the south bank of the River Eamont just below the meeting with the River Lowther. The rivers gave the place natural defences, and the ground around them was fertile. Romans had already chosen the crossing. Three roads met here: one from York by Scotch Corner and the Stainmore Pass, through Brough under Stainmore and Kirkby Thore; one from the Manchester and Lancaster side by Burrow-in-Lonsdale, Middleton and Low Borrow Bridge; and one from the port at Ravenglass by Hardknott, Ambleside and High Street.

From Brougham the road ran north to Carlisle by Old Penrith. The fort the Romans built at that junction was called Brocavum. The medieval castle occupies the northern part of the fort, and the fort and the castle are protected together as one scheduled monument.

The occupation of the fort is dated in more than one way. One account places it from the governorship of Agricola, in the years 78 to 84, through to the end of the fourth century. Another treats the foundation date as uncertain, and thinks an important role from an early date likely, perhaps just after the revolt of Venutius in the early 70s, with early Flavian occupation probable even though objects from the cemetery belong to the second and third centuries. The fort measured about 125 metres north to south by 110 metres east to west, enclosing about 3.4 acres, or 1.37 hectares.

Its defences survive as a turf-covered bank up to 0.9 metres high, a levelled berm, and an outer ditch 10 to 14 metres wide and up to 1.4 metres deep. Only the site of the west gate can be identified with certainty. Inside, later ridge-and-furrow ploughing, drainage and stone-robbing have disturbed the surface, and the southern half appears to hold the disturbed remains of a two-celled structure. The northern defences were obscured when the castle and its ditches were built.

No excavation of the fort earthworks themselves is known, though later trenches in the castle bailey have been read as clipping the fort’s outer ditch.

An inscription records a part-mounted cohort, the cohors III Bracaraugustanorum, a unit first raised in Portugal in the first century. An altar dedicated to Mars by a soldier of the Stratonician cavalry, a unit raised in Asia Minor, is taken to show that this cavalry was stationed at the fort in the third century. Altars found locally were dedicated to Belatucadrus, a local god treated as a native equivalent of Mars. One count gives six such dedications at Brougham and takes them to suggest that his worship was centred there.

It has also been suggested that the focus of the Carvetii, a people present before and during Roman rule, lay nearby at Clifton Dykes, and that this, with the roads and rivers, helps explain why a fort was placed here after the conquest. A civilian settlement, a vicus, grew around the fort, and in the third century it became substantial. A cemetery excavated in the 1960s produced evidence read as suggesting that an East European, Danubian, contingent lived here.

Stone from the ruined fort was used when the castle was built. A Roman tombstone can be seen in a passageway in the keep, reused as a ceiling slab. Between the end of Roman rule in the early fifth century and the Norman Conquest in the late eleventh, the history of Westmorland is obscure, and there is no evidence that Brougham was refortified even though the site was defendable. Angles who arrived named the place Brougham, meaning the village by the fort.

The collapse of Northumbrian rule in the second half of the ninth century left a vacuum that, in the early tenth, was filled by the kings of Scots and their satellites, the kings of British Strathclyde. It is not known whether Brougham was inhabited then, but the area remained within the Scottish kingdom until 1092, when William II, also called William Rufus, seized Cumbria south of the Solway Firth and set a new border far north of Brougham, secured by a castle at Carlisle. Border warfare continued through the twelfth century. Castles at Appleby and Brough, both south-east of Brougham, protected the line of communication from Carlisle toward Yorkshire.

The site at Brougham itself stayed unfortified.

John, King of England, reigned from 1199 until his death on 19 October 1216. He was the youngest son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, nicknamed Lackland because a younger son had not been expected to inherit much. He lost Normandy and most of his other French lands to Philip II of France in 1204, after early victories in a war that resumed in 1202, and he spent the next decade trying to recover them, raising heavy revenues and rebuilding alliances. A quarrel with Pope Innocent III over Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury led to a ban on church services in England from 1208 to 1214 and to John’s excommunication from 1209 to 1213.

His allies were beaten at Bouvines in 1214. Many barons, angry at his fiscal policy and his treatment of nobles, rebelled. Magna Carta was sealed in 1215 as a peace, neither side kept to it, and civil war followed, with the barons aided by Philip’s son Louis. John died of dysentery in eastern England during that war.

In the north his rule had already bred discontent, and the region’s inhabitants eventually rebelled. He was, even so, a king who trusted a small circle of servants and gave them castles, sheriffdoms and custody of royal heirs.

One of those servants was Robert de Vieuxpont, also called Vipont, Veteripont, or de Vetere Ponte, meaning from the Old Bridge. He died in 1227 or 1228, before 1 February 1228. He had worked in Normandy as a paymaster of troops and a director of military works, including work on Rouen Castle. In February 1203 John gave him custody of Appleby Castle and Brough Castle, and a month later the lordship of Westmorland and the office of Sheriff of Westmorland, to be held by his heirs in perpetuity.

One account places the lasting grant in 1203, after an earlier grant during pleasure in 1202. He returned from Normandy with John late in 1203 and became a northern administrator: sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, keeper of Nottingham Castle, a justice, custodian of the sees of York and Durham, and sheriff of Devon and of Wiltshire. John put in his care the royal treasury, his son Richard, and his niece Eleanor, the Fair Maid of Brittany. Roger of Wendover listed him, with his brother Ivo, among John’s evil counsellors under the year 1211.

He did not join the confederate barons in 1214. After those barons were received in London on 24 May 1215 he was forced by threats to desert the king, but he soon acted for John again, receiving custody of Carlisle Castle and of Cumberland, holding Durham, and taking grants of insurgents’ lands. In 1216 he was one of three lords appointed to hold the castles and everything else of the Crown in Yorkshire. From 1217 to 1222 he was Sheriff of Cumberland.

In 1203 the barony of Westmorland, containing Appleby, Brough and Brougham, was in his hands. Early in that lordship a well-established community already existed at Brougham. Faced with rebellion and the chance of civil war, he acquired land for a castle at Brougham in about 1214, including half the manor, and stone construction began shortly after. Brougham was the last of three great Norman castles along the Stainmore route through the Pennines, Bowes and Brough being the others.

He was one of only a few lords in the region loyal to John, and he most likely began the castle as soon as he had the land. The first castle had a stone keep, of which the first three storeys belong to this phase, entered at first-floor level through a forebuilding on the east. A stone building to the east was probably a hall. An earthen bank and a timber palisade enclosed the site.

The castle was probably entered from the Roman fort to the south, which may have served as a ready-made outer bailey. It stood in the northern part of the old fort, and Roman stone was probably reused. No record says what Brougham itself cost. A late twelfth-century stone keep at Peveril in Derbyshire is priced in other records at around £200, while a work on the scale of Château Gaillard is estimated at £15,000 to £20,000 and took years.

Building in stone was slow and expensive, and Brougham was not finished when it was first needed.

In 1216 a Scottish army invaded the Eden valley and Alan of Galloway occupied Westmorland. Brougham played no part in the county’s defence, probably because it was unfinished, and work would have stopped until Alan retreated in 1217. Vieuxpont then had control of the king’s revenues from Cumberland, and those revenues helped pay for the castle. He is credited with defending his northern lands against Scottish raiding and with building Brougham in the course of that defence.

When he died, his only son, John, was a minor, so the property passed into the care of a warden. John de Vieuxpont died in 1241 before he came of age. The next heir, John’s son Robert, was also too young, and the lands stayed in wardship. During that wardship the estates fell into disrepair, and the castle was probably among them.

When this younger Robert came of age around 1257 he inherited heavy debts.

Henry III of England, born on 1 October 1207, became king in 1216 at the age of nine, in the middle of the First Barons’ War. He was the son of John and Isabella of Angoulême. Cardinal Guala Bicchieri treated the war against the rebel barons as a crusade, and Henry’s forces, led by William Marshal, defeated the rebels at Lincoln and Sandwich in 1217. Henry promised to abide by the Great Charter of 1225, a reissue of Magna Carta.

His early reign was dominated by William Marshal and then, after 1219, by Hubert de Burgh. Later he ruled more personally, spent heavily on a few palaces and castles, and pursued costly attempts to recover French lands, including the failed invasion of Poitou in 1242 and the Battle of Taillebourg. By 1258 his rule was unpopular because of those foreign costs, the notoriety of his Poitevin half-brothers, and the conduct of local officials. A baronial coalition seized power, expelled the Poitevins, and reformed government through the Provisions of Oxford.

In 1263 Simon de Montfort seized power, and the Second Barons’ War followed. Henry was defeated and taken prisoner at the Battle of Lewes in 1264. His eldest son, Edward, escaped and defeated Simon at Evesham in 1265, then freed his father. Henry at first took a hard revenge and was later pressed by the Church, through the Dictum of Kenilworth, to soften it.

He died in 1272.

The younger Robert de Vieuxpont was one of the northern lords who revolted in support of Simon de Montfort in the Second Barons’ War of 1264 to 1267. By June 1264 he was dead. Because he was treated as a traitor, Henry III of England confiscated his property. In 1266 the king pardoned him after his death, and his two daughters inherited.

Their guardians, while the girls were still too young to marry, divided the lands in the expectation that marriage would bring those lands to the guardians’ own families. Isabel Vieuxpont was given in marriage to Roger Clifford, the son of her guardian. With her went the shrievalty of Westmorland and the castles of Brougham and Appleby. By 1269 Roger had married Isabel, and Brougham passed down the Clifford family.

One account says Roger died in 1283 and Isabel in 1292. Another says Roger de Clifford died in 1282 and Isabella de Vipont died in 1291. Their son Robert was born on 1 April 1274 at Clifford Castle in Herefordshire. One account says that at 18 he was still not old enough to take possession, that a three-year minority followed his mother’s death, and that the estates suffered neglect and poaching in those years.

Another says that in 1286, because his father had died before his own father, Robert inherited the estates of his grandfather Roger de Clifford, and that on his mother’s death in 1291 he inherited a one-half share of the Vipont barony of Appleby, including Appleby Castle and Brougham Castle.

The Wars of Scottish Independence were two long wars, from 1296 to 1328 and from 1332 to 1357, in which the kings of England tried to take full control of Scotland and failed. The first war grew out of a succession crisis. Alexander III of Scotland died in 1286, leaving his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway. She died in Orkney in 1290, and thirteen rivals claimed the crown.

The Guardians of Scotland asked Edward I to arbitrate. He insisted on being recognised as Lord Paramount of Scotland, took temporary control of royal castles, and in 1292 awarded the crown to John Balliol, who did homage for Scotland. Edward then treated Scotland as a vassal kingdom, demanded troops and money for his war in France, and in 1296 invaded. That first war ran until the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton in 1328.

The second began when Edward Balliol, with English support, invaded in 1332, and it ended with the Treaty of Berwick in 1357. Edward I, Edward II and Edward III were the English kings through these wars. On the Scottish side the leading figures included John Balliol, Robert the Bruce, David II, and William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland from 1297 to 1298.

Edward I, born on the night of 17 to 18 June 1239 and king from 1272 until his death on 7 July 1307, was the son of Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. Before he became king he had been loyal to his father in the Second Barons’ War after briefly siding with the Provisions of Oxford, and he had beaten Simon de Montfort at Evesham. As king he conquered Wales in 1282 and 1283, built castles there, and turned from a Scottish succession dispute into a claim of feudal superiority and an invasion. He was also at war with Philip IV of France over Gascony.

By the mid-1290s the cost of these campaigns brought lay and church opposition to taxation in England. He left his son a war in Scotland and heavy debts. He was called Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots. Robert Clifford used Brougham, the furthest north of his castles, as his principal seat because it lay close to that border.

Robert de Clifford, born in 1274 and killed on 24 June 1314, became the first Lord Warden of the Marches, the office charged with defending the English border with Scotland. In 1296 he was sent with Henry de Percy to Irvine, where Scots asked for terms, and he was made Governor of Carlisle. In 1298 he fought for Edward I at Falkirk, where William Wallace was defeated, and he was rewarded with Nottingham Castle. In 1299 he was created Baron de Clifford by writ and summoned to Parliament.

In 1300 he was at the siege of Caerlaverock, and the roll made there praised his checky gold and blue banner with a scarlet fess. In 1301 he sealed the Barons’ Letter to the Pope as constable of Appleby. In 1308 his childless aunt Idonea de Vipont, who died in 1333, granted him the remaining half of the barony of Appleby, which made him one of the more powerful barons in England. In 1295 he had married Maud de Clare.

Their children included Roger, born on 21 January 1300, Robert, born on 5 November 1305, and two daughters.

During these years he rebuilt Brougham. The timber palisade was replaced with a stone curtain wall. A fourth storey was added to the keep. A double gatehouse was attached to the keep’s northern side, providing the main entrance from the east and replacing the older approach from the Roman fort on the south.

A four-storey residential tower, the Tower of League, was raised at the south-west corner. One passage places that tower in Robert’s works. Another says it was built around 1300 by Roger Clifford. A new stone hall south of the keep may show that the wartime garrison was larger than the peacetime household, or it may have been built ahead of a royal visit.

In July 1300 Edward I, himself a great builder of castles, came to Brougham with a large household and the teenage Prince of Wales. It is not certain that the king slept in the castle, but historians have thought it likely. In 1309 Robert was granted a licence to crenellate. Such a licence allowed a man to fortify a site, and it also marked royal favour.

The licence has been taken to mean that the rebuilding was complete by then.

Edward I died in 1307. His successor, Edward II, born on 25 April 1284 at Caernarfon, had been with his father on Scottish campaigns from 1300 and was knighted at Westminster in 1306. He became king in 1307 and in 1308 married Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France. His closeness to Piers Gaveston angered the barons.

Gaveston was exiled, recalled, and in 1312 seized and executed by a baronial group led by Thomas, Earl of Lancaster. Robert Clifford took part in that movement and besieged Gaveston at Scarborough. Edward II had named him a counsellor, with the earls of Lincoln, Warwick and Pembroke, and in 1307 made him Marshal of England, a role in which he probably organised the coronation of 25 February 1308. On 12 March 1308 he was relieved of the marshalcy, of Nottingham, and of a forest justiceship, and on 20 August 1308 he was made captain and chief guardian of Scotland.

In 1310 Edward II granted him Skipton Castle and the feudal barony of Skipton, which Henry de Lacy had held. One account places that grant in 1310 or 1311. Skipton lay further from the border than Brougham. Scottish raids were ravaging Westmorland, and Clifford chose to spend more time and money building at Skipton.

Edward II’s reign was pulled away from the Scottish war by these quarrels at home, and Scottish forces ranged further south into England. The Battle of Bannockburn, on 24 June 1314, ended the English counter-offensive. Robert Clifford was killed there in a cavalry charge against Scottish spearmen, on the second and main day of the battle, and he was buried at Shap Abbey. Widespread famine followed the defeat, and criticism of Edward II grew.

Roger de Clifford, the second baron, was 14 when his father died, so guardians ran the estates. Scottish raids were so severe that in 1317 the king granted Roger £200 toward the maintenance of his castles. Bartholomew de Badlesmere was responsible for the upkeep of Brougham and of Appleby, among other Clifford properties. Between 1316 and 1318 he spent £363 on the garrisons at Brougham and Appleby, with £1,270 from the king toward their upkeep.

Money for the garrison was hard to collect from the Clifford estates, and the garrisons were accused of poaching and pillaging. In 1320 Roger received his inheritance but probably spent more time at Skipton. He joined the rebellion against Edward II’s later favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, and against the king. He took part in the siege of Tickhill.

At the Battle of Boroughbridge in March 1322 he was badly wounded, forced to surrender, condemned, held at York, and hanged, probably on 23 March. His estates were forfeited, including Skipton. Brougham was among the Clifford lands confiscated and given to Andrew de Harcla for supporting the king against the rising. By 1323 Harcla too had been executed for treason, and the castle passed to Edward II.

In May 1323 a truce between the Scots and the English reduced garrison strength across northern England.

Edward II was deposed in January 1327. His wife Isabella and Roger Mortimer had invaded in 1326. He was forced to give up the crown to his son and died at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327, probably killed on the orders of the new regime. Edward III, born at Windsor on 13 November 1312, was crowned at 14.

At 17 he overthrew Mortimer, and from 1330 he ruled in person. He restored lands and authority after his father’s reign, claimed the French throne, and began the Hundred Years’ War in 1337. When he replaced his father, Robert Clifford, Roger’s younger brother, was granted most of the confiscated lands. Roger’s page places that restoration in 1327.

By 1333 this Robert had united under his control all the estates that had belonged to the Vieuxpont family. Hostilities with Scotland resumed in 1332 when Edward Balliol invaded to take the Scottish throne. He was expelled from Scotland in December 1333. Entering Westmorland, he sought refuge with the Cliffords and stayed at Appleby, Brougham, Brough and Pendragon.

Robert was not heavily engaged in the renewed war, though he fought in 1332, 1337 and 1342. When his property was valued at his death in 1344, the Brougham estates were suffering from the war, and the castle appears to have been in disrepair after a decade without maintenance money. Two minorities followed until Roger Clifford, the fifth baron, came of age in 1354.

Another truce, signed in 1357, lasted until 1384. Roger spent much of his time at Appleby, the county town of Westmorland, but he rebuilt the domestic ranges at Brougham, including the hall. The king ordered him to keep 40 men-at-arms and 50 mounted archers near the west end of the Scottish border, and some were likely stationed at Brougham. The need for extra lodging is one possible reason for the rebuilding.

As Warden of the Marches he added ranges along the east and south curtains, with a great hall, a kitchen and a chapel, and a covered way from the hall porch to the ground floor of the keep. In August 1388 the Scots attacked England. One force went east and met the English at the Battle of Otterburn in Northumberland. Another raided the west and reached Brough, about 20 miles south-east of Brougham.

During that raid Brougham Castle was briefly captured. One account says it was sacked. Roger died at Skipton in 1389, and the family began to lose interest in Westmorland. Their Yorkshire houses were preferred to castles that Scottish wars had left dilapidated.

Brougham is not known to have been lived in again until 1421, when a man was accused of forging coins in the castle. Little is recorded for the years between, though repairs are thought likely, and a rivalry grew between the Cliffords and the Nevilles. The Earl of Salisbury, a Neville and lord of Penrith, used that lordship against the Cliffords, and Brougham was probably kept garrisoned because it stood so near Penrith. In the Wars of the Roses, from 1455 to 1485, the Cliffords supported the House of Lancaster and the Nevilles the House of York.

When the Yorkist Edward IV took the throne in 1461, the lands of John Clifford, the ninth baron, were confiscated. In 1471 Edward IV granted Brougham Castle and other Clifford properties to Sir William Parr. A year later Henry Clifford, John’s son, was pardoned. When Henry Tudor took the throne as Henry VII, Henry Clifford asked for the estates back, and they were restored in November 1485.

Henry Clifford lived until 1523. Under him and his son, also Henry, who became Earl of Cumberland, the castle was used as a residence only from time to time. After Brough Castle burned in 1521, Brougham likely became the administrative centre of the local lordship. As Earl of Cumberland, Henry controlled Penrith and Carlisle, and he was an unpopular landlord.

In October 1536 the Pilgrimage of Grace began in Yorkshire under Robert Aske and spread through Cumberland, Northumberland, Durham and north Lancashire. It was a Catholic rising against Henry VIII’s break with Rome, the dissolution of the lesser monasteries, and the policies of Thomas Cromwell, with economic grievances as well, and it followed the shorter Lincolnshire Rising of that autumn. Henry Clifford was one of those the rebels targeted. He confronted the rebel leaders at Kirkby Stephen in February 1537, was defeated, and retreated to Brougham Castle.

After the rising was suppressed, regional government in the north-west was reformed. The earldom of Cumberland no longer carried the wardenship of Penrith and Carlisle, and Brougham was again the Cliffords’ northernmost castle.

Henry died in 1542. His son, Henry Clifford, the second Earl of Cumberland, inherited. During the Rising of the North in 1569, Catholic nobles led by Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, and Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, tried to depose Elizabeth I and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. They occupied Durham, failed to take York, and dispersed into Scotland.

The Cliffords were a Catholic family, but Henry stayed loyal to the Tudor dynasty. He dismantled Appleby Castle so it could not be used against royal forces, and he put Brougham at the service of Elizabeth’s government. There was no fighting at Brougham. Under the second earl and the third, the castle was still a residence.

The third earl was born there.

George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, was born at Brougham Castle on 8 August 1558, the son of Henry Clifford, second Earl of Cumberland, and Anne Dacre. His father died in January 1570, and George succeeded at the age of 12. Elizabeth I granted his wardship to Francis Russell, Earl of Bedford, who in 1577 married him to his daughter Margaret Russell. The match had been arranged in their infancy and was not a happy one.

Court life kept George in southern England. He became Elizabeth’s second Champion, after Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley retired, and he was famous for jousting at the Accession Day Tilts. A miniature of about 1590 shows him in tilting armour with the queen’s glove, set with diamonds, pinned to his hat. He sat as a peer at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots.

In 1592 the queen made him a Knight of the Garter, and in the same year Brougham was deserted. He had neglected the northern estates. He was also a naval commander in the war with Spain, captaining the Elizabeth Bonaventure in 1588 and leading voyages that included the capture of the Madre de Deus in 1592, but those voyages belong to his life at sea and at court, not to the castle. An inventory of Brougham in 1595 shows a neglected, thinly furnished house, with what little furniture there was old and broken.

He died on 30 October 1605. A fellow courtier had called him the rudest earl by reason of his northern upbringing. He left a long dispute between his heirs. The earldom passed, by the patent, to his younger brother Francis Clifford, the fourth earl, and the estates were willed to Francis as well.

Anne, his only surviving child, received £15,000.

James VI and I was King of Scotland from 1567 and King of England and Ireland from the union of the crowns on 24 March 1603 until his death in 1625. He was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, raised as a Protestant, and he succeeded the childless Elizabeth I. After 1603 he lived in England and returned to Scotland only once, in 1617. He styled himself King of Great Britain and Ireland but the two kingdoms kept their own parliaments and laws.

His English reign included the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and repeated conflict with Parliament. Margaret, George’s widow, became dowager countess and began repairing Brougham, which became her favourite house. She held it against the claims of her brother-in-law Francis. Their daughter, Lady Anne Clifford, continued the work.

Lady Anne was born on 30 January 1590 at Skipton Castle, the only surviving child of George and Margaret. On her father’s death she became Baroness de Clifford in her own right, a barony created by writ in 1299, while the earldom went to the male heir. She argued that the family estates had been granted by Edward II to descend by absolute cognatic primogeniture, so that a daughter could inherit them, and that she had been only 15 when her father died. The privy council found for her, but the decision did not last.

In January 1617 Anne of Denmark encouraged her to refuse a settlement promoted by the king. In April 1617 James VI and I decided that Francis Clifford was the rightful heir, and the estates passed to Francis. Later that same year James made his only return to Scotland. On the way back he stayed at Carlisle, Brougham and Appleby, and expensive banquets were given for him.

The festivities are estimated at about £1,200. After that visit the owner almost forgot Brougham, and the house was neglected. One short account says the castle fell into decay after 1617. The longer account places a restoration by Margaret before that visit, and then neglect once Francis had the estates.

Francis died in 1641. His son Henry, the fifth Earl of Cumberland, died in 1643 without a son, and the Clifford estates reverted to Lady Anne. She did not obtain possession until 1649, after the long lawsuit. The English Civil War had broken out in 1641.

Brougham was one of several castles in a generally Royalist Cumberland and Westmorland that were garrisoned for the king. Sir John Lowther, the garrison commander, said he took Brougham not because it was strategically important but to deny it to Parliament. Lady Anne gave the income of her estates to the upkeep of her castles while they were in Royalist hands. In June 1648 Appleby stood a four-day siege and then surrendered to Parliament.

Lightly manned Brougham fell easily to Colonel John Lambert. Many castles in the two counties were dismantled so they could not be used again. Brougham was spared, most likely because it did not matter as a fortress. In 1650 Lady Anne began repairing Appleby and Brougham.

The work was mostly finished by 1653 and continued for some years, at an estimated cost of £40,000. Brougham was no longer a serious fortification. It had become her country house. She rotated her residences among Pendragon, Brough, Skipton, Appleby and Brougham, living in each for months or for as long as a year.

At Brougham she rebuilt a service wing against the west curtain, inserted fireplaces and doorways in a Tudor manner, used the great hall as a courthouse, and made the top floor of the inner gatehouse her bedchamber. That room connected with the Painted Chamber in the outer gatehouse, used as a dining room or as a withdrawing room from the great chamber. She held the hereditary office of High Sheriff of Westmorland from 1653 until her death, and she exercised it herself. She laid out a garden on the site of the Roman fort.

The work turned up Roman coins and three altars. A stone wall 10.5 feet high was built around the garden, enclosing ground from the gatehouse to the south end of the fort. She died at Brougham Castle on 22 March 1676.

Her grandson Nicholas Tufton, third Earl of Thanet, inherited. He died in 1679, and over the next five years the estates passed through his three younger brothers. Under the youngest, Thomas Tufton, sixth Earl of Thanet, Brougham was especially neglected. One account says the castle was partly demolished about 1691.

In 1714 Thomas decided that Appleby was a sufficient residence and sold the contents of Brougham for £570. Only the Tower of League was left untouched, and in 1723 its contents were sold for £40. By the 1750s the castle’s practical use was as a quarry for the village of Brougham, which prospered from the earl’s investment. A record of 1794 noted that much of the interior walling had lately been removed to build houses for the adjoining farm.

The empty shell was left to decay because it cost too much to maintain.

In the late eighteenth century the Lake District drew visitors, and the taste for picturesque ruins took in Brougham. William Wordsworth, in The Prelude, recalled exploring the ruins as an adolescent with his sister. He also wrote the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle upon the Restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors. Antiquaries came as well.

William Gilpin and Richard Warner were among them. In a diary of a journey to the Lake District from Cambridge in 1779, William Wilberforce called Brougham a very fine ruin. J. M.

W. Turner, the Romantic painter who began as an architectural draughtsman and watercolourist and travelled widely through England making sketches, visited Brougham in 1809 and again in 1831. On the first visit he made a sketch that later became the starting point of a watercolour.

To stop further decay, Charles Tufton, tenth Earl of Thanet, spent £41 on repairs in 1830. His successor, Henry Tufton, eleventh Earl of Thanet, spent a further £421 in the late 1840s. Above the gatehouse entrance there had been the arms of Roger Clifford and his wife. In the nineteenth century Henry Tufton replaced them with the inscription “Thys Made Roger”, which had originally stood over the entrance of the great hall built by Roger Clifford, the fifth baron.

Henry Tufton died in 1849, and the castle passed to the Hothfields. Maintenance was too expensive. By 1859 cattle were being kept in the gatehouse, and visitors complained that parts of the ruin could no longer be reached. Without money, the decay became marked.

In 1915 the Ancient Monuments Board declared Brougham a monument whose preservation was regarded as of national importance. Bus services brought people back, and in the late 1920s about 2,000 visitors came each year. In 1927 the second Baron Hothfield granted guardianship to the Office of Works while keeping the ownership. Repairs cost £5,925.

In the 1930s a further £1,050 was spent removing masonry that had been added in the 1840s, and the moat was cleaned out. One account says the castle was left to the Ministry of Works in the 1930s. It survives essentially as it was when those main repairs finished. It is a scheduled monument, protected against unauthorised change, and it is now in the care of English Heritage, which maintains the ruins, opens them to the public, and runs a museum in the former custodian’s cottage.

The castle is closed until March 2027.

The path to the castle runs from east to west. To the south, on the left of someone approaching, are the earthworks of the Roman fort and the site of the seventeenth-century garden. The ground is terraced, and to the north it falls toward the Eamont. A moat runs along the east, south and west.

One account gives its width as 33 to 49 feet, or 10 to 15 metres, and its depth as up to 11 feet, or 3.4 metres. Another gives 15 to 18 metres in width and up to 4 metres in depth, with the depth on the west falling to 2.8 metres outside and 2 metres inside, and with a second, outer ditch on the west that has a counterscarp bank. The moat is dry now. It was probably once filled with water.

When the south moat was cleaned it was found to contain mainly fourth-century Roman pottery, and that arm has been read as the north ditch of the fort. Three causeways cross the defences: a broad stone-revetted approach on the east to the main gate, a narrow causeway on the south-west opposite a postern, and a southern causeway to a narrow gate cut through the curtain in the seventeenth century, leading into the garden enclosure. The castle is an irregular polygon, about 223 feet on the west, 236 feet on the south, 157 feet on the east and 177 feet on the north.

Entry is through a three-storey double gatehouse built in the early fourteenth century by Robert Clifford, set on the slope down to the river. Inner and outer gatehouses stand with a courtyard between them. The inner gatehouse survives to 41 feet on the east. Its ground-floor passage is vaulted, with a portcullis at the east end.

A postern was hidden behind a buttress on the north side. The floors above the passage were each a single large room, linked to the keep so that people could move between them without going outside. Lady Anne made the top floor her bedroom. The outer gatehouse survives to 48 feet on the east.

Below it was a dungeon, and at ground level on the north was the guardroom. The large upper rooms in both gatehouses were lived in. The very top, which would have carried machicolations, does not survive.

The keep stands against the gatehouse. It is a square tower, between 62 and 66 feet high, and it was once taller. One account calls it a five-storey keep. Another describes three storeys from the first building phase and a fourth added in the early fourteenth century, and says that little of the internal building survives even though the shell stands.

For a long time the keep was thought to belong to the last quarter of the twelfth century, because a square plan, narrow corner buttresses and an entrance through a forebuilding match keeps of that date, and by the thirteenth century a square keep was old-fashioned beside the new polygonal towers. Study of the documents places the start no earlier than the first quarter of the thirteenth century. A spiral stair in the north-east corner served the floors, each a single large room. The garderobe was in the north-west corner.

The wooden floors have gone. The use of the rooms is mostly conjecture: the ground floor was likely a store, the first floor a hall and lodging for the guards, and the second floor the lord’s rooms. The entrance was at first-floor level on the east, through the forebuilding.

South-east of the keep, Roger Clifford built a hall in the late fourteenth century in place of an earlier hall. It housed a garrison enlarged by the Scottish wars, and it was where the lord ate with his soldiers. Large windows may have weakened the defence, though the openings may have had heavy wooden shutters. The kitchen that served the whole castle stood in the south-east corner, where a kitchen oven remains.

Along the south wall were further lodgings, a well and a chapel, the chapel another addition by Roger Clifford. The Tower of League, four storeys with one room on each, had a garderobe and a fireplace on every floor, which suggests rooms for high-status guests. Its square plan is the sort used in northern England at that time, as at Warkworth and Egremont, rather than the round towers preferred in the south. From it, defenders could fire on an enemy coming out of the gatehouse.

Other service buildings stood along the west curtain and have been removed to ground level. Lady Anne’s garden, on the north part of the fort, was between 40 and 45 metres wide. A low stone wall bounded it on the west, partly visible in the southern arm of the moat and partly buried under a bank. Traces of a structure at the south-west corner have been identified as a summer house.

The east end no longer shows, but the garden may have run as far as the lane.

Until a survey of the standing structure in 1984, little archaeological investigation had taken place, and Brougham is one of the few castles in Cumbria to have been examined at length. Excavation in the south-east corner of the bailey in 1987 found an unexpectedly complex sequence of six phases, published in advance of the wider study. The sequence ran from a possible ditch of the Roman fort, with postholes taken to suggest sharpened stakes or a thorn hedge, through early occupation, to a substantial rectangular stone building. Later walls belonged to the area of the chapel, and later still there was evidence of the seventeenth-century refitting, including window glass, some of it under flagged floors that had seemed earlier.

The free-standing medieval stone structure is placed some time after about 1300. Specialist reports on that dig covered pottery, glass, metalwork, Roman tile, a hone and animal bone. A measured survey of the castle and the fort at a scale of 1 to 500 was made in 1991. In 1997, when the former custodian’s cottage was converted into a museum, two trenches were dug.

One found postholes of an undated timber structure under a layer with medieval pottery, the latest of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and a gold coin of Edward III’s Fourth Coinage dated 1363 to 1369. Two unstratified Roman coins, dated 323 to 324 and 337 to 341, were also found. The other trench found a stone building of uncertain date, perhaps fronting the south side of the cobbled road to the castle, and unstratified pottery from the Roman period to the nineteenth century. Demolished walls and a pipe-bowl of about 1660 to 1680 were also found, and they may mark clearance before the garden Lady Anne made in the 1660s.

In 2007, or in another account 2008, a services pipeline through three fields south and south-east of the fort cut through well-preserved remains of the civilian settlement: third- and fourth-century timber-framed buildings, minor roads, lanes, cobbled surfaces, ditches of a field system, trackways, and large wells or waterholes, with a few certain or probable cremation burials. The pipeline itself was fully excavated, and further remains were judged to lie on either side. In 2010, before new interpretation panels were set inside the castle, no structural features were found.

The same Roman burial ground has been dug again. Parts of it were excavated in the 1960s when the road north of the fort was widened, and much of that cemetery was destroyed. In 2025 and 2026, ahead of further work on that road, excavation east of the castle and the fort uncovered the settlement and more than 340 confirmed graves, both cremations and inhumations. Little bone survived in the inhumations.

Some inhumation graves were lined with local red sandstone to form cists. The cremations included a pyre, graves with remains in decorated urns or boxes, graves in plain ground, and pits for ashes and charcoal. Some were richly furnished with glass, pottery and bronze vessels, jewellery, and pieces of military equipment and weapons. Flat fragments of decorated animal bone, used to ornament wooden boxes, caskets or biers, were also found.

A small winged figurine of Cupid, and a pipeclay figurine of a male youth in a tunic, cloak and Phrygian cap, holding a round object, came from the graves. A black burnished jar made in Dorset in the third or fourth century, a form usually used as a cooking pot and here used as an urn, was among the vessels, as were complete glass cups and an indented blue-green glass cup of the third or fourth century. Pots with no bone in them are read as offerings, perhaps of food that has not survived.

The settlement east of the fort included large stones used as wall footings, stone slabs used as plinths, and cobble surfaces, one of which contained a Neolithic stone axe. Several phases of use and demolition are likely, and they have not been fully separated. Finds include a silver denarius of Caracalla issued around the year 196, a tiny copper-alloy phallus worn as a charm for luck and protection, a finger ring of the same metal, and a blue intaglio, a carved gem engraved in reverse so that it would leave a sharp impression in wax. Waterlogged pits lined with woven hazel or willow held timber stakes and short lengths of those woods, and five leather shoes lay at the bottom of one pit.

Fragments of samian ware, the red pottery made in Gaul, were preserved there, including a piece with the mark of Comitialis, an East Gaulish potter working from about 170 to 240, and a small unguentarium. Since the digging ended, hundreds of soil samples have been processed by flotation. They have produced cremated bone and charcoal, the charcoal likely from the funeral pyre, and at least 445 green, blue and gold glass beads, a broken amber bead, a bone comb, a brooch with a central gem or glass setting, and an intaglio. A bone gaming die and a ceramic counter reworked from a potsherd were also recovered.

Some bone dice from the site were deliberately weighted. The die from the samples had been burned on a pyre, so it is no longer possible to say whether that one was weighted. Further study of the bone is expected to address age, biological sex where it can be judged, health, and, by isotopes, where a person spent childhood and whether they had travelled. The graves on the line of the road could not be left in the ground, because the later roadworks would destroy them.

The antiquary William Stukeley visited in 1725 and wrote down local beliefs about stone monuments south of the castle. Country people said they were the work of Michael Scot, whom they took for a noted conjuror and a monk of Holme Abbey in Cumberland. They also said that a giant named Turquin, or Tarquin, lived at Brougham, that a tower there was called the Pagan Tower, and that Sir Lancelot lived at Mayburgh and killed the giant. The same giant is tied in folklore to the ruins of Lammerside Castle nearby.

One folklorist identified him with another local giant, Hugh Cesario. Others prefer to derive him from Sir Tarquin, an adversary of Sir Lancelot in Thomas Malory’s account, and they think that story, which Malory did not place in a particular landscape, became attached to the north-west because Arthur was often said to hold his court at Carlisle. John Leland, visiting in the early sixteenth century, noted many squared stones, tokens of old buildings, in the ploughsoil somewhere near the castle. Stukeley described the fort as a square plot with a broad ditch, and a track of Roman wall on the edge of the bank.

What stands is the castle of the Vieuxponts and the Cliffords, altered by Lady Anne into a country house, stripped in the eighteenth century, and consolidated in the twentieth. The Roman fort remains as earthworks partly under the castle and the garden, with the civilian settlement and the cemetery in the fields to the south, south-east and east. The place was a road junction, then a frontier fort, then a baron’s house on a troubled border, and at last a ruin that painters and poets visited.