Carlisle Castle

Carlisle Castle stands at the northern end of a steep bluff above the meeting of the Rivers Caldew and Eden, at the northern tip of the city. The ground under the later fortress is the Roman fort of Luguvalium, also called Luguvalium Carvetiorum. The name is explained as a Brittonic *Luguwalion, the place of a man called Luguwalos, whose name meant the strength of Lugus. Welsh memory kept it as Cair Ligualid and as Caer Liwelydd, and the earliest English form is Luel, about 1050, with later medieval spellings Cardeol, Karlioli and Cærleoil.

The Roman city spread mainly under modern Carlisle. The fort around which that city grew lies mainly beneath the castle. Luguvalium may have been the capital of the fourth-century province of Valentia, and it has been called the northernmost city of the Roman empire. It sat on the crossing of the great north–south and east–west roads, first behind the Stanegate and then near Hadrian’s Wall, and it watched the river confluence.

A timber fort was raised here around 72, in the early 70s, on a date given by tree rings as 72, and on a date for the campaign camps of about 72 or 73. It stood south of the Eden in a loop of water, on the site of the later castle. A detachment of the Ninth Legion built it in the last campaign of Cerialis against the Brigantian leader Venutius. It was of turf and timber.

In 83 it was refurbished with oak brought from farther away, rather than local alder, and a cavalry regiment five hundred strong, the Ala Gallorum Sebosiana, held it. The Stanegate frontier, in place from about 87, used Luguvalium and the forts east toward Corbridge. The fort was deliberately taken down around 103 and rebuilt before 105. A writing tablet from Vindolanda names a district centurion stationed at Luguvalium in 103.

In 122 Hadrian approved a wall a little north of the Stanegate. A new and larger fort, Uxelodunum, was built on that wall at Stanwix, north of the river and in sight of Luguvalium. It became the largest fort on the Wall and held the thousand-strong Ala Gallorum Petriana, the only regiment of that size on the line. Milecastle 65 stood about a kilometre to the north-west.

The garrison at Luguvalium was reduced from 105, and during the Antonine years, 138 to 161, the fort was levelled and left. It was rebuilt in stone about 200 by the Twentieth Legion Valeria Victrix, based at York. Timber buildings farther to the south-east, probably military, were later replaced in stone by the same legion. One account ends the fort sometime between 275 and 325.

Another keeps it in use until the 330s and then finds only crude late-fourth-century stone structures, of unknown purpose, on the old barrack ground. Coins from the wider town run to the reign of Valentinian II, 375 to 392. In the second century the defences were shifted farther south, which may mean the fort grew, and in the third century a stone fort again reached south of the earlier line, with traces in Abbey Street and Castle Street. The civilian settlement outside the fort became, at some point in the second century, the civitas capital of the Carvetii.

Its stone wall is assumed to have followed the later medieval wall. The town worked copper and hides, and inscriptions show a shrine of Mithras and perhaps a temple of Mars identified with the local god Belatucadros. Before the Romans, the chief place of the Carvetii seems to have been Clifton Dykes, and Iron Age remains on this spot are slight.

After the Roman administration of Britain ended, around 410, occupation at Luguvalium seems to have gone on without a clean break. Possible fifth-century buildings have been found, and the settlement has been identified as a court of Urien of Rheged. Carlisle may have been the administrative centre of that Romano-British kingdom. In the seventh century an abbey was founded, possibly by the kings of Northumbria.

Cuthbert visited the town and, in Bede’s account, described high stone walls and a fine fountain, presumably still fed by an aqueduct. A city officer, a praepositus civitatis, was in charge. Cair Ligualid stands among the twenty-eight cities of Britain in a list composed after 830.

William II of England, called Rufus, was king from 26 September 1087 until his death in 1100. He was the third son of William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders, born by about 1057, and he left no children. In 1091 he drove back an invasion by Malcolm III of Scotland and took his homage. In 1092 he built Carlisle Castle and took Cumberland and Westmorland, lands the Scots had claimed.

He had defeated the local ruler Dolfin. The first castle was set over part of the first Roman fort. One account makes it a ringwork, an earth and timber enclosure using the slope to the north and a deep ditch to the south. Another calls it a Norman motte and bailey.

A third says that in 1092 he built a stone castle on the Roman site. Surface traces of an earth and timber castle have gone. Cumberland was still spoken of as part of Scotland when he ordered the work. The following year the two kings quarrelled over Malcolm’s English lands.

Malcolm invaded again and ravaged Northumbria. At Alnwick on 13 November 1093 he and his son Edward were killed. Donald took the Scottish throne. William backed Malcolm’s sons Duncan and then Edgar, and Edgar removed Donald in 1097.

On 2 August 1100 William was killed by an arrow while hunting in the New Forest. The earliest notice says one of his own men shot him. Later writers name Walter Tirel. His brother Henry rode to Winchester, seized the treasury and was crowned.

Whether the shot was an accident or a plot is still argued, and the evidence is not treated as proof of murder.

Henry I of England, also Henry Beauclerc, reigned from 1100 to 1 December 1135. He was the fourth son of the Conqueror, born about 1068, and he had been landless when his elder brothers took Normandy and England. He married Matilda of Scotland, and their surviving children were Empress Matilda and William Adelin. On 25 November 1120 the White Ship sank off Barfleur and William drowned, with as many as three hundred others and a single survivor.

Henry married Adeliza of Louvain in January 1121. They had no child. He named his daughter Matilda his heir and married her to Geoffrey of Anjou. He died at Lyons-la-Forêt on 1 December 1135 after a week of illness.

A chronicler blamed a surfeit of lampreys, which is unlikely to have been the true cause. His nephew Stephen of Blois was crowned on 22 December, and the disputed succession became the civil war later called the Anarchy. Henry visited Carlisle in 1122 and ordered it fortified with a castle and towers. A pipe roll for 1130 shows that work on the castle and towers had begun and was still going on.

That order may be the start of the great keep. The keep that stands is too altered to be dated from its details alone. One account places the existing keep somewhere between 1122 and 1135. Another says building began during the 1120s.

Henry built similar square keeps elsewhere, but it is not clear how far this one had gone by his death.

David I of Scotland was king from 1124 to 1153, and before that prince of the Cumbrians from 1113 to 1124. He was born about 1084, the youngest son of Malcolm III and Margaret, and he died on 24 May 1153. In 1093, the year Malcolm and Edward fell at Alnwick, David was in exile in England, a boy of about nine. After 1100 he lived at the court of Henry I of England, whose wife was David’s sister Matilda, and Henry’s example shaped him.

In 1113 Henry gave him Matilda of Huntingdon, heir of Waltheof, and with her the honour of Huntingdon. When his brother Alexander I died in 1124, David took the kingship with Henry’s backing and spent about ten years fighting his nephew Máel Coluim mac Alaxandair and Óengus of Moray. A force and a fleet that Henry sent, including Walter Espec, were gathered at Carlisle to help root out those enemies. Máel Coluim was captured in 1134 and held at Roxburgh.

When Henry died, David backed Empress Matilda, his niece. Before the end of December 1135 he marched into northern England, and by the end of January he held the castles of Carlisle, Wark, Alnwick, Norham and Newcastle. At Durham in February he and Stephen made a treaty: David kept Carlisle, his son Henry received half of Huntingdon back, and Henry did homage for Carlisle, while David himself did none. The treaty soon failed.

In 1138 David was defeated at the Battle of the Standard and fell back on Carlisle with most of his army still intact. On 26 September Cardinal Alberic of Ostia met the Scottish nobles, abbots and bishops at Carlisle and brokered a six-week truce, which did not cover the continuing siege of Wark. On 9 April, at a second meeting in Durham, David’s son Henry received Northumberland as well as Huntingdon and Doncaster, and David kept Carlisle and Cumberland. Stephen kept Bamburgh and Newcastle.

During the Anarchy David rebuilt the fortress of Carlisle, which replaced Roxburgh as his favoured residence. Silver from the mines at Alston let him strike the first silver coinage of the kingdom of Scotland. In September 1151 Cardinal John Paparo met him at his residence in Carlisle, and David asked, without success, for a pallium that would have made St Andrews an archbishopric over the bishops of his Scottish lands, Orkney and the Isles. His heir, Earl Henry, died on 12 July 1152.

David settled the succession on his grandson Malcolm, later Malcolm IV, and made the younger grandson William earl of Northumberland. On 24 May 1153 David died in Carlisle Castle, of an illness, and one account places that death in the oratory, a small room for private prayer. An obituary calls him king of Scotland and of England.

The keep’s date is left open on purpose. David is said to have built a very strong keep, or a mighty keep, after he took Cumberland in 1135. He may have been finishing Henry’s work, or rebuilding it. One account says the castle was largely rebuilt on his orders after the Battle of the Standard in 1138.

Another says the keep was completed by him during an occupation that ran from 1135 until his death in 1153. If the keep is his, it is the only Anglo-Norman keep built by a king of Scots, and this is the only English castle that was a royal house for kings of both realms. Henry II took Carlisle and Cumberland back. The sums spent on his repairs do not look large enough for a new keep.

One account dates the return of the city and the region to England in 1157, and says they have been English since. Henry of Anjou, Matilda’s son and the future Henry II, was knighted in the castle in 1149. David’s own life says that he later knighted that son.

Henry II strengthened the castle in 1163 with a stone outer curtain and a new southern gate. The outer curtain and the outer gatehouse are also placed in the 1160s, and so is the inner gatehouse, the Captain’s Tower, which juts forward so that men on it could fire along the wall. In 1186 Henry came again and ordered a new chamber for himself. That work may be the first stage of the palace range in the inner ward.

John, who reigned from 1199 to 1216, may have rebuilt the outer curtain and the inner ward wall in stone, and he was here in 1201. In 1216 his barons rose, Carlisle sided with the northerners, and the city opened its gates to a Scottish army under Alexander II. The castle was taken. Alexander withdrew in 1217, and much of the thirteenth century was quiet.

A record of 1255 to 1256 says that Maunsell’s Tower, William de Ireby’s Tower and the tower over the inner gate had been destroyed and not rebuilt.

The First War of Scottish Independence grew out of a broken succession. Alexander III died on 19 March 1286 after a fall from his horse. His heir was his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, and she died in Orkney on 26 September 1290. Thirteen claimants then asked Edward I of England to judge the competition, and they accepted him as lord superior.

At Berwick in November 1292 he named John Balliol. Balliol’s enemies resisted. In 1295 Balliol allied with Philip IV of France, the pact later called the Auld Alliance, and in March 1296 he renounced his homage. Edward invaded, sacked Berwick and won at Dunbar.

By July Balliol was deposed and sent into exile, and more than 1,800 Scottish nobles swore homage to Edward. Edward made Carlisle his headquarters for three months in the early part of that war. On 26 March 1296 John Comyn, called the Red, lord of Annandale since the last quarter of 1295, led a Scottish host across the Solway against Carlisle. The governor, Robert de Brus, the deposed lord of Annandale, held the castle and drove the raiders back through Annandale to Sweetheart Abbey.

From the mid-thirteenth century until the union of the crowns in 1603 the castle was the headquarters of the Western March, the western buffer of the border. In 1306 and 1307 it was the seat of royal government. Just before his death Edward I had the great hall built for meetings of parliament. The inner ward, which probably already had a hall and a chamber, was improved for the court.

A residential tower, later Queen Mary’s Tower, is dated to 1308, and also to the early years of Edward II, when the royal rooms were given a tower of their own at the south-east angle of the inner bailey, with a separate defence. At the same time the ditches were recut, new palisades were set, the great gatehouse was repaired, and large fixed crossbows were mounted on the keep and the western postern.

The Siege of Carlisle (1315) ran from 22 July to 1 August, in the First War of Scottish Independence. Robert the Bruce had beaten Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314 and then raided northern England, as he had done since 1311. Carlisle controlled the way into the north-west, as Berwick did the north-east. Many of these lands were claimed by both kingdoms.

The Scots are said to have lacked the skill and the supplies for a long siege, and also to have brought the ordinary engines of a siege and to have failed with them. One figure given for their strength is 10,000. Bruce was there, and so was James Douglas. Andrew Harclay, also written Andrew de Harcla, commanded the castle.

He was an experienced soldier, later earl of Carlisle, and he was executed in 1323. Six months before the siege he had a few hundred regular soldiers, with local men who had come inside the walls for safety. The defenders had catapults and springalds that could throw bolts and stones. Bruce’s usual way with a castle was a small night attack.

At Edinburgh a noisy diversion had covered a smaller party going over the wall. At Carlisle he arrived on 22 July, burned the suburbs and spoiled the crops. An assault on the gates was thrown back with heavy loss. A catapult did little damage.

A siege tower stuck in bad weather. Hay and other fill packed into the ditch was washed away. Long ladders, bridges over the moat, and a sow, the mobile shed that protected miners, all failed. A last attempt copied Edinburgh: diversionary attacks, while Douglas tried a side that had not yet been stormed.

That failed too. The Scots left on 1 August, either because a relief was rumoured or because Edward Bruce had been beaten in Ireland. One account says they retreated with only two English lives lost. The siege is called one of the most determined of seven suffered by the town and castle between 1173 and 1461, and the same count of seven is also given as the years 1171 to 1461.

Harclay was paid 1,000 marks. His shrievalty of Cumberland was confirmed, and the town received a royal charter. Late in 1315 Bruce captured him, and the ransom was 2,000 marks. In 1319 Edward II made him warden of the Western March, and in 1322 earl of Carlisle.

At Boroughbridge in March 1322, during the Despenser War, he drew his infantry up in the Scottish schiltron. Thomas of Lancaster and the earl of Hereford led the rebels. Hereford was killed. Lancaster and forty others were beheaded.

Roger Mortimer was banished. Harclay made enemies by that victory, and in 1323 he was executed for treason, on the charge that he had tried to make peace with Bruce. The Scots besieged Carlisle again in 1316. The raids went on until Edward II accepted a truce in 1322, flickered again in 1327, and ended in 1328 when Edward III signed the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton and accepted Scottish independence.

The war as it touched this castle is also given the longer span 1296 to 1346.

After those wars the castle grew as a centre of regional government, still housing the sheriff and becoming the headquarters of the warden of the march. In 1378 work began on a new outer gatehouse, De Ireby’s Tower, as lodgings for those magnates. Building accounts run from 1378 to 1382, and the rebuilding is also dated 1378 to 1383. John Lewyn, a master of the Perpendicular, designed and built it.

It is modest beside the works attributed to him at Raby, Sheriff Hutton and Warkworth, which are attributions rather than documented contracts. The tower was both the constable’s house and a centre for the county’s administration, money and justice. Its west side holds an anteroom, now the ticket office, a steward’s room, a gaoler’s room and a windowless dungeon. Above are a kitchen, a solar and a hall with the remains of a hooded fireplace.

The portcullis housing shows in a window by that fireplace. Two rooms under the eastern solar were probably a prison. In 1430 money was again given for the defences, and a good part of it was spent on cannon.

The siege of 1461, in the Wars of the Roses, was one of the bloodiest episodes of that struggle. A combined army of Lancastrians and Scots took the castle from the Yorkists, with an early use of artillery in a British setting. The defences were nevertheless little changed by that capture. Richard, duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, was warden of the Western March from 1471 to 1485 and was among the lord wardens who used the castle as their seat.

After damage in the wars he had the Tile Tower built as a gun tower at the time he took the throne, in 1483 to 1485. The same tower is also described as twelfth-century in origin and rebuilt at various times from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth. It projects from the city wall that runs out from the south-west of the outer bailey. Another length of city wall leaves the south-east corner and keeps the trace of a turret.

Those walls once joined the castle to the walled town on the south.

Through the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth the law failed along almost the whole border. On both sides, families formed armed bands of reivers who robbed their neighbours. The English side was divided into three marches, and lord wardens acted for the crown. This castle was the seat of the warden of the West March.

After 1538, when Scotland’s renewed alliance with France sharpened England’s isolation, Henry VIII ordered a review of the defences. The works that followed were the largest since the twelfth century. They began in 1540. The next year they came under a Moravian engineer whose name is written both Stefan von Haschenperg and Stephan von Haschenperg.

He lowered the keep, replaced the medieval battlements with gun embrasures, and built an artillery platform on the roof. He thickened the inner ward walls and backed the north and west walls with ramparts wide enough for guns. He built the half-moon battery and a breastwork and inner ditch, the battery, breastwork and ditch being dated to 1542, and he raised massive outworks to the north and east. The outworks stood at the foot of the bluff in what is now Bitts Park.

The half-moon battery pushed into the ditch in front of the Captain’s Tower. It had a double row of guns: cannon at ground level could rake the outer bailey, and square openings below could fire on anyone trying to cross the ditch. It once stood high enough for shot over the outer ward, and it was levelled in the nineteenth century. The main foreign danger was France, but France had long treated Scotland as an ally, so the northern frontier had to be held as well.

A wide wall-walk on a high arch was added to the Captain’s Tower in the middle of the sixteenth century so that cannon could be moved. Two 24-pounder guns on that walk now show the scale of the pieces the wall was rebuilt to carry.

Mary, Queen of Scots, fled to England from her rebellious subjects in May 1567, and she is also said to have been held here for a few months in 1568. She was housed for some weeks in the Warden’s Tower, at the south-east corner of the inner ward. Another account says she spent the first two months of a captivity that lasted nearly nineteen years. It was the last time the castle was used as a royal house.

Keeping her small court cost Elizabeth, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, an average of £56 a week in food and wine. Francis Knollys described her watching two games of football on a green outside the postern. The governor’s range, an Elizabethan lodging, was rebuilt in 1577 and demolished in 1812. Its wall, with fireplaces and ovens, still stands by the south-east corner of the keep.

The castle was also a prison for border reivers. On 13 April 1596 a large armed party of the friends of William Armstrong of Kinmont, called Kinmont Willie, broke in with ladders and took him out.

The union of the English and Scottish crowns in 1603 ought to have ended the castle’s life as a border fortress. It did not, because opposition in Scotland to the religious policy of Charles I, who reigned from 1625 to 1649, helped to bring on war in 1642. The First English Civil War was fought in England and Wales from 1642 to 1646, inside the longer Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1639 to 1653. The quarrel over parliament and religion went back to the accession of James VI and I in 1603.

Charles imposed personal rule in 1629 and recalled parliament in April and November 1640, hoping to pay for a recovery from defeat in the Bishops’ Wars. Parliament wanted a share of government he would not give. Fighting started in August 1642. Both sides expected one battle to end it.

An estimated 15 to 20 per cent of adult men in England and Wales served at some point between 1639 and 1653, and about 4 per cent of the population died of war-related causes. At Edgehill on 23 October 1642 the armies fought a bloody and indecisive action. Royalist successes in 1643 led parliament into alliance with the Scots. In 1644 the largest battle of the war, Marston Moor on 2 July, was a decisive Royalist defeat and lost them the north.

York surrendered on 16 July. Parliament’s commanders did not follow the victory up. In February 1645 parliament created the New Model Army, and on 14 June 1645 that army won at Naseby. The war ended in a parliamentarian victory in June 1646, with Charles in custody.

His refusal to concede, and the splits among his opponents, led to a second war in 1648 and to his execution in January 1649.

Carlisle was garrisoned for the king in 1642 and was one of the few northern places still holding for him after Marston Moor. In October 1644 a parliamentarian army surrounded the city with guns and earthworks and settled down to starve it. One account calls the besiegers a Scottish army and gives the siege as eight months, ending in surrender in June 1645. Another says parliamentary forces besieged the castle for eight months in 1644.

In the spring of 1645 English troops joined the blockade and made it tighter. The horses were eaten, then the dogs and the rats. After Naseby there was no realistic relief, and on 25 June the city surrendered. New batteries had been added at the south-west and north-west angles of the outer bailey, and more guns were put on the east curtain, which is why the defence lasted as long as it did.

Covenanting Scots patched the castle and were then driven out by parliament’s men, who were themselves driven out after the Restoration. Among the governors in these years were Sir Nicholas Byron, Sir Henry Stradling, Sir Thomas Glemham for the king, then Sir John Brown and Sir William Douglas for parliament and the Covenanters.

The Jacobite rising of 1745 was the last serious attempt to put the exiled house of Stuart back on the throne, and it ended Jacobitism as a major force in British politics. Charles Edward Stuart launched it on 19 August 1745 at Glenfinnan. On 17 September he entered Edinburgh, though the castle there stayed in government hands. On 21 September the Jacobites scattered Cope’s army at Prestonpans in less than twenty minutes.

The duke of Cumberland, Prince William, was recalled from Flanders with 12,000 troops. The Jacobite council agreed to invade England only if English and French help appeared. Lord George Murray chose the western road, by Carlisle and the north-west, rather than Berwick, because those counties had been strongly Jacobite in 1715. The army entered England on 8 November, unopposed.

One account has them at Carlisle on 9 November, with the city and castle surrendering five days later. Another has them there on the 10th, facing a garrison of eighty elderly veterans in a fortress whose defences had decayed since the union of 1707. Without siege guns they would have had to starve the place, and they had neither the equipment nor the time, yet the castle capitulated on 15 November after news that Wade’s relief was stuck in snow. Cumberland later wanted the men responsible for that surrender executed.

The Jacobites left a garrison and marched on. They reached Derby on 4 December. At Exeter House on 5 December the council chose retreat. Only Manchester had produced a real body of English recruits, formed as the Manchester Regiment under Francis Towneley.

Preston, Jacobite in 1715, produced three men. Charles admitted he had not heard from the English Jacobites since leaving France. The army skirmished lightly at Clifton Moor and crossed back into Scotland on 20 December. One account says a garrison of 400 was left in the castle to delay Cumberland.

Another says the garrison left behind was small, that much of it was the Manchester Regiment, and that Cumberland arrived outside Carlisle on 22 December and forced a surrender seven days later, which is 29 December. A plan of the siege is dated 21 December. The castle is also said to have been taken on 30 December 1745, after bombardment, in what is called its tenth and final siege. The city and castle together are said to have been besieged ten times, more than any other place in the British Isles, and at least five of those sieges were long.

The castle alone is also said to have endured more sieges than any other castle in England, and to be the most besieged site in the British Isles. This was the last English fortress to undergo a siege.

Jacobite prisoners were held in the castle. Nine were executed on 18 October 1746, and another account says thirty-one were executed in public. Francis Towneley was among the officers later executed. Across the whole rising, 3,500 people were indicted for treason.

Of those, 120 were executed, mostly army deserters or men of the Manchester Regiment, 650 died waiting for trial, 900 were pardoned and the rest were transported. The lords Kilmarnock, Balmerino and Lovat were beheaded in April 1747. Charles escaped to France, failed to raise another attempt, and died in Rome in 1788. Culloden, on 16 April 1746, lasted less than an hour.

Fewer than 5,000 Jacobites, many of them exhausted by a failed night march, met 7,000 to 9,000 government troops. Cumberland would not attack. Charles ordered a charge. Boggy ground pushed the centre into the right, grapeshot tore the line, and the government left bent but did not break.

After 1746 the castle was neglected. French prisoners of war were held there later in the eighteenth century. The drawbridge was repaired in 1783. Fear of revolution from the 1820s brought garrisons back to provincial towns, and the castle became an important barracks.

The first new block in the outer ward was Arroyo, then Gallipoli in 1829, begun as a single-storey canteen and enlarged in 1876. A hospital of 1832, called the worst army hospital in Britain, is now Arnhem block. Listing places Arroyo and Arnhem in the early years of the century, garrison cells three years after the 1829 canteen, the Ypres barrack in 1836, a military prison in 1840, a fives court in 1841 and two washrooms four years after that. An officers’ mess went up in 1876, the year Gallipoli was extended.

Alma block was built in the outer ward in 1932, with Burma block and the regimental headquarters. In 1851 the barracks held the 33rd Regiment of Foot: ten officers, 150 soldiers, two servants, and twenty-five soldiers’ wives and children. Under the Cardwell reforms a county recruiting system began in 1873, and the castle became the depot of the 34th (Cumberland) and the 55th (Westmorland). The same change is dated 1872 to 1873.

In 1881 the Childers reforms joined those two regiments as the Border Regiment, with its depot here. A militia store and a magazine were built in the inner ward in 1881. The depot left in 1959, when the Border Regiment joined the King’s Own Royal Regiment (Lancaster) to form the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment. The headquarters is also said to have remained until 1962, under the name King’s Own Border Regiment.

The castle was the administrative headquarters of the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment until 2006, and the county headquarters of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment until 2019. A text of the scheduling still calls it the headquarters of the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment and the home of the regimental museum. Most of the outer ward stayed in military occupation after 1959. Since 2000 most of the remaining military uses have gone.

A reserve detachment still uses part of the castle: 8 Platoon, C Company, 4th Battalion, the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, in Burma block, with a mixed-cap-badge detachment of medics, engineers, logisticians, intelligence staff and infantry. The museum of the county infantry, the Border Regiment and the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment, stands in the grounds and was until 2014 in the converted chamber block.

The keep is free-standing, with very thick walls and a spine wall running the full height, so that each half could be held on its own. The original entrance was a first-floor door reached by steps in a forebuilding on the east, of which only the foundations remain. Ground-floor windows are deeply splayed Norman openings, and those rooms were stores and, at times, cells. The first floor has a fourteenth-century fireplace, a room thought to have held the portcullis windlass, a way to the well, a garderobe and a spiral stair.

The second floor has two rooms, a small Norman kitchen with a fireplace and a chimney, and a stair to the third floor. A small cell in one of the large second-floor rooms holds late-fifteenth-century carvings. The third floor is plain and leads by a steep wooden stair to a roof whose wide embrasures were made for cannon. The inner curtain is heavily buttressed on the north-east.

The Captain’s Tower, altered again in the late fourteenth century, has a porter’s lodge, rooms over the gate, a portcullis housing and a chute for the counterweight. Three sixteenth-century store rooms open under the wall-walk to the north. On the north-east of the inner bailey, three nineteenth-century buildings, the magazine, the militia store and the museum, replaced a single range that held the royal apartments, the great hall and a chapel. Medieval fabric survives inside the museum, including fireplaces and traces of sixteenth-century windows.

A fourteenth-century octagonal stair once linked those rooms to Queen Mary’s Tower, which had been the original Norman entrance, at the south-east corner. That entrance was blocked when the Captain’s Tower was built. Foundations and part of an arch with a portcullis groove remain, beside the narrow Dacre postern. Queen Mary’s Tower is said to have been demolished in 1825, and also in 1835.

A well a little over 20 metres deep lies beside the steps up to the northern wall-walk. A dry ditch, once waterlogged, separates the inner and outer baileys. The outer moat, also once wet, is dry. The stone bridge across the outer ditch has modern parapets and a medieval lower part, and it replaced a timber drawbridge on stone walls.

Two posterns pierce the outer wall, and a rectangular tower stands in the west curtain. Batteries were added later at the south-west and north-west angles. The curtain of the twelfth century remained the main defence. No wall-towers of the kind usual in an English castle of this rank were ever added.

The castle and the structures in its curtilage, including the nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings, the city walls, the Tile Tower, both gatehouses, the curtains, the bridge and the inner bailey, are Grade I. The monument, which takes in the medieval tower keep, two lengths of city wall, the sixteenth-century battery and much of the buried Roman fort, was scheduled on 7 August 1996. The national grid is given as NY 39705 56224 and as NY396562. Tower-keep castles are rare: 104 examples are recorded in England, with a concentration on the Welsh border, and no two are alike.

This one has been in almost continuous military use since the twelfth century, and the occupation since 1092 is itself unusual among medieval castles. The post of governor was abolished in 1838. The last governor was Lieutenant-General James Ramsay, son of the earl of Dalhousie, appointed on 28 April 1831 and still named in 1837.

The first large investigative dig was Sir Charles Peers’s, in 1917 and 1918, which found the ditch in front of the inner wall and the half-moon battery, then buried. Sometime in the mid-1930s the ditch and the base of the keep’s forebuilding were uncovered, and no archaeological account of that work seems to have been written. Studies of the sieges of 1644 to 1645 and 1745 to 1746 were published in 1840 and 1846. The Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society was founded in 1866.

Its first president, R. S. Ferguson, wrote a guidebook in 1875 and a long article in 1876. A full architectural history appeared in the king’s works volumes from 1963, confirming a basically twelfth-century keep and defence, Lewyn’s authorship of De Ireby’s Tower, and the Haschenperg campaign already studied in 1945.

A monograph of 1990, by Mike McCarthy, Henry Summerson and R. G. Annis, inventoried the whole complex and gave the first full documentary history from the foundation to the present, with as much weight on the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries as on the Middle Ages. John Goodall later set the keep in a twelfth-century context.

Dorothy Charlesworth’s digs on Castle Green in the 1950s were the first to uncover the Roman fort. Those excavations placed the fort south of the medieval castle, which itself lies over the north-eastern corner of the Roman work. Later work found a waterlogged and remarkably well-preserved timber gateway and its rampart, on the west and south defences. Excavations in 1981 to 1984, and in 1990, found about fifty wooden writing tablets inside the fort, evidence for the Ala Gallorum Sebosiana and for its consumption of barley, wheat and weapons.

The collection is second in importance only to the tablets from Vindolanda. Tiles and pottery stamped by the Ninth Legion have been found at Scalesceugh, eight kilometres south of the city. The largest recent excavation on the castle side was the dig of 1998 to 2001 for a pedestrian subway that linked the castle to the city centre and to the museum, directed by Mike McCarthy and John Zant for the Carlisle Archaeological Unit and Oxford Archaeology North. It found three successive Roman forts and a great quantity of finds, and the southern edge of the fort also appeared between Castle Street and Abbey Street.

From 15 to 17 February 2016 the historic carvings were recorded with laser scanning and photogrammetry. The prisoners’ carvings in the keep, and a medieval door covered in scratches, were scanned, photographed and filmed. A Roman altar, medieval graffiti and later graffiti were modelled as a record of their condition. The altar is of the third century, dedicated by a Syrian officer of the Twentieth Legion, and it was reused as a lintel over a doorway in the outer gatehouse.

Questions still open include whether the Norman castle sat on the Roman alignment, what the keep’s original plan and roof were, whether it first had a spine wall, and what the prisoners’ inscriptions mean.

North of the Eden, in the cricket ground, and not under the castle, imperial baths larger than any found near the Wall, possibly a mansio, were discovered in 2017. Finds in 2021, engraved fragments dedicated to Julia Domna and tiles stamped by the workshop of Septimius Severus, have been read as a suggestion that the emperor and his consort spent time in Luguvalium about 208 to 211, while he campaigned in Scotland. Two oversized sculpted heads were found there in 2023, and another in 2024. Those discoveries belong to the Roman town, not to the fabric of the castle.

The carvings in the keep are about three hundred, cut in the fifteenth century in a tiny room between two cells. They are given to prisoners, and they are given to bored prison guards, and it is also said that nobody knows who made them or why. They include dolphins, horses, a boar, salmon, mermaids, a leopard, George and the dragon, and a fox preaching to chickens, read as a warning not to trust people in authority and as a satire on the clergy. The boar is the personal badge of Richard III.

Dolphins are also the badge of the Greystoke family. Other beasts are emblems of the Dacre family and the Percy family. Cleaning revealed a deer hunt and a knight in profile that had been hard to see. Water had been entering at the third floor and running down into the lower cells, because the roof and the wall cappings were failed.

It moved through the wall core and left crusts of salt on the stone. Black marks on some stones are blamed on centuries of hands and of people brushing past. In 2022 the roof and masonry were repaired, drainage at ground level was improved, hard cement was replaced with lime mortar so that water could leave through the joints instead of through the stone, the parapet was repaired, the outer walls were descaled, and the revetments were capped with lead over a concealed permeable mat. The carvings were cleaned by hand, with stencil brushes and scalpels, without industrial equipment or chemicals, by the conservator Alex Carrington.

The property manager is named both Juliet Fellows-Smith and Juliet Fellow-Smith. Work had started at the beginning of 2022, and by 29 November 2022 the carvings were said to be clearer than they had been for generations. The same year was marked as nine hundred years since the keep was built in stone, which points back to 1122, beside the older doubt about whether David finished or rebuilt it. Since the works ended in 2022, moisture has been read every fortnight, and those readings were reported as showing that the keep had stayed dry.

Bats living under the castle were to be disturbed as little as possible during the drainage work. Heritage skills days, tours and demonstrations of stone carving were held while the scaffold was up. In 2025 the same project was credited with a Civic Trust highly commended award given earlier that year. Thermal imaging and environmental monitoring had been used before the lime and the lead were chosen.

The whole monument is said to carry graffiti of the last nine hundred years.

A fourteenth-century poem puts Sir Gawain at the castle of Carlisle while he hunted in Inglewood Forest. Some accounts go further and identify this castle with Camelot. That is legend, not a documented history of the building. What the building does document is a fortress occupied, with few breaks, from 1092, used by the kings of both kingdoms, rebuilt for cannon, and still holding a museum and a reserve company inside walls that began as a Roman fort.