Dover Castle

Dover Castle stands on Castle Hill above the town of Dover in Kent, looking over the Strait of Dover and the shortest sea crossing toward the continent. It has been called the Key to England because of that position. Some accounts call it the largest castle in England, a title also claimed by Windsor Castle. The place was founded in the eleventh century.

The earthworks enclose an unusually large and irregular area, a shape that does not fit a typical medieval castle and looks more like a hillfort. In southern England hillforts were built from about 500 BC until the Roman invasion, sometimes as permanent homes and sometimes as places of refuge. The origin of settlement on the hill may therefore lie in the pre-Roman Iron Age, or even earlier, before the Romans invaded in AD 43. Excavations have found Iron Age occupation in the locality of the castle, but it is not certain that those traces belong to the hillfort itself.

In 1962, slight evidence of occupation in the first century BC was found near the castle church of St Mary in Castro.

Seventy years after the invasion of AD 43, construction of a fort began at the mouth of the river Dour. This was Dubris, a base for the classis Britannica, the Roman fleet that patrolled the eastern Channel. Building stopped suddenly, then began again around AD 130, and the fort was completed. Around the same time the Romans built an octagonal, tower-like lighthouse, or pharos, on Castle Hill, and another on the opposite hill, the Western Heights.

Fire beacons in the two towers guided ships into the narrow river mouth and toward a quay outside the fort. The fort at Dubris was demolished around AD 215. A new fort was constructed around AD 270 and may have stayed in use, with the lighthouses, into the fifth century. The castle pharos was later reused as a chapel and bell tower for the church beside it, and it still stands.

The standing lighthouse is one of Dover’s two Roman lights, one of only three Roman-era lighthouses surviving in the world, and the tallest and most complete standing Roman structure in England. It has also been claimed as Britain’s oldest standing building. Built in the early second century, the tower has five levels and eight sides, made in layers of tufa, Kentish ragstone and red brick. It survived by being turned into a belfry in the Saxon period, about the year 1000, by receiving a new upper layer about 1430, and by a partial renovation in 1913 to 1915.

The other Roman lighthouse survives only as scant remains on the Western Heights, across the town. It is known as the Bredenstone, or the Devil’s Drop of Mortar. Across the Channel at Boulogne-sur-Mer, the Roman lighthouse called the Tour d’Ordre stood for many centuries, and its light should have been visible from Dover. It was built about AD 39 by order of the emperor Caligula, possibly in preparation for an invasion of Britain.

Suetonius describes Caligula’s erection of a tall lighthouse, not unlike the one at Pharos, in which fires were to be kept going all night as a guide to ships. Coastal erosion toppled the Boulogne tower into the sea in 1644. Engravings of its height may show how the Dover lighthouse once looked.

The church of St Mary in Castro dates to about AD 1000. Its exceptional size hints at a royal patron. One possibility is Godwin, Earl of Wessex, whose recorded rule runs from 1020 to 1053, and who was the father of King Harold, king in 1066. A cemetery found in the 1962 excavations shows that a community lived nearby, perhaps inside a fortified burh.

The same church is a Saxon building rebuilt in the Victorian era. There is also a royal chapel inside the keep, dedicated to St Thomas Becket. The pharos, converted for the church, remained the bell tower.

From the foundation of the Cinque Ports in 1050, Dover has always been a chief member of that association. That standing may be what first drew William the Conqueror to the place, and it is tied to the Kent motto Invicta. After the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, William and his army marched toward Westminster Abbey for his coronation by a roundabout route through Romney, Dover and Canterbury. William of Poitiers says that Dover had been reported impregnable and held by a large force.

The English, stricken with fear at his approach, had confidence neither in their ramparts nor in the numbers of their troops. While the inhabitants were preparing to surrender unconditionally, the Normans, greedy for money, set the castle on fire, and the great part of it was soon enveloped in flames. William then paid for the repair. Having taken possession of the castle, he spent eight days adding new fortifications.

The same account adds that the castle was first built entirely out of clay, that it collapsed to the ground, and that the clay was then used as the flooring for many of the ground-floor rooms. A later scheduling description of the site names sieges of 1067 and 1216 among the episodes for which detailed documents survive. The narrative of the conquest places William at Dover in 1066, where he established a fortification, possibly around the church, of which no remains survive. The castle was extended in the twelfth century, although nothing is known of its appearance before the great rebuilding of the 1180s.

In 1088 eight knights were appointed under tenures to guard Dover Castle. They were William d’Albrincis, Fulberl, also called Fulbert, de Dover, William d’Arsic, Geoffrey Peverell, William Maminot, Robert du Port, Hugh Crevecoeur and Adam Fitzwilliam.

The king who gave the castle the shape still recognised today was Henry II of England. He was born on 5 March 1133 and died on 6 July 1189. He was king of England from 1154 until his death. During that reign he controlled England, limited parts of Wales and Ireland, and much of France, including Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, a collection later called the Angevin Empire.

He also held power over Scotland for a time and held the Duchy of Brittany. He was the eldest son of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, and of Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England. By the age of fourteen he was involved in his mother’s effort to claim the English throne, then held by her cousin Stephen of Blois. His father made him Duke of Normandy in 1150.

When his father died in 1151 he inherited Anjou, Maine and Touraine. His marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine brought him the Duchy of Aquitaine, and with it control of most of France. His expedition to England in 1153 ended in the Treaty of Wallingford, by which Stephen agreed to leave England to him. He inherited the kingdom when Stephen died a year later.

Henry II of England was an energetic and ruthless ruler, set on restoring the royal lands and prerogatives of his grandfather Henry I. Early in the reign he restored the royal administration in England and invaded Wales in 1157. He was defeated at the Battle of Ewloe and nearly killed. His wish to control the English church led to a long quarrel with his former friend Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

The quarrel lasted through much of the 1160s and ended in Becket’s murder in 1170. Soon after his accession he also came into conflict with Louis VII of France, his feudal overlord. The two fought over several decades in what has been called a cold war. Henry expanded at Louis’s expense, taking Brittany and pushing east into central France and south into Toulouse.

Peace conferences and treaties produced no lasting agreement. Henry and Eleanor had eight children. Three of their sons were kings: Henry the Young King as co-ruler, and Richard I and John as sole monarchs. As the sons grew, Henry struggled to satisfy their desire for land and immediate power.

Louis VII and his son Philip II, who became king of France in 1180, encouraged the tension over the inheritance. In 1173 the heir, Young Henry, rebelled, and was joined by his brothers Richard and Geoffrey and by their mother. Several European states allied with the rebels. The Great Revolt was defeated by Henry’s own military action and by local commanders, many of them new men chosen for loyalty and administrative skill.

Young Henry and Geoffrey led another failed revolt in 1183, and Young Henry died of dysentery. Geoffrey died in 1186. The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland provided lands for the youngest son, John. By 1189 Philip had swayed Richard to his side.

Suffering from a bleeding ulcer, Henry was defeated by Philip and Richard, retreated to Chinon Castle in Anjou, and died soon afterwards. Richard succeeded him. The empire collapsed quickly under John, but Henry’s legal reforms are generally taken to have laid the basis of the English common law, and his interventions in Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland shaped those societies. Chroniclers such as Gerald of Wales and William of Newburgh, sometimes unfavourable, generally praised his achievements.

It was in the last decade of that reign that Dover took its recognisable medieval form. The castle visible today was established by Henry II in the decade 1179 to 1189. One account says he began to build the present castle in the 1180s. Another places the spending in the years 1179 to 1188, when he spent over £6,500 on the castle, an enormous sum beside an annual revenue likely around £10,000.

He spent lavishly and created what one history calls the most advanced castle design in Europe. The inner and outer baileys and the great keep belong to this time. His engineer Maurice built the inner bailey and its towers, part of the outer bailey, and the immense great tower, a building that combined defence with a palatial residence. A 1999 study of armies and warfare in the Middle Ages by Michael Prestwich credits Maurice the Engineer with building the keep.

Michael Prestwich is not a builder of the tower and not a man of the twelfth century. Michael Charles Prestwich was born on 30 January 1943. He is an English historian of medieval England, in particular the reign of Edward I, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Durham, and he was head of that department of history until 2007. He is the son of the Oxford historians John Prestwich and Menna Roberts.

His father worked at Bletchley Park during the war, among other tasks on the breaking of U-boat codes. Michael Prestwich was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and at Charterhouse. He read history at Magdalen College, Oxford, took a first-class degree in 1964, and, by the Oxford custom, later received the master of arts. Christ Church gave him a senior scholarship.

He stayed at Oxford for a doctorate under George Holmes, finished in 1968, on Edward I’s wars and their financing from 1294 to 1307. He then lectured at Christ Church while covering a sabbatical, moved in 1969 to St Andrews for ten years, and went to Durham as a reader. In 1986 he was appointed Professor of Medieval History. He headed the department for two spells.

For seven years in the 1990s he was pro vice-chancellor, with a brief that even included health and safety. He chaired the trustees of the Durham Union Society until 2013, and he twice chaired the history panel of the Research Assessment Exercise, in 1996 and 2001. He encouraged other historians, among them Ann Hyland, whose books on medieval warhorses carry his forewords. On retirement he was given a festschrift, War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, about 1150 to 1500, edited by Chris Given-Wilson, Ann Kettle and Len Scales.

He was appointed OBE in the 2010 New Year Honours. His 1988 biography of Edward I was praised as the first such life for twenty years. J. H.

Denton found its scope able to leave a reader breathless and its analysis often brilliantly incisive. Fred Cazel’s view of Edward stood close to his, judging the king by the standards of his own time. Reviewers praised the command of administrative and financial matters, the sources, and the attempt at balance. Several thought the social condition of England was too little discussed, and some thought Edward was let off too lightly for bad decisions.

The connection with Dover is the 1999 book, not a residence or a command here. The keep he discusses is the one Maurice built for Henry II of England.

One important reason for the rebuilding may have been the new pilgrimage to Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. With no substantial properties in Kent, Henry needed a magnificent setting in which to receive and house important visitors on that journey. The great tower has been called both the last and the technically most ambitious keep of its kind in England. The outer bailey defences, planned and begun before Henry’s death, anticipated the concentric castles of the thirteenth century by almost half a century.

A redisplay begun early in 2008 set out to show the tower as an occasional fortress-residence for Henry’s itinerant household, and to evoke its appearance at the end of the twelfth century, with a dressed interior suggesting the mid 1180s. The fabric survey made for that work found twelve major phases, from the late twelfth-century construction to restoration in the 1930s. It now appears that the exterior was dominated by five light bands of Caen ashlar or render, set against panels of ragstone rubble, and that some parts of the outside were deliberately enriched while others were played down. The survey also recovered the scale and position of the twelfth-century windows.

A cross-braced timber frame was inserted in the early thirteenth century into the first-floor north-east chamber, to carry the floor above. The first revisions of the fabric appear to date to the fifteenth century. Earlier in that century walls were repaired and refaced and windows were adapted so that the interior was less open to the weather. About 1480, toward the end of the reign of Edward IV, the building was extensively remodelled, with new fireplaces, rearranged doorways and enlarged window embrasures.

The forebuilding is thought to have been roofed then for the first time, initially in timber.

In 1204 King John, who reigned from 1199 to 1216, lost the Duchy of Normandy to Philip II of France, who reigned from 1180 to 1223. Enemy territory then lay just across the Channel. That loss prompted more spending at Dover, continuing Henry’s design in the outer wall and towers and adding royal accommodation in the inner bailey. John’s attempt to recover his French lands in 1214 had already failed when his allies were beaten at the Battle of Bouvines and he withdrew.

Noble discontent then reached the point of civil war.

The First Barons' War, from 1215 to 1217, was a civil war in the kingdom of England. Rebellious landowners, commonly called barons and led by Robert Fitzwalter, fought King John. The conflict followed John’s disastrous wars against Philip II, the collapse of the Angevin Empire, and John’s refusal to accept and abide by Magna Carta, which he had sealed on 15 June 1215. On that day he had been forced to put his seal to the Articles of the Barons.

Faced with an uncompromising king, the barons turned to Philip’s son Louis. In 1216 Louis sailed to England with an army despite the disapproval of his father and of the pope. He captured Winchester and soon controlled more than half the kingdom. The barons proclaimed him king of England in London, although he was never crowned.

In October 1216 John died. Many barons then deserted Louis for John’s nine-year-old son, Henry III, and the war dragged on. Louis’s army was beaten at the Battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217. A fleet assembled by his wife, Blanche of Castile, tried to bring French reinforcements and was defeated off the English coast on 24 August 1217.

Louis made peace on English terms, signed the Treaty of Lambeth, and surrendered the few castles he still held. The treaty had him agree that he had never been the legitimate king of England. That ended the civil war and the French left England.

During the First Barons' War, Dover Castle was twice besieged by Anglo-French forces under Prince Louis, the future Louis VIII of France. The episode has also been described as a single siege, with a truce dividing it into two phases. These are the Sieges of Dover Castle (1216–17). In the first phase, in 1216, Louis’s forces breached the walls but were repulsed.

A truce was struck and Louis withdrew to London. He had some success against the walls and was ultimately unable to take the castle. The garrison was led by Hubert de Burgh, who repulsed every attempt, though the barbican and the main gate at the northern end were severely damaged. The second phase, in 1217, was brief.

News of the Capetian defeat at the Battle of Lincoln prompted Louis to withdraw and begin peace negotiations. Another account says that after his lieutenants were badly defeated at Lincoln on 20 May 1217, Louis raised his siege of Dover Castle and retired to London. During the fighting the English defenders tunnelled outwards and attacked the French.

The Battle of Lincoln (1217) was the second battle fought at Lincoln, on Saturday 20 May 1217, at Lincoln Castle. It was part of the First Barons' War. The forces of the future Louis VIII were attacked by a relief army under William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke. Thomas, Count of Perche, who commanded the French troops, was killed, and Louis was expelled from his base in the south-east of England.

The looting that followed is known as the Lincoln Fair. The citizens of Lincoln were loyal to Louis, so Henry’s forces sacked the city. In 1216 Louis had entered London and proclaimed himself king, supported by barons who resisted John. After John died, many of those barons were willing to change sides.

William Marshal, regent for the nine-year-old Henry III, called the nobles who held castles to a muster at Newark. About 400 knights, 250 crossbowmen and a larger auxiliary force of horse and foot were assembled. Marshal marched to Lincoln to break Louis’s siege and to win before the royal money ran out.

Medieval Lincoln was a walled city with a Norman castle near its centre, on the crossing of two Roman roads, Ermine Street and the Fosse Way. William the Conqueror had ordered Lincoln Castle built on a hilltop over an old Roman fort about 150 years earlier. In May 1217 Louis’s men held the city, but Lincoln Castle was still intact. Its garrison, under the castellan Nicola de la Haie, stayed loyal to Henry and kept the castle against Thomas, Count of Perche.

Marshal approached from Stow, eleven miles north-west of Lincoln. Perche knew the advance was coming, but his knights were unsure of the enemy’s strength. One party wanted to fight in the open at the foot of the hill before Marshal reached the gates. Another wanted to delay him at the city wall, press the siege, take the castle and hold the stronger position.

The defensive plan was chosen, though the argument continued. The western gate of the city was left undefended because it was believed to be blocked by rubble. Marshal split his men. Ranulf de Blondeville assaulted the northern gate.

Falkes de Breauté led the crossbowmen into Lincoln Castle by the postern, and from the walls their bolts struck Perche’s men. A third detachment cleared the rubble at the western gate. Marshal’s troops entered by the western and northern gates, and de Breauté sallied from the castle. In the melee Perche was killed.

His men broke and fled by the city’s southern bridge. Those of Louis’s army who were not captured fled by the south gate toward London. The battle took about six hours. The victory at Lincoln is what caused Louis to raise the siege at Dover and open talks.

Those talks nearly ended the war and then failed, which is why the sea fight followed. Louis agreed to meet adherents of the boy king Henry III at Brentford. William Marshal and Louis came close to an agreement. Pardoning the bishops who had gone over to Louis required the consent of Pope Honorius III.

That could not be had without a long journey to Rome, so the negotiations broke down. Louis then heard that reinforcements and supplies would soon arrive from France, and he resolved to fight on. He had been invited in by English barons in revolt against John. The struggle was a war of factions, not of nations.

The Battle of Sandwich (1217), also called the Battle of Dover, took place on 24 August 1217 as part of the First Barons' War. A Plantagenet English fleet commanded by Hubert de Burgh, the same man who had held Dover Castle, attacked a Capetian French fleet led by Eustace the Monk and Robert of Courtenay off Sandwich in Kent. The English captured the French flagship and most of the supply vessels and forced the rest of the French fleet back to Calais. The French were trying to bring supplies and reinforcements to Prince Louis, whose forces still held London.

The English ships attacked from windward, seized Eustace’s ship, made Robert and the knights prisoner, and killed the rest of that crew. Eustace, a notorious pirate, was executed after he was taken. The battle convinced Louis to abandon the conquest of England, and the Treaty of Lambeth was signed a few weeks later.

Eustace the Monk had once belonged to a monastic order. He broke his vows and became a pirate with his brothers and friends. Early success drew lawless men to him, and his ships menaced the Channel. English opponents credited him with diabolical ingenuity.

From 1205 to 1208 he worked for King John. With John’s blessing he seized the Channel Islands and was allowed to hold them, using Winchelsea as his English base. In 1212 he switched to France and was chased out of England. In 1215 his ships carried war engines to the barons who opposed John.

When Louis sailed for London he went in Eustace’s fleet, and with that help Louis quickly captured London and the Cinque Ports.

On 24 August, in clear weather, the French fleet left Calais. Eustace equipped the ships, but command of the knights and soldiers was held by Robert of Courtenay. Blanche of Castile, Louis’s wife, was an important organiser of the relief. Opposing the French was Philip d’Aubigny, commander of the south-eastern coast.

The Earl of Pembroke had arrived at New Romney on 19 August and summoned the sailors of the Cinque Ports. Those mariners complained bitterly of bad treatment at the hands of King John. Pembroke persuaded them to fight by promising great spoils if they beat the French. Eustace’s own vessel, the Great Ship of Bayonne, led the French squadron.

Robert de Courtenay held the top command and Eustace served as his deputy. Ralph de la Tourniele and William des Barres were third and fourth in command. There were 36 knights on the flagship. The next three troopships were commanded by Mikius de Harnes, William V of Saint-Omer and the Mayor of Boulogne.

The first four ships, including the flagship, contained between 100 and 125 knights. Men-at-arms manned the remaining six troopships. There were also 70 smaller vessels. Hubert de Burgh’s command of the English fleet, Philip d’Aubigny’s command of the coast, and William Marshal’s summons of the Cinque Ports sailors are all part of the same day’s account.

When the war ended in 1217, building at Dover resumed for Henry III, who reigned from 1216 to 1272. The vulnerable north gate, the one breached in the siege, was blocked solid and turned into an underground forward-defence complex, including St John’s Tower. Two new gates were built in the outer curtain. One account places Fitzwilliam’s Gate on the west and Constable’s Gate on the east.

Another places the main gate, Constable’s Gate, on the west, where it was also a residence for the castle constable, and the secondary Fitzwilliam Gate on the east. The builders remade the barbican and cut a tunnel under the outer wall to reach it, by way of the new St John’s Tower in the outer ditch and a covered passage across the ditch. The passage continued as a tunnel under the Spur, where it divided into three, so that defenders could hold the barbican. Work continued sporadically under Henry III into the middle of the thirteenth century.

By then the castle had reached a peak, as one of the largest and most sophisticated in Europe, with a royal residential complex lining the walls of the inner bailey.

Arthur’s Hall, a fourteenth-century name for the hall built in Henry III’s reign, is the centrepiece of the range along the north-east side of the inner bailey, created in the mid thirteenth century as the king’s lodgings. The traditional story is of a new hall built in the late 1230s and ready by 1240. Much of the fabric belongs to that date, but in the south-east wall, above the arches of the service doors, the remains of an earlier arch may belong to John’s reign, from 1199 to 1216. The form of that earlier building is unclear.

In the north-east corner the floor of the hall is interrupted, which suggests the site, or the intended site, of a substantial stair up to the ramparts. The hall kept its three service doors at the lower end. Scarring in the side wall marks the door from the inner bailey into the cross passage. At the upper end are the remains of a tall door from the front of the dais out into the bailey, perhaps the door into a pentice that ran north-west to the king’s chamber.

The threshold of that door stood 0.48 metres above the present floor, about 0.6 metres above the floor in Henry III’s time, which is evidence for the dais. The services and the kitchen lay to the south-east. The upper end, where the regimental museum now stands, may have been the king’s chamber and perhaps an earlier hall built for John. Repairs show that Arthur’s Hall and the other buildings of the range stayed in use, though altered, through much of the Middle Ages.

A drawing of about 1570 by John Bereblock suggests a new facade, and the floor had been raised at least twice by the sixteenth century.

In 1265 the castle was besieged again, with Eleanor de Montfort in residence. After her husband died at the Battle of Evesham during the Second Barons’ War, from 1264 to 1267, there was a short siege at Dover. It ended by negotiation with Eleanor and her nephew, the Lord Edward, son of Henry III. From the 1260s the constable of the castle was also Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a royal officer set over those semi-independent ports to ensure their service to the crown.

That double office is one reason Dover stayed important. The Lord Warden is still officially head of the castle, in the conjoint office of Constable of Dover Castle, and the Deputy Constable has his residence in Constable’s Gate. During the time of Stephen de Pencester a windmill was erected on Tower 22, later called the Mill Tower.

Knowledge of the castle in the later Middle Ages is scant until Edward IV, who reigned from 1461 to 1483. He remodelled the great tower as an occasional residence. Dover then lay on the route to Flanders, ruled by the Duke of Burgundy, an important ally. The fabric study places an extensive remodelling, with fireplaces and enlarged windows, at about 1480, toward the end of that reign.

Dover remained important under the Tudors, especially after Henry VIII, who reigned from 1509 to 1547, built artillery forts in Dover and along the south-east coast in 1539 and 1540. A separate account dates his coastal campaign from 1537 to 1540 and says that Moat’s Bulwark is the only one remaining of the three batteries known to have been built at Dover in that campaign. As a smaller battery rather than a fort, it is a rare survival. The castle’s own history says that Henry VIII made a personal visit and added the Moat Bulwark.

The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V came to the castle in 1522 and met Henry there at the start of a six-week diplomatic visit. The royal apartments in the great tower were refurbished to receive Anne of Cleves on her way to marry Henry in 1539. Elizabeth I visited in 1573. One history of the castle gives her reign as 1557 to 1603 and says she kept the castle in good repair during the war with Spain in the last two decades of the century.

By the Tudor age the older defences had been superseded by gunpowder, which is why the artillery works were added.

Around 1620 Edward Zouche, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports for King James I, noted that four towers were decayed and that the covered gallery from the kitchen to the royal lodging had been demolished. Royalty last used the castle, on one account, in 1625, when the great tower was prepared for the French princess Henrietta Maria on her way to marry Charles I. Afterwards the king’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, made alterations in the great tower and in some buildings of the inner bailey. A closer study of the accounts gives a longer programme.

Scholars had assumed that all the work was finished for Henrietta Maria in the six months between the proxy marriage of December 1624 and her delayed arrival in June 1625. The accounts instead run from repairs to the Duke of Buckingham’s lodgings, as newly appointed constable, in December 1624, and continue until the autumn of 1626. Very little appears to have been finished in time for her stay of a single night on 15 June 1625. Her chamberlain complained that she was lodged in an old building in the antique manner, rather badly housed, poorly accommodated, and that her train was treated with very little magnificence.

Even so, the works created a magnificent setting for court ceremony: existing panelling and coved or flat beamed ceilings were redecorated, a great rustic door with rustic pilasters was added at the foot of the stairs, and a lodging for the Lord Chamberlain was refurbished opposite the forebuilding. The two principal floors functioned as the king’s side, on the upper level, and the queen’s side, on the lower. The private side of both was on the south-west, where four of the six bedchambers stood, two on each level. The accounts also describe panelling in six bedchambers.

Channels and round fixing holes for panelling battens were found in the four principal chambers and in two smaller chambers on the south-east. A plan of 1827 shows those smaller rooms with doors only on the south-west, the private side. From the fifteenth century they had been closed off on the north-east and made part of a suite of panelled and heated bedchambers on the warmer southern side. John Bereblock, in a bird’s-eye view of about 1570, labelled the tower the Regale palatium, the royal palace.

The intended welcome for the new king and queen never fully materialised. War with France over the next two years, and the Duke of Buckingham’s assassination in August 1628, stood in the way. Almost all the medieval floor timbers have since disappeared, along with the steep-pitched roofs over the two upper chambers and the wall panelling. The roof was last recorded in a section through the great tower in 1729, before its replacement with parabolic brick vaults in 1799.

Between those dates, in 1747 to 1756, the forebuilding staircase was reconfigured and a large Portland stone porch was removed. That porch, 23 feet high and 14 feet wide, was the most conspicuous external feature of the 1625 to 1626 refurbishment. No topographical view of it survives. Some of its stone was later reused as jambs of barrack windows and doors around the inner bailey.

An early eighteenth-century view of the castle is the work of Henry Hulsbergh. Henry, or Hendrick, Hulsbergh, also Hulsberg, was a Dutch engraver of maps and architecture who died in 1729. He was born in Amsterdam and was in London by 1709 at the latest. He was mainly employed on large architectural plates, including Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus, Kip’s Britannia Illustrata, and Christopher Wren’s designs for St Paul’s Cathedral.

He also engraved portraits, among them one of Georg Andreas Ruperti, pastor of the Dutch church in London, in 1709. He was warden of the Lutheran church in the Savoy Hospital. During two years of illness and disability he was supported by that congregation and by the brethren of a Dutch club. He died in May 1729 of a paralytic fit and was buried in the Savoy.

He was an engraver of the castle, not a constable or a builder of it. The 1729 section that still records the medieval roof belongs to the year of his death.

After 1625 the castle was neglected. One account says it played no significant role in the Civil Wars of 1642 to 1645. Another says that during the English Civil War it was held for the king and then taken by supporters of Parliament in 1642 without a shot being fired. Knowing the castle was lightly guarded, a local merchant, Richard Dawkes, with ten men, scaled the cliffs, attacked the porter’s lodge, took the keys and entered before the garrison could be summoned.

The two accounts sit side by side: a seizure without a fight in 1642, and a judgement that the castle played no significant part in the wars of 1642 to 1645.

The great tower was later used as a prison for French and Spanish prisoners during the Nine Years’ War, from 1688 to 1697, and the War of the Spanish Succession, from 1701 to 1714. Their graffiti can be seen on its walls. A study of the tower as a military prison notes that the extensive prisoners’ graffiti from the late seventeenth century onward seems to be mainly of prisoners from Marlborough’s campaigns in the early eighteenth century. Recording of that graffiti began with rubbings made between 1997 and 1999, which produced 255 records and covered only a small proportion of the whole, because the work was done only where the fabric was already being analysed.

An assessment in August 2008 led to a photogrammetric record of nine principal areas. From 207 stereo pairs, 979 digital surface models were generated. Some marks are cut as deep as a couple of centimetres. They are typically names and dates, with other areas of lightly inscribed patterns.

The 1740s marked a new beginning, as Britain came into conflict with France. In 1744 and 1745 a failed French invasion and a Jacobite uprising prompted work on decaying buildings. Barracks were made in the inner bailey and the great tower, and new barracks were erected in 1756 and 1757 on Palace Green. Together they held 800 infantrymen, an unusually large concentration, which shows Dover’s importance.

Engineers also saw that the Spur was weak, open to cannon from higher ground to the north-east. The barbican was remodelled as an infantry strongpoint. The outer wall on the north-east was reduced in height and backed with an earthwork to absorb shot. Two new gun positions were built, Bell Battery and Four Gun Battery.

In the mid eighteenth century the great tower was converted for use as a barracks. Almost all the principal windows received new Portland stone frames, probably reused from lost seventeenth-century work. Large areas of facework and quoins were replaced in Portland stone, a new front wall was built to the forebuilding stairs, and a new roof was added. Arthur’s Hall, still significant into the sixteenth century, received its present appearance in the barrack campaign of 1745 to 1756.

Like other buildings for ordinary soldiers, its window and door jambs include pieces that probably came from the rustic door of the 1620s. Keep Yard 8, the medieval building adapted for officers, was given windows and doors in new stone. The overall effect was a superficially unified row of blocks. Buildings that had been royal lodgings became the garrison on the front line of the coast.

Other medieval fabric survives around the bailey. Keep Yard 9 was described by Bereblock as the palace of the Duke of Suffolk, and in 1625 to 1626 Buckingham converted it into lodgings for the Lord Chamberlain. Bereblock also shows the old armoury, and some fabric on that site, Keep Yard 8, seems medieval. He shows Arthur’s Lesser Hall, the present shop, and some of that fabric also appears medieval.

Dover Castle was a crucial observation point for the cross-Channel sightings of the Anglo-French Survey, undertaken between 1784 and 1790. The survey used trigonometric calculations to link the Royal Greenwich Observatory with the Paris Observatory. The work was overseen by General William Roy.

The greatest changes since Henry II came during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, from 1792 to 1802 and from 1803 to 1815, and were concentrated mainly in 1794 to 1799. Major William Twiss, Commanding Engineer of the Southern District, and Captain William Ford comprehensively altered the defences. One account says Twiss completed the remodelling of the outer defences by adding the huge Horseshoe, Hudson’s, East Arrow and East Demi-Bastions for extra guns on the east, and the Constable’s Bastion for extra protection on the west. He strengthened the Spur at the north end with a redan, or raised gun platform.

By taking the roof off the keep and replacing it with massive brick vaults he could mount heavy artillery on top. He also built Canon’s Gateway to link the castle defences with those of the town. Another account says the entire eastern outer wall was cut down and backed by an earth rampart for cannon, and that the outer ditch there was enlarged and lined with near-vertical brick. Three huge earthwork bastions projected from the new eastern defences, mounting cannon to fire along the flanks and served by tunnels from inside the castle.

The Spur was modernised for a staged defence back across the inner ditch, through St John’s Tower and the medieval tunnel into the outer bailey. New works included underground barracks in casemates at the southern end, the Cliff Casemates, and above ground at the Spur Casemates. A new entrance, Canon’s Gate, was made on the south-west, and two earthwork bastions flanked the western outer wall. Inside, new gunpowder magazines were built, and the great tower was equipped as a store for powder, shot and other supplies.

The brick vaults that replaced the medieval roofs are dated to 1799 in the fabric study, which calls them parabolic. Later in the eighteenth century, vestiges of the medieval and later roofs were lost when brick vaults were inserted at second-floor level. When the war ended in 1815, Dover Castle was a formidable artillery fortress and barracks.

With Dover a garrison town, troops and stores needed room. Twiss and the Royal Engineers cut a complex of barrack tunnels about 15 metres below the cliff top, and the first troops were accommodated in 1803. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars the tunnels were partly converted for the Coast Blockade Service, to fight smuggling. That use was short.

In 1827 the headquarters moved closer to shore, and one account says the tunnels then lay abandoned for more than a century. Another says that after 1815 the army vacated many barracks, including the underground casemates, which the Coast Blockade used from 1818 to 1828. The windmill on the Mill Tower was demolished during the Anglo-American War, on the orders of the Ordnance Board. It was said that the sale of the materials did not cover the cost of taking the mill down.

A door from an upper floor of the medieval St John’s Tower, dating to about the 1790s, carries about fifty pieces of carved graffiti, cut with knives or possibly bayonets. The find was made public on 15 May 2024, and the door was conserved for display that July as part of an exhibition on the castle under siege, which opened the northern defences, the medieval and Georgian underground tunnels, and the Georgian casemates. With Napoleon across the Channel, the castle in the 1790s changed from an ageing medieval fortress into a modern garrison. It suddenly housed thousands of soldiers.

New barracks and new gun positions were built, and the defences were made more resistant to bombs. St John’s Tower, in the great outer ditch, commands the vulnerable northern end. It would have been guarded by six to twelve men at a time, with one or two up on the tower. The earliest dated carving is 1789, the year of the French Revolution.

Other dates are 1798, a period of rebuilding, and 1855, when changes were planned for the tower. The announcement calls 1789 the earliest dated example and 1855 the oldest. Many initials appear, and two surnames, Downam and Hopper, also read as Hooper. At least nine illustrations of hangings include one of a man in a military uniform and a bicorne hat.

That figure may record a real hanging, since hangings in Dover were a public spectacle, or it may stand for Napoleon. A detailed carving of a single-masted sailing ship is most likely an eight-gun cutter, a fast vessel used by the navy, the revenue service, smugglers and privateers. A glass or chalice for wine, under an elaborate cross, may represent holy communion. After the discovery the door was taken out of the tower.

Paint was removed from the carved face, and the wood was cleaned, toned and treated. Paul Pattison, a senior properties historian, described climbing a ladder to the upper floor and finding the carvings.

By the late 1840s the nation’s defences were in a poor condition, and improvement followed slowly. In 1853 the inner bailey and the great tower were strengthened. The Officers’ New Barracks followed in 1856, to a design by Anthony Salvin. One account says that between 1856 and 1858 he constructed the new officers’ barracks to the south of the castle, that he was responsible for the exterior in a Tudor Revival style, and that the castle’s clerk of the works, G.

Arnold, was responsible for the interior. Better buildings for the soldiers included new barracks at the East Casemates, the Regimental Institute, now the NAAFI, in 1868, and the Garrison School in 1870. From 1865 the building of a new fortress, Fort Burgoyne, to the north was a final acknowledgement that the Spur was weak. The castle then found a role in coast defence.

Four groups of large guns, the Hospital, Shot Yard, East Demi and Shoulder of Mutton batteries, were built in 1871 to 1874 along the cliff edge. They could fire far out to sea against steam-driven ironclad warships. Midway through the nineteenth century two teams of military engineers appear to have competed to reclad the south-west elevation of the keep. The two styles visible there are likely to belong to the same phase of restoration.

Anthony Salvin, the designer of those officers’ barracks, was born on 17 October 1799 and died on 17 December 1881. He was an English architect with a reputation as an expert on medieval buildings, which he applied both to new work and to restorations, including the Tower of London and Windsor Castle. He restored castles and country houses and built houses and churches. He was born at Sunderland Bridge in County Durham, the only child of Anthony Salvin, a soldier, and of that man’s second wife, Elizabeth, also Eliza, Mills.

He was educated at Durham School. In 1820 he became a pupil of John Paterson of Edinburgh, then restoring Brancepeth Castle. In 1821 he moved to Finchley. He had an introduction to Sir John Soane but did not enter Soane’s office.

According to his nephew, he entered the office of John Nash. In 1824 he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Soon afterwards he went on a sketching tour of Britain. On 26 July 1826 he married his cousin Anne Andrews Nesfield.

They had six children, two of whom died in infancy. His first major commission was Mamhead House in Devon for Robert William Newman, in a Tudor style on a symmetrical plan, adapted from a plan by Charles Fowler, which restricted him. Moreby Hall in the East Riding of Yorkshire, for Henry Preston, let him design a complete Tudor house, again symmetrical. At Scotney Castle in Kent, for Edward Hussey, the Tudor design was asymmetrical.

In 1831 he began Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire for Gregory Gregory, combining elements from Montacute House in Somerset and Hengrave Hall in Suffolk. Before that house was finished he was replaced by William Burn. In 1835 he spent five weeks in Germany. In 1836 his Tudor design for the new Palace of Westminster, possibly inspired by that journey, was unsuccessful, as was his entry for the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

He won the competition for the Carlton Club in Pall Mall, but the club did not proceed with his plan. After losing the competition for the Army and Navy Club he entered no more competitions.

Most of his later major houses stayed in the Tudor style, including Keele Hall in Staffordshire for Ralph Sneyd, who lived from 1793 to 1870, and Thoresby Hall in Nottinghamshire for Sydney Pierrepont, 3rd Earl Manvers. Exceptions include Penoyre House in Brecon, an Italianate villa for Colonel John Lloyd Vaughan Watkins, and Oxon Hoath at West Peckham in Kent, in a French château style, for Sir William Geary, 3rd Baronet. A large part of his work was the repair of castles. In 1835 he refaced Norwich Castle.

In 1844 he repaired the ruins of Newark Castle. In 1845 he repaired the ruins of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. In the early 1840s the Queen’s Gate of Caernarvon Castle collapsed, and in 1844 he repaired it and rebuilt other masonry there. He also restored Naworth Castle in Cumbria after a fire on 18 May 1844.

In 1851 he surveyed the Beauchamp Tower at the Tower of London and afterwards restored the Salt, Wakefield and White Towers and the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula there. That chapel is at the Tower of London, not the Becket chapel inside the Dover keep. Prince Albert then instructed him to work at Windsor Castle, replacing sash windows with lancets and mullioned windows and rebuilding the Clewer Tower. He designed Peckforton Castle in Cheshire for John Tollemache, 1st Baron Tollemache.

None of those commissions is the Dover barrack block. His work at Dover is the Officers’ New Barracks of 1856 to 1858, Tudor Revival outside, with G. Arnold’s interior.

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Dover Harbour became the home of the Royal Navy’s Dover Patrol, to defend the Strait, particularly against submarines, and to protect communications for the army in France and Flanders. Dover had a garrison of around 16,000 troops, with the castle as headquarters, defending a perimeter on the high ground around the town for up to a mile and a half. Inside that perimeter were training camps for soldiers bound for the Western Front. Coast-defence guns covered the harbour approaches.

The new threat from airships and aeroplanes was met by anti-aircraft guns, including two near St Mary in Castro. Entry to the harbour was regulated. The Fire Command Post, established in 1905, and the Port War Signal Station of 1914 survive in the castle, with a view over the Channel. A recreated fire command post now shows that watch.

In 1939 Dover resumed the role of headquarters, both for the army garrison defending the town and for the re-established naval base. The empty underground casemates were recommissioned as bomb-proof offices for the vice-admiral in charge of the base, and as headquarters for the army units that coordinated coast artillery and anti-aircraft defence and for the units holding the fortress. These commands expanded through the war. In June 1940 Dover became the nearest town to enemy-occupied territory.

The outbreak of war in 1939 had already seen the tunnels converted first into an air-raid shelter and then into a military command centre and an underground hospital.

The admiral in those tunnels was Bertram Ramsay. Admiral Sir Bertram Home Ramsay, holder of the Bath, the British Empire and the Royal Victorian Order, was born on 20 January 1883 and died on 2 January 1945. He was a Royal Navy officer. He commanded the destroyer HMS Broke in the First World War.

In the Second World War he was responsible for the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 and for planning and commanding the naval forces in the invasion of France in 1944. He was born in Hampton Court Palace, into an old family, and he attended Colchester Royal Grammar School. On 26 February 1929 he married Helen Margaret Menzies, daughter of Colonel Charles Thomson Menzies. They had two sons.

David Francis Ramsay, born on 1 October 1933 and died on 2 January 2021, wrote two books and had two children, Michael Ramsay and James Ramsay. Major General Charles Alexander Ramsay, born on 12 October 1936 and died on 31 December 2017, was educated at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, rose to be Director General of the Territorial Army, and was a member of the Queen’s Body Guard for Scotland. Bertram Ramsay joined the navy in 1898. As a cadet he was posted to HMS Crescent in April 1899.

He later served on HMS Britannia and became a midshipman within a year. By the middle of 1902 he was an acting sub-lieutenant, confirmed in that rank on 15 September 1902. He was promoted to lieutenant on 15 December 1904. The 1911 census shows him as flag lieutenant to Rear Admiral Douglas Gamble on HMS Bacchante in the Mediterranean, a ship then captained by Reginald Tyrwhitt.

In the First World War his first command was HMS M25, a small monitor, from August 1915. For two years that ship was part of the Dover Patrol off the Belgian coast. He was promoted commander on 30 June 1916. In October 1917 he took command of another Dover Patrol ship, the destroyer HMS Broke.

On 9 May 1918 Broke took part in the Second Ostend Raid, a follow-up to the Zeebrugge Raid, and he was mentioned in despatches. He retired in 1938 and was brought back a year later to help meet the Axis threat. Promoted vice-admiral, he was named Commander-in-Chief, Dover, on 24 August 1939. His duties included defence against possible destroyer raids, protection of military traffic across the Channel, and denial of the Straits to submarines.

As Vice-Admiral Dover, Bertram Ramsay was responsible for the Dunkirk evacuation, codenamed Operation Dynamo. Working from the tunnels beneath Dover Castle, he and his staff worked for nine days to rescue troops trapped in France. For bringing home 338,226 British and allied soldiers from the mole and the beaches of Dunkirk, he was asked to report in person to King George VI and was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. The castle history gives the same total, 338,226 British and Allied troops, and places his naval headquarters at the centre of that operation in May 1940.

A statue of him stands outside the tunnels for that evacuation and for the protection of Dover during the war. A military telephone exchange was installed in 1941 and served the underground headquarters. The switchboards were in constant use, and a new tunnel had to be cut beside them for the batteries and chargers that kept them working.

After Dynamo, Ramsay faced the defence of the waters off Dover against an expected invasion. For nearly two years he commanded forces trying to keep control, and he gained a second mention in despatches. He was in command when the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, with their escorts, passed through the Channel in February 1942. British plans for that passage, Operation Fuller, were overtaken by surprise, and the attempt to stop the ships failed.

He was to have been appointed Naval Force Commander for the invasion of Europe on 29 April 1942. The invasion was postponed, and he was transferred to be deputy naval commander of the Allied invasion of North Africa. The later tunnel levels at Dover therefore belong to the fortress after he had been moved on, even though the same underground system had been his headquarters in 1940.

Two new tunnel levels were built. The older workings were then called Casemate level. The first new level, Annexe, was completed early in 1942 as a small hospital. The second, Dumpy, opened in 1943 as a combined headquarters, with room for large-scale communications.

Dumpy played a significant role in Operation Neptune, the naval side of the plan for D-Day, and in a deception called Fortitude South, which convinced the German command that the main invasion would fall in the Calais area rather than Normandy, and that it would be launched from Dover. Tunnel levels are lettered A for Annexe, B for Bastion, C for Casemate, D for Dumpy and E for Esplanade. Annexe and Casemate are open to visitors. Bastion is lost, though investigations continue in the hope of finding it and getting in.

Dumpy, converted from its Second World War use to serve as a regional seat of government in the event of an atomic war, is closed, together with its esplanade, last used as an air-raid shelter in that war.

The army left the castle in 1958, except for Constable’s Gate, which remained a senior officer’s residence until 2015. In the early 1960s the government selected Dover Castle as one of twelve regional seats of government, to be occupied if nuclear war came. It was to be in the charge of a senior minister, with a military and civilian staff, tasked with creating some form of administration after an attack. The heart of that complex was Dumpy.

Annexe was refitted as a dormitory. The western tunnels of Casemate became dormitories, dining and catering rooms and rest rooms. The complex was sealed against contamination and given air filtration and communications, including a small radio studio. It was decommissioned in the early 1980s.

Another account says the plan to use the tunnels as a shelter for those regional seats was abandoned, because the chalk of the cliffs would not give significant protection from radiation, because the tunnels were an inconvenient shape, and because they were in poor condition. The two accounts can be read together as a scheme that was fitted out and later given up.

The inner bailey passed out of active military occupation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Stuart Rigold then excavated around the east side of the inner ward when new services were laid, and he published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association. His sections showed deep stratification on the east side of the tower, but no archive of detailed records could be found. His report suggested that the base of the tower had been deliberately buried with upcast soil so that it looked like a motte.

That reading seemed odd, given how little of the yard can be seen from outside. Arthur’s Hall was also dug at about that time, presumably to expose the three doorways at its south end. No published record of that dig could be found. Two drawings preserve some of the work, and people who were on the staff remembered an excavation after the hall had been cleared of fill.

The hall had been emptied of at least 1.5 metres of fill in the 1970s.

New trenches for the redisplay asked two questions. What could be said about the landscape of the inner bailey before and after the great tower was built, about 1181 to 1188? And did any archaeological deposits survive inside Arthur’s Hall? Two trenches were cut against the base of the tower.

The larger, on the north side, showed that the finished ground against the building was always meant to stand at its present height, because the dressed facing stops at the turf. That turf is new. Evidence from the 1960s showed that a further 0.50 metres of the footings had once been exposed. Those exposed footings were repointed with flint galleting, a style popular in the eighteenth century, which suggests that the ground had been lowered by the time the inner bailey became a barracks.

Under the modern deposits lay a layer of Caen stone chippings and dust, the builders’ yard surface while the tower was going up. That sat on clay levelling which filled a natural dip to the east, the deposits Rigold had read as deliberate mound-building. Below the levelling, a sloping buried soil is the pre-1180 surface of the inner bailey. It crested toward the centre of the north side of the tower, which suggests that the bailey enclosed a narrow ridge and that the tower footings were cut across it.

A feature earlier than 1180 was sealed by that buried surface. A smaller trench confirmed the tower and the intended landscape, but it was more disturbed by a later brick stair and by a pipe with a brick-surrounded stopcock.

Inside Arthur’s Hall, two trenches at opposite ends found the plastic protection left by the 1970s dig, covering extensive untouched deposits. At the south end the sequence began with the floor of about 1238 and then showed that the doorways had been inserted. An earlier curving wall and other features unrelated to the hall were also seen. The dig reached nearly half a metre at the south end and almost a metre at the north, without meeting natural ground.

The earlier excavation had cleared the room down to the floor of the hall of about 1238 and had gone below that floor only in a few places. Eight further trenches were taken down to the top of undisturbed archaeology. One of them, near the north-west corner, was deep enough to expose an earlier wall also seen in Rigold’s work outside, a clue to the complexity of the earlier Norman domestic buildings. The whole of that new digging was described as a month’s work.

It showed how much archaeology is still buried in the hall. The redisplay was to reopen in August 2009, with the introductory exhibition housed in Arthur’s Hall, a mid thirteenth-century building. Between 2007 and 2009, £2.45 million was spent on recreating the castle’s interior. In 2019, 368,243 people visited.

The museum of the Queen’s and Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment is in the castle.

In October 2021 the castle was one of 142 sites across England to receive part of a £35 million grant from the government’s Culture Recovery Fund.

A find made public on 21 August 2026 concerns stone rather than a new trench. Christopher Moore, a research fellow at the University of Kent and a former doctoral researcher in hidden and lost heritage, combined archive records with the standing fabric and linked the Victorian extension at Constable’s Gate with Henry VIII’s lost Sandown Castle. The work was supported by the university and carried out with the cooperation of the body that cares for Dover. An 1883 report says that materials from Sandown were being sent to Dover to build an extension at Constable’s Gate.

That extension, built in 1883 and 1884 as quarters for the castle’s commanding officer, reuses masonry from Sandown. Sandown was one of three castles of the Downs, built in 1539 and 1540 to defend the coast. Unlike Walmer Castle, which still stands, Sandown was abandoned to the sea during the nineteenth century and largely demolished. Moore also identified other places in east Kent where Sandown stone was reused, including Eastry Union Chapel, Walmer Castle and the abutment of Deal’s second pier.

He is co-founder, with Manolo Guerci, of a charity devoted to lost architecture of the early modern period, particularly buildings lost to coastal erosion, neglect or demolition. Guerci described the Dover evidence as a way of seeing a lost Tudor fort in a building people pass every day. The 1883 to 1884 quarters are therefore both a Victorian addition for the commanding officer and a surviving piece of a coastal fort that the sea destroyed.

The castle remains a scheduled monument, first listed on 19 October 1964, which means it is a nationally important historic building and archaeological site protected against unauthorised change. It is also a Grade I listed building, and it has been described as an internationally important structure. The scheduling account stresses the technical innovation of the medieval defences, the survival of the medieval castle in an unusually complete state, the royal connection, and the documents for the building works and for the sieges of 1067 and 1216. It also stresses that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works show how military engineering adapted to new weapons, that the Napoleonic underground barracks are more extensive and more complete than other examples, and that their use as Ramsay’s headquarters in 1940, together with the tunnels built in the Second World War and adapted afterward for nuclear war, makes an uninterrupted military occupation from the Napoleonic era to the late twentieth century.

Buried remains of the hillfort, the lighthouse, the Saxon settlement, the medieval royal castle, the later defences, the tunnels and Moat’s Bulwark are all expected to hold evidence of construction, use, economy and environment from prehistory to the post-medieval period. A government application for a tentative cross-Channel nomination, under the name of the Dover Strait, later named the castle among fortifications from the Roman period to the twentieth century, together with the Western Heights, the Channel Tunnel and other sites on both shores. The records read for this history do not describe the castle as holding its own world-heritage inscription.

The castle has also been used as a filming place. Television work includes the Doctor Who serial The Mind of Evil, Wolf Hall, The Hollow Crown, The Amazing Race 31 and Renegade Nell. Films include Lady Jane in 1986, Hamlet in 1990, To Kill a King in 2003, The Other Boleyn Girl in 2007, Into the Woods in 2014 and Avengers: Age of Ultron in 2015. A painting of the castle by Richard Wilson is dated 1747.

Henry Hulsbergh’s early eighteenth-century engraving is the earlier printed view.

What a visitor meets now is the sum of these phases. The Roman lighthouse and the church of about the year 1000 stand on the hill. Henry II’s great tower, credited to Maurice the Engineer in the study by Michael Prestwich, rises inside baileys that Henry III closed with Constable’s Gate and Fitzwilliam Gate after the First Barons' War. The Battle of Lincoln (1217) and the Battle of Sandwich (1217) are the two blows that ended Louis’s siege and his claim.

Anthony Salvin’s officers’ barracks, the cliff tunnels, and the headquarters of Bertram Ramsay carry the same hill into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 2026 reading of the Constable’s Gate extension adds the lost masonry of Sandown Castle to that sequence. Conservation in the great tower, underway until 11 December, is removing rain-damaged brick from a ceiling in two rooms, with the replica hangings taken down and the replica furniture removed or covered, as a first step toward keeping those rooms. The Operation Dynamo tour of the wartime tunnels is closed for essential maintenance.

The underground hospital is not open on 14 and 15 November for operational reasons, and it cannot be entered by wheelchair or mobility scooter. On the published timetable the castle is open on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, with last entry at 3pm.