Set in a peaceful Shropshire valley near the Welsh border, Stokesay Castle presents visitors with the placid face of the English Middle Ages. More a defensible manor house than a true castle, it conveys a gentle image appropriate to its origins in the social ambitions of a successful wool merchant. It is also a monument to the art of unobtrusive restoration, having been saved from terminal decay in the 1870s and 1880s by a programme of works which, almost uniquely for its time, left little trace of its own achievement except the buildings it conserved.
