Carlisle Castle

Standing strongly in the city it has dominated for nine centuries, Carlisle Castle was a constantly updated working fortress until well within living memory. Now its rich and varied visitor attractions reflect its long and eventful history.

Even before the medieval castle was begun, this site was an important Roman fortress. Today, the castle still plays a prominent role in Cumbria as one of its best loved landmarks.

The squat, frowning keep, begun during the 12th century by King Henry I of England and completed by King David I of Scotland, is both the oldest part of the castle and a reminder that Carlisle was a disputed frontier fortress, long commanding the especially turbulent western end of the Anglo-Scottish border. The keep houses displays about the castle's history, from medieval assaults via the exploits of Elizabethan Border Reivers to the Civil War siege and Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite Rising of 1745-6.

Carlisle was then the very last English fortress ever to suffer a siege: overwhelmed by Cumberland's Hanoverian army, its Jacobite garrison were imprisoned in the keep's dank basement, where visitors can see the legendary 'licking stones' which they supposedly licked for life-giving moisture. Equally famous are the strange and fantastic carvings on the keep's second floor, cut in about 1480. The Warden's Apartments in the castle's outer gatehouse have also been furnished as they appeared at about this date.

By the time Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned here in 1567-8, Henry VIII's updating for heavy artillery had left its mark on Carlisle, including the keep's rounded 'shot-deflecting' battlements and the Half Moon Battery defending the Captain's Tower gateway. The castle's military history did not end after the Jacobite Rising: fear of a radical revolution made it a permanently occupied garrison from the 1820s, when the barrack blocks lining the outer ward were begun. Indeed the castle remained the headquarters of the Border Regiment until 1959, and the 300-year history of Cumbria's famous infantry regiment is vividly told here in the Cumbria's Military Museum. Free entry to the museum (tel 01228 532774, just one of the many attractions which make this famous fortress so well worth exploring, is included in the castle admission charge.