Trifter

I love ruins.  I enjoy their romance and sense of what most have been.

Nowhere is a castle  more evocative than that at Corfe Castle.

Source: Wikipedia

The Isle of Purbeck is an isolated area of Britain.  This part of southern England is separated from the rest of Dorset by the River Frome, moorland and a long chalk ridge.  The chalk ridge is broken by a small hill at Corfe. Corfe Castle was built on that hill which commands the only route in and out of the Isle.

The first castle was built in the eleventh century.  It predates the Norman conquest.  The castle was owned by the Crown until the sixteenth century when Queen Elizabeth I sold it to her favourite, the Lord Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton.

Sir John Bankes, the Attorney General to Charles I bought the castle in 1635. 

It was a royalist stronghold during the English War.  The defence of the castle was left to Lady Mary Banks because her husband was with the Royal Court.   In the first siege of 1643 she successfully defended the castle and the Parliamentary force withdrew after six weeks.  The second siege in 1646 lasted six weeks before someone from within the garrison led the Parliamentarians in through the postern gate.

After the civil war, Cromwell, decreed that the castle should be destroyed so that it could never again be used as a Royalist stronghold.  The castle was destroyed with explosives and undermined.  Today the ruined bastions lie at odd angles showing that they mush have literally jumped in the air. 

In later centuries, locals stole stone from the Castle to build their homes in the village.

Ruins of the great keep at Corfe: Source: Wikipedia

At the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the Bankes family regained their properties. Rather than rebuild the castle, they chose to build a modern house at their other estate at Kingston Lacey.

During the 1980s Ralph Banks gave Corfe Castle and some of the houses in the village to the National Trust.

Nowadays it is a wonderfully evocative place to enjoy near the south coast of England.