Rothley Castle, Rothley, Northumberland

In the middle of the 18th century Wallington Hall, west of Morpeth in Northumberland, was the seat of Sir Walter Calverley Blackett. Like many men of his time, he remodelled his park and introduced fashionable landscape features. On Rothley Crags, a windswept outcrop of rock north of Wallington Hall, he erected a sham castle which served as a distant eye-catcher from the house.

‘Rothley Tower’ was built for Sir Walter (1707-1777) in 1746-47 as the centrepiece of the newly-walled Rothley deer park. A central tower was linked by curtain walls to two smaller turrets, all with battlements and gothic detailing. The stonemasons were John Codling and George Brown, whose famed brother Lancelot (aka Capability) gave advice to Sir Walter, although it is sadly little-documented. A plan in the collection at Wallington Hall suggests that a more ambitious scheme, with a spire on the central tower and further turrets, was initially planned but later abandoned. The Duchess of Northumberland, a careful recorder of the country houses she visited, noted in her diaries that the architect was Daniel Garrett (?-1753) , and in 1775 the Duchess had a sketch taken for her collection:

As well as being an eye-catcher from Wallington Hall and a picnic destination, the folly might also have had a defensive purpose. Built immediately after the Jacobite uprising had put the northern counties of England on high alert for invading armies of Scots, the tower was equipped with 6 brass guns in 1748, and was ready to deter the enemy if required.

With the coming of more peaceful times, the Castle (as it is named on a 1777 estate plan) became purely decorative in purpose. A traveller who saw the folly in 1766 was told it was intended to be an ‘object’ in the landscape, a sea-mark and a deer-shelter, the park at that date being ‘full of deer and game’. The natural historian John Wallis wrote in 1769 that the entrance was flanked by two ‘jaw-bones of a Whale’, over seventeen feet tall, and the creature’s vast shoulder blades were also on display.

In a county rich in medieval strongholds Blackett clearly wished people to believe they were looking at a genuine fortification, and the local poet Thomas Oliver suggested as much in ‘On a View of Roadley Castle…’, written before 1777:

Upon its airy summit high,
An antique tower appears,
Who to the stranger passing by,
Seems aged a thousand years.

The historian William Hutchinson was fooled when he visited in 1778. After missing the ‘proper road’ he was forced to climb a fence and clamber up the steep crag only to find that the ‘object of [his] anxious curiosity’ was ‘no other than an ornamental structure’. But he did at least concede that the situation was ‘romantick’. In the central tower were stone tables and chairs of rude form, and the battlements gave a view to the sea and Rothley Lake. Hutchinson also noted the statuary at the folly, which he described as ‘huge heads of griffins’ and ‘two preposterous effigies, representative of no known dress, personage or people’.

The origin of the two stone figures (called Caesar and Pompey in Oliver’s poem) is not known, but two degraded torsos that remain in the gardens today may be remnants of the ‘preposterous effigies’.

The griffins are easier to identify, and came from a London gate that was pulled down in 1761. Bishopsgate was once topped by the ‘city arms supported by dragons’, and these are the 4 ‘griffins’ that once adorned Rothley Castle, but can now be found close to Wallington Hall. The story goes that Sir Walter purchased a quantity of stone from the demolition of Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, and had it brought north by sea as ballast in his colliers that were empty on the return trip to Northumberland.

Eneas Mackenzie produced an updated history of the county in 1825. He acknowledged that Hutchinson had been in ‘peevish humour’ when he wrote so disparagingly of the sham castle, but repeated some of the earlier writer’s description to illustrate how things had by then changed at Rothley: soon after Sir Walter’s death in 1777 his heir removed the deer and put the parkland ‘under cultivation’. The Northumberland historian, Rev. John Hodgson, described the area in 1827 and by then Rothley Castle was ‘neglected’ and Hodgson accused travellers and local youths of vandalising the statues.

This accounts for the removal of the statuary to the grounds of Wallington Hall. The griffin heads were moved to woods on the estate in the nineteenth century, and then in around 1929 to the lawn in front of Wallington Hall, where they can be seen today (their moss-covered wings can be found in another part of the garden). Their sudden appearance as one rounds a corner remains, as Barbara Jones wrote in her research notes, ‘very startling’.

In the 19th century the family continued to visit Rothley Park and the Wallington collection has sketches taken, and botanical specimens collected, on visits to the castle. The park was used for fox hunting, with the two follies making useful landmarks. Rothley had also become a popular destination for walkers and for excursionists on the newly-arrived Wansbeck Railway (axed in the 1950s, but still walkable in parts and known affectionately as the ‘Wannie Line’). Individual picnic parties were politely requested to apply for permission to visit the crags ten days in advance, or tourists could join an organised trip with tea and music:

A little over a century after it was built the origins of the folly had been forgotten. The surveyors working on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey maps were told the romantic tale that it was ‘used to shelter cattle in troublous times’.

Happily the folly, described in 1902 as ‘the product of the questionable taste of the time of the Georges’, survived the vagaries of fashion and was consolidated as a romantic ruin in the first decade of this century. There are walks across fields to the castle, and a platform in the central tower gives wonderful views across the surrounding countryside. Having approached the folly under blue skies the weather changed rapidly, and the Flâneuse decided it was time to retreat before she was blown off the crags.

Wallington Hall and Rothley Castle (grade II*) are both in the care of the National Trust. Check an OS map for the footpaths to Rothley Castle https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/wallington

The Flâneuse first visited Rothley Castle whilst at Girl Guide camp in the area, and an obsession was born. She has revisited many times, often in the august company of experts Harry Beamish and Nick Owen, who are thanked for sharing their knowledge of the Wallington estate.

Your comments and thoughts are always most welcome. The comments box is at the foot of the page if you’d like to get in touch. Thank you for reading.