Reasons for Designation
A tower keep castle is a strongly fortified residence in which the keep is the
principal defensive feature. The keep may be free-standing or surrounded by a
defensive enclosure; they are normally square in shape, although other shapes
are known. Internally they have several floors providing accommodation of
various types. If the keep has an attached enclosure this will normally be
defined by a defensive wall, frequently with an external ditch. Access into
the enclosure was provided by a bridge across the ditch, allowing entry via a
gatehouse. Additional buildings, including stabling for animals and workshops,
may be found within the enclosure. Tower keep castles were built throughout
the medieval period, from immediately after the Norman Conquest to the mid-
15th century, with a peak in the middle of the 12th century. A few were
constructed on the sites of earlier earthwork castle types but most were new
creations. They provided strongly fortified residences for the king or leading
families and occur in both urban or rural situations. Tower keep castles are
widely dispersed throughout England with a major concentration on the Welsh
border. They are rare nationally with only 104 recorded examples. Considerable
diversity of form is exhibited with no two examples being exactly alike. With
other castle types, they are major medieval monument types which, belonging to
the highest levels of society, frequently acted as major administrative
centres and formed the foci for developing settlement patterns. Castles
generally provide an emotive and evocative link to the past and can provide a
valuable educational resource, both with respect to medieval warfare and
defence, and to wider aspects of medieval society. All examples retaining
significant remains of medieval date are considered to be nationally
important.
Greenhalgh Castle is a late medieval castle which is an unusual variant of a
tower keep castle. Both the form of the main keep, with its corner towers,
and the absence of a defended outer enclosure are unusual. The form probably
owes much to other types of castles and defended houses developing in the
north at this date; these include the tower houses commonly found in the
borderlands with Scotland, and quadrangular castles in which an open enclosure
is surrounded by a defensive wall which has large corner towers providing
domestic and other accommodation.
Despite part destruction of the castle during the Civil War and some later
stone robbing, Greenhalgh Castle survives reasonably well and is unencumbered
by modern development. It retains upstanding medieval fabric and will also
contain buried remains of the 15th century castle and the earlier medieval
manor house which is known from documentary sources to have existed here. It
will contribute to the study of the development of the castle in the north of
England.
Details
The monument includes the upstanding and buried remains of Greenhalgh Castle,
an area of cultivation terraces immediately to the south east of the castle,
and the site and buried remains of Greenhalgh manor house which preceded
the castle. It is located on the top of a low knoll originally surrounded by a
marshy swamp sometimes erroneously described as a moat. The summit of the
knoll has been scarped to give a virtually square, flat top with steep slopes
all round. The upstanding remains include the south west tower of what was
originally a square keep with towers at each corner. The surviving tower is
constructed of coursed sandstone facing stones with a rubble core and angle
quoins. It measures approximately 7.5m square, stands up to a maximum height
of 10m, and has walls an average of 1.6m thick. There are traces of the
original entrance at the east corner. Arrow slits with splayed openings can be
seen in the west and north corners and midway along the north west side.
Traces of others are visible in the south west and south east sides and in the
south corner. In the north east side there is a fireplace and at first floor
level there are remains of windows. There are no upstanding remains of the
three other corner towers, however, on all sides of the knoll's summit apart
from the south west there are traces of a rubble bank up to 4m wide and 0.8m
high which is interpreted as the foundation wall of the main block. On the
south east slope of the knoll there are a number of well preserved
agricultural terraces associated with the castle.
In the 14th and 15th centuries the manor, or estate, which had its
headquarters at Greenhalgh, belonged to the Lord of Wyresdale, but it was
given to Thomas Stanley, first Earl of Derby, as a thank-offering by Henry VII
for his support at the battles of Bosworth (1485) and Stoke (1487). In 1490
the earl received permission to fortify his manor house by constructing the
castle, a square tower with additional towers at each corner. The monument is
of unusual form with elements of both tower keep and quadrangular castle, and
as such it may owe much to the quadrangular castle building tradition which
was common during the 15th century. It is unlikely the Earls of Derby resided
at the castle, indeed custody of the castle was given to Thurstan Tyldesley
and then Sir Richard Shireburne during the mid-16th century. During the
Civil War the castle was held for the king by men loyal to the Earl of Derby,
but was not besieged until 1645 when the garrison surrendered. Thereafter
the timber was removed, the walls breached, and the castle rendered untenable.
A field boundary on the monument's south east side, a stile and the posts for
an information board are all excluded from the scheduling but the ground
beneath these features is included.
MAP EXTRACT
The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract.
