Wray Castle (a gothic castle in the Lake District)
Wray Castle (Cumbria) is a Gothic castle owned by the National Trust, sitting above Lake Windermere. Originally built for a retired surgeon from Liverpool, a descendent (who became the local vicar) decided to hand it over to the Trust, so it could be enjoyed by others, and preserved.
One local teenage visitor was the writer Beatrix Potter, who was so enamoured by the place that she bought a local house (Hill Top) with royalties from her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Following suit, when she died, she left thousands of acres to the National Trust.
England is home to around 1500 castles, mostly in landlocked counties or on the Northumberland coast. The oldest inhabited castle in Europe is 900-year old Windsor Castle (a beautiful building, despite differences of opinion about monarchs).
Built to defend against attack or as signs of power and wealth, some have dungeons (the French word for ‘fortified tower’) and were more like ‘coal bunkers’ for people under attack, and later were used as prisons. Moats were often used too as defence.
