Qualla: Clun Castle

Clun Castle: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Singing Badger, CC BY-SA 2.0. If you took a criminal from Shrewsbury in the 12th century and you brought him to Clun, you brought him to a place where the king's law did not run. The Marcher lord here had a peculiar right: he could execute felons on his own authority, not as the king's officer but as the king's near-equal. Clun Castle was the seat of that authority, an eighty-foot Norman keep on a motte above a bend in the River Clun, twenty miles deep into the buffer zone the Normans built against Wales. Today the keep is a hollowed shell, the great round tower to the southwest is a stump in the grass, and a Victorian sketch of the place looks almost like a Romantic painting. But the architecture still tells the story of a frontier where the rules were different.

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Image: The Singing Badger | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clun Castle: The Picot's Castle

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A. R. Yeo MortimerCat, CC BY 2.5. Robert de Say, nicknamed Picot, was an early Norman baron who took the land from the Anglo-Saxon thegn Edric the Wild after the Conquest. Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, granted Picot twenty-seven manors of which Clun was the largest, and from these holdings the Marcher ...

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Image: A. R. Yeo MortimerCat | CC BY 2.5

Clun Castle: The Castle-Guard System

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0. What made Clun strategically significant was the castle-guard arrangement Henry I established around 1100. Knights from a chain of fiefs east of Clun owed forty days of military service a year to defend the castle, with their fiefs linked to it by the old Roman road running along...

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Image: Jeff Buck | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clun Castle: From Fortress to Hunting Lodge

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Fitzalans inherited Clun through Isabella de Say's marriage to William Fitzalan, Lord of Oswestry, around 1155. They became the dominant Marcher dynasty in this corner of the frontier. Llywelyn the Great pressed against the Marches in the 1230s and Clun was garrisoned by roya...

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Image: Graham Horn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clun Castle: Housman's Quietest Place

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Mackenzie, Public domain. Sir Walter Scott is said to have stayed at the Buffalo Inn in Clun while writing parts of his 1825 novel The Betrothed, basing his fictional castle Garde Doloreuse on the ruin above the town. The town's most famous literary visitor was the poet A.E. Housman, whose A Shropshire La...

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Image: James Mackenzie | Public domain