England in 1135 had just lost its king, Henry I, and would spend the next two decades fighting a civil war between his daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen. The period known as the Anarchy filled the English landscape with quickly thrown-up motte-and-bailey castles, timber towers on artificial mounds with stockaded enclosures below, built fast by anyone with land worth defending. The Fillongley castle at Castle Hills (sometimes recorded as Fillungeleye Castle in medieval documents) belongs to this generation. A moat was dug around the motte, the spoil pushed up into the mound itself. The defences would have been wooden palisades crowning a clay earthwork. By the reign of Henry III (1216 to 1272), it had become known as Old Fillongley, and by the end of his reign it had been abandoned, presumably because the second castle nearby had absorbed its function.

The second castle at Castle Yard was a fortified manor house held by the de Hastings family, raised around the same time as the Castle Hills motte but conceived as a permanent residence rather than a temporary timber fortification. Its history can be sketched in deaths and inheritances. One of the de Hastings lords was buried at the Greyfriars in Coventry, the Franciscan house whose only surviving fragment is the Christ Church spire still standing in the modern city. The manor stood through the reign of Edward III (1327 to 1377), although by then the de Hastings had stopped living in it. In 1389 it passed by inheritance to the Beauchamps, the family that held the Earl of Warwick title and ran much of the Midlands from their fortress at Warwick Castle twenty miles to the south. The Fillongley site was minor in their portfolio, repurposed once more as a manor house through the fourteenth century before they let it slip into ruin in the fifteenth.

By the early fifteenth century the manor was empty, and an empty stone building in a medieval village was effectively a quarry. The stones cut for the de Hastings' walls were dragged into Fillongley itself and reused in cottages, in the church, in barns. The practice was so universal that medieval ruins across England are mostly missing because their materials walked back into the villages that had supplied the labour to build them in the first place. By the time antiquarians began surveying English earthworks in the nineteenth century, what was left at Fillongley was the moat, an irregular platform, and patches of foundation revealed where ploughs had been turned at the edges of fields. George Thomas Clark wrote about Castle Hills in his 1884 study of medieval military architecture; the Builder magazine had described both sites the year before. Each later survey added more detail and less standing fabric.

Today the visitor sees two enclosures of grassed-over earth, both lower than they once were, both reshaped by centuries of ploughing and the occasional drainage scheme. Castle Hills is the more legible: a circular motte with the ring of its surrounding moat still mostly traceable, the inner platform clearly defined. Castle Yard is harder, a roughly rectangular platform with a partial moat and faint ridges marking what may have been outer enclosures. Both have been scheduled ancient monuments since 1925, which protects the ground but does not, of course, restore what is missing. Reading the earthworks requires the patience to walk slowly and the willingness to imagine: a timber tower replaced by a stone manor, a stone manor stripped to its footings, two centuries of comings and goings reduced to two faint humps in two Warwickshire fields where the cattle now graze.