Qualla: Fillongley Castle

Fillongley Castle: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Fillongley has two castles, both of them ghosts. Neither has standing walls. Both occupied positions chosen for the same reason: rising ground in a corner of north Warwickshire where the country roads still wander as they did in the twelfth century. The first castle, raised around 1135 from timber on a mound at Castle Hills, lasted barely a hundred years. The second, a fortified manor house at Castle Yard built about the same time on the other side of the village, lasted three. Stones from its abandoned walls were carted into Fillongley itself in the fifteenth century to patch other buildings. What remains today is an outline scratched into the turf, scheduled as an ancient monument since 1925.

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Fillongley Castle: Castle Hills, 1135

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 tow...

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Fillongley Castle: The Hastings and the Beauchamps

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 inheri...

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Fillongley Castle: Stone Carted Away

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 unive...

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Fillongley Castle: Reading the Earthworks

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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