Lindisfarne Castle began as a military necessity. After Henry VIII dissolved the nearby priory in 1537, his troops used the monastic ruins as a naval store. In 1542 he ordered the site fortified against Scottish invasion, and by 1549 a small fort had been built on Beblowe, the highest point of Holy Island, overlooking the harbour. Elizabeth I strengthened it with gun platforms for the new developments in artillery technology, spending nearly twelve hundred pounds on the works in 1570 and 1571. The priory buildings were quarried for stone during construction. When James I united the English and Scottish crowns, the need for the castle declined, though it remained garrisoned from Berwick.

In the eighteenth century, the castle briefly returned to military relevance when Jacobite rebels seized it. The occupation was short-lived -- soldiers from Berwick quickly recaptured the fort and imprisoned the rebels inside. But the Jacobites dug their way out and hid for nine days near Bamburgh Castle before making good their escape. After that excitement, the castle settled into a long decline, serving as a coastguard lookout and eventually becoming a curiosity for early tourists drawn to Holy Island's monastic history and the dramatic tidal causeway that connects it to the mainland.

Lutyens kept the building's defensive bones intact while creating domestic spaces of austere beauty. The entrance requires a steep climb around the rocky base -- originally unprotected by rails in order to emphasise the site's exposed character. When the future George V and Queen Mary visited in 1908, they were reportedly alarmed by the slope and its cobbled surface. Inside, large stone pillars divide the entrance hall like a church nave, dark reddish-brown stone contrasting with whitewashed plaster above bare stone floors. Throughout the castle, Lutyens used stone, brick, slate, and wood to create simple forms, choosing texture over ornamentation. The kitchen is dominated by a massive stone fireplace. In the scullery, a tiny window above a stone sink is framed by the mechanism of the portcullis.

The dining room occupies the original Tudor fort's vaulted interior, its walls supporting the gun battery above. A wide chimney-piece contains an old bread oven, and Neo-Gothic traceried windows, framed by curtains on pull-out poles, give the room a sense of theatrical antiquity. One end wall is painted a rich Prussian blue against a herring-bone red-brick floor. The adjacent ship room uses a deep green wall to similar effect. Lutyens created a long gallery intended to echo the grand galleries of Elizabethan and Jacobean country houses, but at a much smaller scale -- exposed stone arches and oak beams creating grandeur within intimate proportions. The music room was used by the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia, and a cello remains in the room to mark her visits.

Lutyens's most whimsical touch was using upturned herring busses -- old fishing boats -- as garden sheds, their hulls forming shelter against the island winds. The Spanish architect Enric Miralles later cited these upturned boats as inspiration for his design of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh. The walled garden, originally the garrison's vegetable plot, was designed by Lutyens's longtime collaborator Gertrude Jekyll between 1906 and 1912. Hudson sold the castle in 1922, and after passing through two more owners it came to the National Trust in 1944. Two of the boat sheds were destroyed by arson in 2005 and replaced the following year. The castle underwent major renovation from 2016 to 2018. It sits on its crag today much as it appeared to Hudson and Lutyens that first afternoon -- a small, fierce building on a rocky island, surrounded by nothing but the tide, the wind, and the wide Northumberland sky.