Walk into the grounds of Marlborough College, past the brick houses and the cricket pitch, and you come to a tree-covered hill that doesn't quite fit. Locally it has always just been The Mound. Boys at the school carved their initials into its slopes for generations, and headmasters discouraged climbing it. In the early 2010s, archaeologists drilled core samples from inside and ran them through a radiocarbon lab. The answer came back: 2400 BC. The Mound is roughly contemporary with Silbury Hill, the largest prehistoric mound in Europe, just six miles away. Centuries before anyone in Wiltshire had heard of the Romans, someone had piled this hill up. The Normans, four thousand years later, looked at it and decided it would do nicely for a castle.
In 1067, the year after Hastings, William the Conqueror claimed the area around Marlborough and gave Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, the job of putting a fortification on top of the prehistoric mound. Roger built a motte-and-bailey in timber: a wooden tower on the hilltop, a palisaded yard at its foot, and ditches around the whole thing. The Saxon barrow, perhaps the so-called barrow of Maerla from which the town takes its name, became a Norman motte without anyone having to dig a foot of new earth. William declared the surrounding woodlands his royal hunting ground, the Savernake Forest, and Marlborough became a stop on the king's circuit. By 1110 his son Henry I was spending Easter at the castle, which means it was finished enough to house a court.
In July 1139, during the chaos of Stephen and Matilda's war, King Stephen besieged Marlborough Castle. He gave up after a month to fight elsewhere. Eight years later, in 1147, a fourteen-year-old boy marched into Wiltshire at the head of a small army and took the castle for himself. The boy was the future Henry II of England. Two years after that he was back at Marlborough, negotiating with David I of Scotland about a possible northern alliance against Stephen. By the 1170s the castle was being rebuilt in stone, and royal accounts show £43 spent on building materials to make the king's chambers more comfortable. Prince John, the future king, married Isabel of Gloucester at Marlborough in 1189. He came back here repeatedly during his reign, 51 visits in all, and set up a treasury to mint coins on the spot.
After John, the castle's role shifted from frontier strongpoint to comfortable royal residence. The English kings of the thirteenth century needed places to keep awkward relatives, and from 1223 to 1224 Marlborough housed Eleanor of Brittany, cousin of Henry III. By the rules of primogeniture Eleanor had a better claim to the throne than Henry did, which made her a permanent political problem. The royal council ordered extra horsemen and crossbowmen for her custody. Henry III himself spent the enormous sum of £2,000 between 1227 and 1272 on the castle's apartments, chambers, and chapel of St Nicholas. Edmund FitzAlan, who would grow up to become the 9th Earl of Arundel, was born inside the castle walls on 1 May 1285, when the building was serving as the dower house of Queen Eleanor of Provence.
After 1273 Marlborough was no longer a royal favourite. The castle was a ruin by 1403. In the 1660s, Francis Seymour built a new house on the site, and his grandson Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset, replaced it in 1683 with the building that survives today as the heart of Marlborough College. In between, the place spent decades as a fashionable coaching inn on the Old Bath Road, the route from London to the spa town of Bath. The Marlborough Club, made up of local Tory gentlemen, met there from 1774 until 1842. The poet Stephen Duck, known as the thresher poet because he had worked the harvest before being patronised by Queen Caroline, wrote an entire poem describing the house. In 1843 the inn was reborn as a school. The Mound sits in its grounds still, mostly closed to the public except on rare open days, with the Norman castle's keep and curtain walls traced in fragments beneath the lawn.
Marlborough sits in the Kennet valley, with the chalk downs rising to the north and south. The Mound is the conspicuous tree-covered hillock in the middle of Marlborough College's grounds at the west end of the town's High Street, one of the widest in Britain. Silbury Hill and the Avebury stone circle lie six miles west; Savernake Forest spreads to the south-east. View from 2,000 to 3,500 feet for the clearest sense of the mound's scale against the surrounding college buildings.
Located at 51.4167 N, 1.73722 W in Marlborough, Wiltshire. The Mound is in the grounds of Marlborough College at the west end of the High Street. Nearest GA airfields: Clench Common to the south, Manton (Marlborough Airfield) to the west. The Kennet valley, the Marlborough Downs, and the great prehistoric monuments of Avebury and Silbury Hill are all visible in clear weather.