Qualla: Marlborough Castle

Marlborough Castle: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Marlborough Castle: William's Hill, Roger's Castle

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 palisade...

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Marlborough Castle: Civil War and a Fourteen-Year-Old King

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 himse...

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Marlborough Castle: The Royal Prisoner and the Costly Apartments

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Marlborough Castle: Ruin, Inn, and Boarding School

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Ma...

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Marlborough Castle: From the Air

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 th...

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