Robert of Mortain built the castle to make a point. The hill above Bishopston was steep, conical, and conspicuous, the kind of natural feature any Norman commander would pick for a stronghold. But it carried something else as well. Before the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the Anglo-Saxons had reportedly discovered what they believed to be a holy cross on this hill, and treated the place as sacred. Robert, William the Conqueror's younger half-brother, watched the spiritual significance of the site and decided to plant his castle directly on top of it. The Saxon name disappeared. The hill became Mons Acutus, sharp hill, and the castle on its summit became the main seat of one of the most powerful men in post-Conquest England.
Acquiring the land took some negotiating. The site was within the Saxon settlement of Bishopston, and the abbot of Athelney Abbey had to be persuaded to give it up. Robert traded him the manor of Purse Caundle, which contemporaries described as an expensive exchange that did the abbey well. With the land secured, Robert's builders used the natural features of the hill to create the standard Norman fortification of the age: an oval motte at the summit with an inner bailey below, surrounded by a wider outer bailey. Village tradition holds that the keep was first built in timber, then later replaced in stone. A medieval deer park was established alongside the castle and the village. The Saxon settlement, in time, adopted the Norman name and became Montacute.
The choice of hill was as much strategic as political. Montacute sits in southern Somerset where the old Roman Fosseway runs north-east toward Bath, and where the Somerset Levels open into a flat, easily controlled landscape. From his castle Robert could overlook and tax the traffic on the Roman road and respond quickly to any unrest on the Levels. He needed to. In 1068, only two years after the Conquest, a major Anglo-Saxon revolt against Norman rule reached as far as Somerset. Rebels besieged Montacute Castle. They failed. Geoffrey de Montbray, Bishop of Coutances and one of William the Conqueror's enforcers in the West Country, brought a relief force and defeated them. The siege confirmed everything Robert had hoped to demonstrate by building his castle on the sacred hill: the Norman grip was tightening, and there was nothing the local English could do about it.
Robert of Mortain made Montacute the caput, the head castle of his honour, which was the technical Norman term for a great lordship. He abandoned another Somerset castle he had begun at Castle Neroche, west of Taunton, to concentrate his authority here. But the family's importance did not survive Robert. His son William of Mortain joined a rebellion against Henry I and lost everything. In 1102 he gave the castle and the surrounding lands to the Cluniac monastic order, which founded Montacute Priory at the foot of the hill. The military role of the castle ended. Its chapel, dedicated to Saint Michael, continued in use into the fourteenth century. The rest of the structure was left to weather. By the time the antiquarian John Leland visited in 1540, he described it as 'party fell to ruin.' Local people had begun quarrying the stone for their own buildings, and by the eighteenth century almost nothing remained above ground.
What stands on the summit today is not Robert's castle but a Georgian replacement. St. Michael's Hill Tower is an eighteenth-century folly built on part of the castle chapel's foundations, named for the same Saint Michael to whom the medieval chapel was dedicated. It is a small circular limestone tower with a spiral staircase climbing inside, and at the top a parapet that opens onto one of the finest views in southern Somerset. From here the visitor sees the medieval deer park curving below, the village of Montacute and its great Elizabethan house just to the east, and the Roman road still running straight across the country. English Heritage surveyed the castle site for the National Trust in April 2000, mapping the earthworks that survive as ridges and hollows under the grass.
It is rare to find a site that carried so many layers of meaning in so short a span of time. The Anglo-Saxons treated the hill as a place of relics and pilgrimage. The Normans treated it as a place of subjugation. The Cluniacs treated it as a place of prayer. The Georgian gentry treated it as a place to put a folly. Modern visitors treat it as a place for a steep walk and a view. The motte that Robert of Mortain shaped from the natural ridge eight hundred and fifty years ago is still recognisably under the turf, if you know where to look. The folly that took its summit is open to walkers from the National Trust's nearby Montacute House. The Norman castle itself, the great stone caput of an eleventh-century lordship, has effectively vanished. Its stones now stand in barns, garden walls, and cottages all the way down the valley.
Located at 50.950°N, 2.722°W in southern Somerset, four miles west of Yeovil. The site sits on a steep conical hill (St. Michael's Hill) rising distinctively from the surrounding farmland, with the small Georgian folly tower visible on its summit. Best viewed from 1,500-3,000 feet. Nearest airfields: Bristol Airport (EGGD) 27 nm north-north-west, Compton Abbas (EGHA) 20 nm east, Henstridge (EGHS) 9 nm east. RNAS Yeovilton (EGDY) is 5 nm north.