Norris Castle has no defensive purpose. Its crenellations are decoration, its rough galleted facade theatre, its name borrowed from a medieval landowner who had nothing to do with the building. Lord Henry Seymour wanted a castle and James Wyatt - architect to the Crown, designer of Fonthill Abbey - gave him one. Construction began in 1795 and finished around 1805. Across 225 acres of East Cowes meadow and shoreline, on a mile of waterfront looking out across the Solent, the place was built to look ancient and to be brand new at the same time. Two centuries on, the building is almost unchanged - which is itself a kind of accident, the product of one peculiar bachelor's habits and a long string of owners who couldn't or wouldn't update it.
James Wyatt built Norris Castle in locally quarried stone, with 15 bedrooms, a grand hall, a circular drawing room, and extensive cellars. He gave it the silhouette of a medieval fortress and the comforts of a Regency country house. Humphry Repton - the great landscape designer who picked up where Capability Brown left off - is thought to have laid out the grounds in 1799, including a castellated walled garden that survives. Historic England has listed both the castle as Grade I and the surrounding parks and gardens as Grade I as well; they remain the only Grade I landscape on the Isle of Wight. Lord Seymour commissioned heraldic stained glass from William Raphael Eginton in 1816, set on what Eginton called a "Mosaic Ground."
Lord Henry Seymour did not behave like the owner of a castle. Visitors to the Isle of Wight in 1826 reported a retired bachelor in his eighties who hadn't left the island in twenty or thirty years, who dressed in a blue jacket, trousers and hobnailed boots, and who was so frequently mistaken for a labourer that he played along with it. He drove a dung cart into town. He worked in his own hedges and ditches alongside his men. He would show his estate to visitors while pretending to be a worker, accept their tips, and then hand the coins to his servants with a cheerful "Here you are. I have got you something today!" When Seymour died in 1830 at the age of 84, he was buried at Whippingham Church, and the public lost their access to Norris Castle for the next 145 years.
In 1831, a 12-year-old Princess Victoria came to the Isle of Wight on holiday and stayed at Norris Castle with her mother, the Duchess of Kent. She returned in 1833. The visits made an impression deep enough that, when Victoria looked for a private country home of her own a decade later, she came back to East Cowes. In 1844 she tried to buy Norris Castle outright from its then owner, the newspaper tycoon Robert Bell. He asked too much. So instead, in 1845, she bought the neighbouring Osborne House estate and had Prince Albert design a new Italianate summer palace there. Norris Castle sat beside Osborne for the rest of Victoria's life. The two estates share a boundary. The princess holiday at one made the queen's retreat at the other possible.
Seymour's brother George took the castle for nine years and sold it in 1839 to Robert Bell, the founder of the Weekly Dispatch. Bell built the mile-long sea wall that still defines the estate's waterfront, at a cost of £20,000. The Duke and Duchess of Bedford bought it in 1880 - the Duchess had just been appointed Mistress of the Robes to Queen Victoria, and they wanted to be near Osborne. In July 1887 the German Emperor Frederick III and his wife Victoria, Princess Royal - the elder Victoria's eldest daughter - spent about a month at Norris Castle while Frederick recuperated from throat surgery. He would die of laryngeal cancer the following June, after only 99 days as Kaiser. Later visitors included the Philadelphia millionaire A. J. Drexel; Sir Horatio Davies, a former Lord Mayor of London; and Sir Richard Burbidge, managing director of Harrods, who used the estate to billet Canadian troops and their horses through the First World War.
Through the twentieth century Norris Castle slowly fell asleep. The Great War saw it given over to soldiers. The Second World War sent army troops back in. By the time it changed hands in 1955, after Mrs Birkbeck's death, the estate was sold off as nineteen separate lots; the castle and its 34-acre core went to a Mrs Catherine Annie Briscoe George, and the rest scattered. Her daughter and son-in-law - Commander and Mrs Lacon - spent years buying back the original lands and reassembled the full 225-acre estate. In 1975 they opened the castle to the public for the first time since Seymour's death. There was tour income, but the building had been deferred-maintenance for nearly two centuries, and it kept needing more than tour income could pay.
Norris Castle is closed to the public today, awaiting restoration. Walk the perimeter and you'll see the sea wall Bell built, the silhouette Wyatt drew against the sky, the trees Repton placed. Look closely at the castle itself and you'll find a German shower bath that Kaiser Wilhelm II had installed during his frequent late-Victorian visits - it's still in place. The estate also keeps memory of less famous moments: a 1971 episode of Doctor Who and the Sea Devils was filmed across the grounds with Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning; in the 1980s the BBC made other use of the place. The building has remained virtually unaltered for more than 200 years - a Wyatt original frozen at the moment of its completion, surrounded by Repton's landscape, with the Solent at its feet and Osborne next door.
Located at 50.76°N, 1.27°W, on the north coast of the Isle of Wight at East Cowes. Best viewed from low altitude on a westerly approach into Bembridge (EGHJ) or Sandown (EGHN); the castle and the adjacent Osborne House estate sit together on the shore east of the River Medina mouth. Southampton (EGHI) lies directly across the Solent to the north. Cowes Roads is heavily trafficked, especially during Cowes Week in August - expect yacht traffic and restricted airspace at the major regattas.