History of Lydford Castle in Devon
By David Nash Ford

L Y D F O R D
C A S T L E
Massive Keep & Stannary Prison

At Lydford, one of the few old castles of Mid-Devon, there is one big fragment of a keep, "square and ruinous without picturesqueness''. It is 53ft square of two storeys with walls more than ten feet thick. A local Elizabethan satirist remarked
They have a castle on a hill.
I took it for an old windmill,
The vanes blown off by weather.
Lydford was the site of an early 10th century Saxon burgh, possibly of a fortification dating from two hundred years earlier. A Norman castle was erected soon after the Conquest, at the tip of the promontory west of the church. The present buildings probably date from around 1195. The place ws certainly garrisoned by 1199 and repairs were being carried out in the early 13th century. This was originally a Royal castle, given by King John to William Bruere in 1216 and by King Henry III to his brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, in 1337 - when the main keep was drastically rebuilt. Neglected in the later Middle Ages when the Duchy of Cornwall was an appanage of the Crown. There was (as a rule) no Duke of Cornwall alive to require a single, not to speak of ten, castles to live in. The building was said to have been in a very poor state of repair in 1546 and, by the early 18th century, was a roofless shell. It was, soon afterward however, repaired for use as a gaol and court-house, where also the Stannary (Tin Mining) Courts were held. This lasted for only a hundred years when it again became derelict. The Duchy of Cornwall placed the ruin in the care of, what is now, English Heritage in 1922.