Bailey & Bew Castle - in the Debatable Lands

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There is a memorial in the church yard to the fallen of the 1914-1918 war.

The villages who were killed in action are named on the memorial.

Some of the fallen are also buried in the church yard and have individual tombstones.

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The weather here has not been kind to the sandstone and the engravings of many of the older stones are faded. Bewcastle was at the heart of Routledge territory in Reiver days and I could not fail to notice that even today this family name continues to occur frequently on the more modern graves.








Though there are also a few Armstrongs buried here:-


Other family names which occur frequently in this cemetery include Waugh, Moscrop, Cavers, Graham and Lauder.

Beyond the wall of the cemetery is Bew Castle, subject of my next post.

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There was castle erected here in Norman times around 1092, which is believed to have been destroyed by Scots invaders in 1173, and the castle which we see today was built between 1361 and 1371 by John de Strivelyn, one of the king's generals.

The south wall survives almost to its original height.

The castle was originally surrounded by a moat, but this has long since dried up, leaving a grassy trench all round.

The castle stands on a lonely windswept spot. To the east is the vast wilderness of Spadeadam, one of the largest uninhabited areas in Britain, used by the government in the 1950's for testing engines for the Blue Streak rocket, and now used by the Royal Air Force as a practice bombing range.

A self portrait within the area of the castle walls, Black Watch acrylic kilt from Union Kilts.

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The gatehouse in the south-west corner is the best surviving part of the castle.

The Scots had captured the castle in 1401, when it was the home of Christiana de Middleton and her son John, who were taken prisoner and ransomed, and after the English regained it, the Duke of Gloucester ordered that it be garrisoned against future attack by the Scots and the gatehouse was added around 1478.

The gatehouse stonework is still standing almost to its original height.
The castle was attacked and its outbuildings burned by the Armstrongs in 1541, as revenge for the earlier murder of Ambrose Armstrong when he had been caught thieving cattle, and the castle itself was ransacked and burnt by Border Reivers in 1583.

Standing in the gatehouse.

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From a corner of the gatehouse rises this staircase within the thickness of the walls. It led to a garde-robe (toilet) and to two spy holes overlooking the entrance.

The castle passed to the Grahams in 1630 and gradually decayed until it was sold to the neighbouring farm in 1900. In 1968 it was sold to a London property company who planned to sell it in many small non-removeable squares to anyone who wanted to own part of a historic castle but the scheme failed. No one is quite sure who now owns the castle and it continues to decay, though it is listed by English Heritage as a historic building which cannot be demolished.


I left Bewcastle to have lunch at Carlisle Airport and on my way I spotted what appeared to be a Tower House.

In fact there were two towers, with two-storey accommodation linking them and a walled courtyard.

Askerton Castle was a medieval Dacre and later Howard stronghold, fortified against the Scottish Reivers, which passed through marriage to a daughter of the 9th Earl of Carlisle and into the Eden family who continue to operate a working farm from here today.

That's all for today folks.