Castles wanted - preferably ruined, plus dungeons

This may be sentimental of me, but I'm a romantic and I rather like castles with a bit of wear on them. The well-kept ones like this one at Ludlow in Shropshire,  have a rugged grandeur and give a lot more scope for a writer's research, but there's something about a ruin.

The one lurking behind me on my usual mugshot is a good case in point: Dunstanburgh has one of the best locations in the country - acres of green, little villages, wild Northumberland coast - but it wouldn't have the same charm for me if it was complete and shiny-new.

'Athelstan's Tower' at Exeter, where the Rougemont Castle site is a delectable public garden and the sandstone tower sits in the wall near the war memorial, is part of my husband's home-town memories.


The battered gatehouse of the old castle at Sherborne in Dorset- the town has two, the second later and swankier - breathes long-vanished adventure to me, even (maybe especially) in a dull and rainy autumn afternoon.

Nonsense for a medievalist, I know, but indulge me.

Of course, a working medieval castle would not be complete without a place to hold prisoners.

Medieval castles and dungeons tend to go together in people's imaginations.What we imagine as a typical dungeon, however - dark, underground, no windows, lots of chains - was less common in the Middle Ages than is assumed. 

Take the word 'dungeon'. Its earliest form, donjon, meant a keep or tower, a strong defensive position. Over time that tower has been taken to mean a prison, often underground in a castle. This form of prison was in fact an oubliette (meaning 'forgotten place') and was far darker and more grim than a dungeon. 

Famous dungeons include the Tower of London and those at Pontefract Castle and Alnwick Castle, though true dungeons in castles were not usual until later in the Middle Ages. Often noble prisoners, captured and held for ransom in the dungeon, would be kept in a secure, comfortable place within the host's castle: certainly the room would be well-guarded, but we should not picture a Richard the Lionheart or Charles of Orleans languishing in the rat-infested, damp stone cell of imagination. Life expectancy in an oubliette would be short, and bad for the ransom business. 'Common' prisoners might be kept in gate houses, while those considered undesirable and disposable but not to be actually murdered could end up down with the rats in the oubliette.

Lindsay Townsend.