Corfe Castle

Look up. On a steep green hill, set exactly in a gap through the Purbeck ridge, stand the shattered ruins of a great castle, its towers split and leaning as though frozen mid-collapse. Grey stone walls climb the mound above a grey stone village of the same name, and if you are lucky a plume of steam drifts below as a heritage train rounds the foot of the hill. Corfe Castle is one of the most romantic ruins in England, and every stone of its ruin was made on purpose.

The site has commanded this gap since soon after the Norman Conquest, for whoever held it controlled the only easy way through the Purbeck Hills. There was a stronghold here even earlier: in Saxon times, in the year nine hundred and seventy-eight, the young King Edward, later called Edward the Martyr, was murdered at Corfe, a dark deed that clung to the place for centuries. The stone castle that rose here became a royal fortress and a royal prison, one of the strongest in the land, through the long centuries of the Middle Ages.

Its ruin came in the Civil War. Corfe was held for the King, and twice it was besieged by Parliament's forces. Its great defence is remembered above all for Lady Mary Bankes, who held the castle with a tiny garrison and extraordinary resolve while her husband was away. It fell at last in sixteen forty-six, and Parliament ordered it slighted, deliberately blown apart with gunpowder so that it could never again be defended. That is why the towers lean at such wild angles today: they are not decayed, they are demolished, caught forever in the moment of the explosion.

Let me help you read the scene. First, take in the whole silhouette, the jagged keep and broken curtain walls crowning the hill, and notice how the gatehouse towers slump outward, split by the charges set beneath them. Second, look at how perfectly the castle fits its gap in the ridge, a natural hill of hard rock in a saddle eroded through the limestone, a gateway anyone would want to hold. Third, drop your eye to the village, its cottages and church built from the same warm Purbeck stone as the castle, so that fortress and settlement seem carved from one seam. Fourth, watch for the Swanage steam railway threading below the hill, its engines and carriages a moving picture from an earlier age. And fifth, look wider still to the Purbeck Hills rolling away on either side, grassland rich with wildflowers, butterflies and birds, and beyond them the heaths that shelter some of Britain's rarest reptiles.

A note on safety and access. Corfe lies a little inland, a short detour from the Coast Path, but it is well worth the diversion, and the castle is in the care of the National Trust. If you explore the ruins, take care on the steep slopes and the broken, uneven walls, which are centuries old and were never meant to be climbed.

Here is the story to carry with you. Picture Lady Mary Bankes on these walls, a woman holding a royal castle against an army, refusing to yield through siege after siege while the war turned against her cause. When treachery finally opened the gates, her enemies are said to have respected her courage enough to let her keep the keys of the castle she had defended so well. Those keys survive to this day, a small, human relic of an epic stand, and the leaning towers above you are her monument, ruined but never quite conquered.

From Corfe the Coast Path carries on through Purbeck towards its end, out along Ballard Down to the dazzling white stacks of Old Harry Rocks and the final push to South Haven Point. Consider arriving or leaving by the steam railway for a memorable approach. Take one last look at that broken crown on the hill. Walk safe.