Inside the Ground Floor of Dunharrow Castle

Dunharrow Castle has never been a ruin in the romantic sense. Unlike many fortresses of its age, it was never besieged into submission or deliberately slighted after a civil war; it simply fell out of fashion. By the early eighteenth century its owners had built themselves a comfortable house in the valley below, and the castle was let to tenant farmers, who stored hay in its hall and kept pigs in its kitchen. That long period of humble use is precisely what saved it. When the trust that now manages the building began its survey, it found the medieval plan of the ground floor almost entirely intact beneath centuries of agricultural clutter.

Visitors approach the castle from the south, crossing a short causeway over what was once a moat, and pass through the Entrance in the middle of the south wall. The doorway leads into the Entrance Passage, a narrow vaulted corridor that runs due north into the heart of the building. Its narrowness was deliberate: any attacker who broke through the outer door would find himself in a confined space, unable to bring more than one or two men forward at a time, and overlooked from the rooms on either side.

The first of these, on the left as you enter, is the guardroom, from which a small window gives a view of anyone standing in the passage. Its stone benches are worn smooth, and the walls are covered with graffiti scratched by bored soldiers, including several board games and a crude drawing of a ship. Across the passage, on the right, is the wine cellar, a low, windowless chamber kept cool by walls more than two metres thick. Curiously, its door could be locked only from the inside, which has led some historians to suggest that it doubled as a refuge in times of danger.

At its northern end, the Entrance Passage meets the Screens Passage, which runs across the full width of the castle from west to east. In medieval great houses, this corridor separated the public world of the hall from the working world of the service rooms, and Dunharrow is no exception. West of the guardroom, in the south-western corner of the castle, are the Stairs, a tight spiral that climbs to the private apartments on the upper floors. North of the stairs, and opening onto the Screens Passage, is the Kitchen, with an enormous fireplace large enough to roast an entire ox. Between the Kitchen and the Entrance Passage lies the bakehouse, its domed bread oven still blackened from use, which allowed bread to be produced without overloading the Kitchen's hearth.

The rooms on the eastern side of the Entrance Passage served rather different purposes. Immediately north of the wine cellar is the armoury, where the castle's weapons and armour were stored and repaired; iron hooks for hanging helmets survive along one wall. Beyond it, against the east wall, is the Well Chamber, which contains a shaft cut forty metres through solid rock. A reliable water supply was essential to any castle, and the well at Dunharrow was enclosed within the walls so that it could not be poisoned or cut off by an enemy.

Across the Screens Passage lies the Great Hall, which fills the whole of the western part of the north range. This was the centre of the castle's social life, where the lord dined with his household and received visitors, and the restoration has concentrated on recovering its original appearance, including a painted ceiling uncovered beneath layers of whitewash. To the east of the hall is the chapel, smaller than one might expect but beautifully finished, with a carved stone basin for holy water beside its door. The north-eastern corner of the castle is taken up by the Buttery, where ale and provisions were issued to the household.

The trust has resisted the temptation to fill these rooms with reproduction furniture. Instead, it uses lighting, sound and a small number of carefully chosen objects to suggest how each space was used. Not everyone approves; some visitors find the rooms bare. Yet the approach allows the building itself, rather than a modern reconstruction of its contents, to tell its story. Practical considerations played a part as well. The thick walls keep the interior cold and damp for much of the year, conditions in which textiles and timber quickly deteriorate, and the trust would rather spend its limited budget on conserving the medieval stonework than on replacing reproductions that would need constant attention.