Hartshill Castle

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Remains of the western curtain wall of Hartshill Castle
The manor's remaining fireplace from the 1560s

Hartshill Castle is a ruined castle in the village of Hartshill on the outskirts of Nuneaton in the English county of Warwickshire .

Settlement and prehistory

Nowhere else in Warwickshire is there so much evidence of uninterrupted settlement from the earliest times as in the Hartshill and Oldbury hills.

In the Stone Age (around 10,000 BC) tribes lived here. They were nomads who, although they did not go far, wandered the area in search of flint ; that they needed to make tools and weapons. They found him in the boulder clay at the foot of the Hartshill ridge near the River Anker . Remains of flint artefacts from the Stone Age and bones of red deer and woolly rhinos have been found in the sand and gravel near the river at Witherly .

Over the centuries, tribes from the Stone and Bronze Ages, Anglo-Saxons , Danes and Normans shaped the area.

In the Domesday Book of 1086 Hartshill appears as "Ardreshill". 13 families lived here when the paths through the woods were still poor and difficult to find.

Castle

In 1125 Hugh de Hardreshull , who had received the land as a fief, had a moth built over the Athestone . The walls were made of wood and the mound was crowned by a wooden tower. The landlord lived there and it also served as a lookout and watchtower. The first stone building on the castle was a chapel in the 13th century . Hugh de Hardreshull's son, Robert de Hardreshull (or Hartshill ), fell together with Simon de Montford in the Battle of Evesham in 1265 , and the castle was no longer used from then on.

In 1330 a John de Hardreshull had it rebuilt. He had a curtain wall , 1.2 meters thick and 5 meters high, made of granite . It was provided with cross-shaped loopholes in sandstone . King Henry VII stayed there sometime before the Battle of Bosworth . The property was later destroyed by the effects of the war.

Today a moat has been preserved on the west side of the castle, as well as the north gate and traces of the west gate. However, there is no evidence of the main entrance from the south. It is also believed that there was a tower in the southwest corner.

Mansion

During the Tudor era , around 1560, Michael and Edmund Parker , who leased the property, had a half - timbered manor house built in the northeast corner of the courtyard. It was demolished in the 1950s; only one chimney in the northeast corner has survived to this day.

Web links and sources

Commons : Hartshill Castle  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 52 ° 32 ′ 40.9 "  N , 1 ° 31 ′ 19.9"  W.