Every time I visit Scotney Castle this prettified ruin in the East Sussex countryside appears more photogenic than the last.
Visiting Scotney Castle
As a National Trust property, visitors are well catered for with a good car park, toilets, shop, tea rooms and a second hand bookshop. It is well sign posted too and a pleasantly scenic drive.
My Experience
I have been to Scotney Castle several times and I’d recommend a visit as soon as it opens. It does get very crowded, especially at the weekends or holiday periods. It is a pleasant walk to the castle and the park/garden areas are obviously well tended as well as the paths that lead around the lake. The photos are from several visits over the years.
Scotney Castle Photo Gallery
As these photos are taken in the dim and distant past of 2010 they were not taken in RAW so these are pretty much unedited jpgs. I’d like to think my own skill in photography has moved on since then too so these may not be ideal pictures. Sorry!
History
The earliest record from 1137 gives the owner of the estate as Lambert de Scoteni. Roger Ashburnham is credited with building the castle c.1378–80.
Construction of the castle began as a roughly rectangular fortified house with towers in each corner. The original plan may never have been finished, and by 1558 it is likely only the southern tower remained. In 1580 the south wing was rebuilt in Elizabethan architecture style, and around 1630 the eastern range was rebuilt in three-story Inigo Jones style. The Elizabethan wing remained a bailiff’s residence until 1905, but the eastern range was partly dismantled on the completion of the new house in 1843, leaving the ruin as a garden feature.
The Recusant owner Thomas Darrell hid Jesuit Father Richard Blount, S.J. in the castle while he ministered to Roman Catholics from 1591 to 1598. Catholicism was then illegal in England, and during the second raid by authorities to arrest the priest he fled over a wall into the moat and escaped.
The Darrell family owned the estate for some 350 years. In 1778 Edward Hussey bought the estate and his grandson, also Edward, built the ‘new’ Castle to the designs of Anthony Salvin, from sandstone quarried from the slope below. The hollow created was developed into a Quarry Garden and contains a 100-million-year-old impression of a dinosaur’s footprint.
On Christopher Hussey’s death in 1970 the estate was left to the National Trust.
References
The National Trust site with all the entry information, is here.
The history above is copied from the Wiki site here.
There is some useful information on the Historic England site here.