Qualla: Helmsley Castle

Helmsley Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tom P from Scottish Borders, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0. There is a moment, walking up to Helmsley Castle from the market square, when the East Tower comes into view and one half of it is missing. The remaining half stands as tall and square as it did when Edward III slept inside it in 1334; the other half lies in the ditch below, sheared away in a single deliberate explosion. Both halves are deliberate. The standing half is what English kings and Yorkshire barons built over five centuries. The fallen half is what Parliament took down in 1644 - and what an 18th-century landowner happily left lying there, because his new mansion looked better with a ruin in the view.

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Image: Tom P from Scottish Borders, Scotland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Helmsley Castle: A Castle on a Rock Above the Rye

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Griffiths, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walter l'Espec built the first timber castle here around 1120, on a rocky outcrop above the River Rye. He was a Norman baron with no children and a habit of giving land away to monks - it was Walter who granted the meadow three kilometres west where Rievaulx Abbey rose, and Aelre...

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Image: Bill Griffiths | CC BY-SA 2.0

Helmsley Castle: The King Who Slept Here and the King Who Did Not

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James T M Towill, CC BY-SA 2.0. Edward III stayed for five days in 1334, probably while the East Tower was being heightened for the royal occasion. A century and a half later, Edmund de Roos sold the castle to Richard, Duke of Gloucester - the future Richard III - in 1478. Richard never bothered with Helmsley; ...

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Image: James T M Towill | CC BY-SA 2.0

Helmsley Castle: Three Months Under the Guns

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Jordan, CC BY-SA 2.0. In September 1644, with Parliament's army flooding north after Marston Moor, Sir Thomas Fairfax brought a force to Helmsley to take the last Royalist stronghold in the area. Sir Jordan Crosland held the castle for the King with about 200 men. Fairfax could not bring up siege guns...

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Image: Peter Jordan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Helmsley Castle: A Ruin by Design

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. The castle changed hands twice more - to George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, and in 1695 to Charles Duncombe, a London banker who paid ninety thousand pounds for the forty-thousand-acre estate (roughly eleven million in 2018 money). Duncombe's heir, who took the famil...

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Image: andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0