Qualla: Kendal Castle

Kendal Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit mattbuck (category), CC BY-SA 3.0. It sits on top of a drumlin - one of the smooth, elongated mounds that the last ice sheet pressed into the Lake District landscape - and from the walls of the surviving tower you can see why anyone with thirteenth-century power would have wanted to build here. The Kent valley spreads below you in three directions, Kendal pooled in the bottom, the western fells lifting toward Scout Scar and the Lakes. The Parr family lived here for generations. Their most famous descendant, Catherine Parr, became Henry VIII's sixth and final wife, the one who outlived him. For a long time it was believed that she had been born in the castle itself. Modern research has gently corrected that romance: by Catherine's birth in 1512, the castle was already crumbling, and her father preferred London. She was almost certainly born in Blackfriars. But Kendal Castle is still where the Parr fortune was rooted, and the ruin still stands above the town that bears their queen's name.

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Image: mattbuck (category) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Kendal Castle: Two Castles, One Town

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Hodgins, CC BY-SA 2.0. Kendal had two medieval castles. The earlier one, Castle Howe, was a Norman motte-and-bailey raised on the west side of the town shortly after the Conquest, when the settlement still went under the name Kirkbie Strickland. By the late twelfth century - probably in the 1180s or 11...

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Image: Tim Hodgins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kendal Castle: The Parr Inheritance

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Heardman, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sir William Parr married Elizabeth Ros, heiress of the Barony of Kendal, during the reign of Edward III in the mid-fourteenth century. The marriage brought the castle into a family that would, over the next century and a half, push steadily upward into the orbit of the Tudor cour...

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Image: Alan Heardman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kendal Castle: Keats on the Walls

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Park, CC BY-SA 2.0. Poet John Keats visited the ruins in the summer of 1818, in the middle of his walking tour of the Lakes with his friend Charles Brown. The two had stayed the previous night at Endmoor, walked up to Kendal, climbed the drumlin to see the castle, and then continued on to Windermere...

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Image: Colin Park | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kendal Castle: Excavation and Survival

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Herrick from Sheffield, UK, CC BY 2.0. Serious investigation of the castle began surprisingly recently. A small excavation led by J. E. Spence and involving pupils from nearby Heversham Grammar School was carried out on the site of the gatehouse in 1951. Barbara Harbottle - one of the leading medieval archaeologists o...

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Image: Tim Herrick from Sheffield, UK | CC BY 2.0