Qualla: Mulgrave Castle

Mulgrave Castle: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. There are three castles at Mulgrave, and only one of them is real - or rather, only one is currently lived in. The oldest, according to the antiquaries who wrote about it, was built by a giant called Wada, a Saxon legend of Halsingland who supposedly threw up castles and roads across Yorkshire with his bare hands. The second was Norman, raised by Nigel Fossard after the Conquest and held by the Mauleys for seven generations, until Parliament ordered it blown up in 1647. The third - a Georgian country house that still wears the older castle name - is what you actually see today, sitting in 16,000 acres of woodland and pheasant cover above the Esk valley, four miles from Whitby.

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Image: Public domain

Mulgrave Castle: Wada the Giant

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pauline E, CC BY-SA 2.0. The antiquarian John Leland, riding through Yorkshire around 1545, collected local stories about Wada. He was, the country people insisted, a giant who had built castles and laid roads across the moors when the world was young. He came from Halsingland in Sweden, and he was burie...

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Image: Pauline E | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mulgrave Castle: The Norman Stronghold

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frop, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nigel Fossard built the real castle - or rather the documented one - on the same ridge. By 1088 he was a tenant-in-chief of King William, holder of the feudal barony of Mulgrave, with thirty-three and a half knights' fees to his name. The castle occupied the entire width of the r...

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Image: Frop | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mulgrave Castle: Blown Up by Parliament

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frop, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the time of the English Civil War, the castle had passed to Edmund Sheffield, Lord Sheffield of Butterwick, whom Charles I created Earl of Mulgrave. The Sheffield family were Royalists. They garrisoned the castle for the King. After the war, Parliament made its usual decision ...

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Image: Frop | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mulgrave Castle: The Third Castle

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frop, CC BY-SA 4.0. The current Mulgrave Castle - a battlemented country house in stone, not a fortress at all - was built by Lady Catherine Darnley in the early eighteenth century. In 1718, her daughter Catherine Sheffield married William Phipps, and the estate passed to the Phipps family, who stil...

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Image: Frop | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mulgrave Castle: Three Time Layers, One Ridge

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Horncastle, CC BY-SA 2.0. What is remarkable about Mulgrave is that all three versions still exist on the same square mile of ground. The giant's castle survives as a few weathered stones that may have been a wall or may have been nothing at all - the country people decided which. The Norman castle surviv...

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Image: Stephen Horncastle | CC BY-SA 2.0