Hedingham Castle

The manor of Hedingham was awarded to Aubrey de Vere I by William the Conqueror by 1086. The castle was constructed by the de Veres in the late 11th and early 12th centuries, and the keep in the 1130s and 1140s. To accommodate the existing castle, a large ditch was cut through a natural spur westward into the Colne Valley in order to form a ringwork and inner bailey; an outer bailey extended south further into the valley and what is now the modern village of Castle Hedingham. The stone keep is the only mediaeval structure to survive, and is in an excellent state of preservation. The keep is nearly square, a common shape for Norman keeps. The east and west sides are 53 ft long and the north–south sides about 58 ft. The main part of the keep stands more than 70 ft tall, and the turrets rise an additional 15 to above the parapets, commanding the countryside around it from its elevated position atop the ringwork. The walls are about 11 ft thick at the base and average 10 ft thick at the top. They are constructed from flint rubble bound with lime mortar, but, very unusually for an Essex castle, are faced with ashlar stone transported from a quarry in Barnack, Northamptonshire. The keep has five floors including the Great or Banqueting Hall with a large fireplace and a central arch extending two storeys. The top floor may have been added around the 15th century, replacing a pyramid-shaped roof. This is a recent theory, however, and many older sources have noted the similar plans of Hedingham Castle and Rochester Castle, which was begun about 1126 and has four floors and four turrets. • Illustration — Floor plans of the keep from The Growth of the English House by John Alfred Gotch, 1909. Changes were made in subsequent years, particularly during the Tudor period. Two of the original four corner turrets are missing. Their demise is owing to the ambitious building plans of Henry VII, which required vast amounts of stone. The outer buildings, including the hall, drawbridge and others, were replaced during the Tudor period. However, those structures have now also been lost. The only exception is the red-brick bridge of four spans that connects the inner bailey to the outer bailey, lying to the north-east of the keep. The bridge was built in the late 15th or early 16th century and has been restored several times. A chapel was previously located to the south of the stone keep within the inner bailey. Around 1700, a Queen Anne style red-brick mansion was built in the outer bailey by Sir William Ashhurst, an MP and a former Lord Mayor of London. This was built sometime between his purchase of the property in 1693 and his death in 1719.

Hedingham Castle was the location for episode 2 of The Landscape of Man aired on Channel 4 in 2010, in which the castle grounds and gardens, which had been left to become a wilderness throughout the 20th century, were restored. The castle has also been a location for the feature film The Reckoning (2004) and for the BBC series Ivanhoe (1997). In 2001, British pop group Steps filmed part of the music video (which was largely animated) for their single, "Words Are Not Enough" inside the castle. The documentaries Made in Britain (2005) with Fred Dibnah, The Shakespeare Theory (2013) with Derek Jacobi and A History of Britain with Simon Schama have used Hedingham Castle as a location. The castle also appeared in a 1997 photo-shoot for Vanity Fair featuring Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow; the photograph can be seen hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The castle serves as the location of John Cleese's The Dinosaur Hour on GB News.