I have been to.... Sheffield Castle

 The Friends of Sheffield Castle recently organised some tours of the castle as part of the Castlegate Festival in Sheffield. I managed to get one of the tickets, which get snapped up in seconds. The castle is notable for being one of the largest in England (as the curtain wall was vast, bigger than the adjacent town) and it was the prison of Mary Queen of Scots for 14 years. It was slighted after the Civil War and then the site was built over as Sheffield became an industrial city.

A digital model of the castle keep produced by the University of Sheffield and based on the features described in the 1637 castle survey. Sadly no contemporary pictures of it survive, but the complete dogs dinner of different tower styles etc is apparently correct. The Keep is built on Castle Hill, which is the remains of the original Norman Motte. 

It doesn't look like the image now! It is just a huge building site. The walls in the foreground are early Victorian buildings which date from when there was a steel works here. The Medieval moat and bottom structures of the gatehouse are in the middle distance, and the far boundary of the moat is where the row of buildings with tower are in the far distance. 

 

A brief timeline of the castle from the blurb outside the site. The first known castle on the site was Norman, and it was built at the confluence of the Rivers Don and Sheaf, supposedly the southern border of the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, but an important communications node in any case.

This hill is the original Norman Motte. The lighter tone is the original sandstone, the dark layer is shale and earth laid down to raise the height of the Motte. The structure on the top right is a concrete shell built  around remains of the northeast tower in the 1920s. There is a (locked) door giving access to the original tower wall.ls inside. The white wall is the foundations of the Castle Market building built in the 1920s right over the site and demolished some years ago.

The site of the original gate house and moat. The concrete square was also built in the 1920s and is protecting the base of one of the gatehouse towers, and the masonry on the foreground is the site of the drawbridge. The moat is quite deep, around 6m, but only 2m or so has been excavated. Sections of the original Norman ditch run behind it, but have been filled in.

Another view of the site of the gatehouse and drawbridge, you can see more clearly the layer of extra shale and earth used to build up the Motte.

There are still some quite nice bits of dressed stone left, but most of the wall facing was sold off for building in the rest of the city after the castle was slighted in the seventeeth century. Most of the walls which remain are just the rubble cores, and the rest of the castle stone has been incorporated in various buildings around the city. 

This is up on Castle Hill. The white wall is part of the 1920s market building, but the stones of the old castle walls can be seen behind. Some of these are interior walls for towers. The old castle well is at the far end of the ridge, and one of the walls of the old steel works went right over it. 

The wall interiors from the other side. The walls on the near right are early eighteenth century. The hill was squared off then, houses built around the perimeter and a large bowling green constructed in the middle of what had been the courtyard.

The River Sheaf joins the Don here (the Don is off to the left) , both used to be floating cesspits choked with human and industrial waste. This section of the Sheaf was covered over in 1917, but is now being exposed again down to the Don. Those arches are the original 1917 ones. I've done the underground river tour almost as far as here, it stops at the 'Megatron' culvert underground on the right off picture, which is huge and hosts nesting bats.

A very fanciful illustration of the 'Norman Castle'. Of course it looked nothing like that, and Sheffield is apparently a flat rolling plain.

This painting was made in the 1950s, and bears a slightly greater resemblance to the original, at least the layout of some of the walls and towers and rivers, although the structure is far too big. In this image, Sheffield has apparently been transported to the Scottish Highlands, and the city itself has ben replaced with some woodland and fields.

Anyway, that was loads of fun and very interesting. The site has been worked on for years now, but hopefully the exposed (and conserved) sections will be open for general public access as the key features of a new park in Spring 2026.