Lea Castle

The site occupies two connected courtyards, constructed in stone and organized around a central fortified keep. An inner ward contains the keep and is surrounded by a surviving portion of curtain wall. To the east an outer ward once stretched away from the core and was entered through a gate complex flanked by two towers.

The principal surviving structure is the rectangular keep, which rises to four floors with a circular tower at each corner that originally rose an extra level. The corner tower at the north survives close to its original height. Only the north-west and north-east walls reach up to the third floor; the remainder of the walls show damage sustained in the seventeenth century. Evidence remains of a forebuilding immediately outside the keep, visible now as a small amount of standing stone.

An opening at the first-floor level has commonly been taken as the main doorway, but that aperture may have served as a service entrance rather than the principal approach. A large opening at second-floor height in the north-east wall would have given direct access into the keep; Karen Dempsey has proposed that this larger entrance provided a formal route used by the castle’s lord and lady, possibly reached by a timber bridge. Dempsey identified architectural features in the masonry that could have supported such external access. Within the keep, the chapel occupied space on the second level in the north tower.

The entrance to the outer ward survives as a two-towered gatehouse built of the same masonry as the keep. Today the curtain wall, gatehouse and the keep remain as ruinous but recognisable elements of the medieval complex, with some towers standing to near their original heights while other sections are fragmentary.