Pele Tower, Angle

The site occupies a raised position on the northern bank of a tidal creek and was surrounded by a moat on the other three sides. The standing tower is roughly square in plan and rises to about nine metres. Its walls are built of local sandstone rubble and survive almost to their original height, though the upper floors and the roof are no longer present.

Masonry varies around the building: the northern face is constructed with irregular rubble while the other three faces show courses laid in regular lines with smaller stones used to bring the work into level. A narrow stair turret projects a little from the north and east walls. Near the top of the walls two rows of projecting corbels run around the building on every side except the turret, a feature that indicates there once was a parapet walk with openings for dropping material or objects straight down onto anyone at the base.

The principal entrance stands at first-floor level on the east face; this door is just over a metre tall and has a segmented arch typical of the later medieval period. Above that doorway two narrow vertical slits open into the second storey; these alignments and the corbels above them are interpreted as provision for the chains of a former drawbridge and for a protective hood over that mechanism.

Inside, each floor consisted of a single chamber about 3.6 metres across. The lowest level is slightly pointed in profile and carries a masonry vault, and it served as a cellar or for storage. Access to the first-floor chamber is by a stair that is partly outside the main wall and then continues within; a winding newel stair gives passage to the second and third storeys. Small square windows look out to the south toward the creek, while the remaining openings are narrow vertical slits intended for defence.

Every floor had a fireplace. The first and second storey hearths are set into the north wall and share a common flue that rises within the thickness of the wall to terminate in a largely intact chimney stack. The uppermost hearth sits in the east wall. Each fireplace rests upon a stone bressummer, a horizontal stone lintel supporting the opening. A garderobe is built into the east wall of the first floor, providing a medieval latrine within the tower’s fabric.

In the landscape around the tower, traces recorded until around 1930 show the footprint of another building of similar size beside the former northern moat arm, the position now occupied by Castle Farm. The surviving fabric of the tower itself remains largely in situ, its walls and chimney prominent while the floors and roof no longer survive.