Sutton Valence Castle

Sutton Valence Castle stands on a spur of the Chart Hills above the village of Sutton Valence in Kent. Built in the late 12th century, probably by Baldwin of Bethune, it once guarded a key route from Maidstone to the south-coast ports. The castle had an inner and outer bailey, a barbican and a three-storey keep on its southern side. It passed through the Marshal, de Montfort and Valence families before falling out of use in the early 14th century. Today only the keep survives, managed by English Heritage. The keep is a massive ragstone and flint structure, 11 metres square with walls 2.4 metres thick. It rises to about 7 metres and once stood 20 metres high, entered by an external stair to a first-floor door. Inside, a spiral staircase in a corner tower linked the floors, and clasping buttresses reinforced the corners. The outer baileys and barbican survive as earthworks, while a dry ditch once protected the inner bailey. Visitors walk among grassy earthworks that mark the baileys and barbican. The keep’s ruins stand on the southern edge, its thick walls and stairway still visible. Ivy once covered the walls, as the historian Edward Hasted noted in the 18th century. Archaeologists from Maidstone Museum and Sutton Valence School explored the keep in the 1950s. The site is protected as a Grade II listed building and a Scheduled Monument.