Sizergh Castle

Sizergh Castle stands four miles south of Kendal in Cumbria’s gentle countryside. A fourteenth- or fifteenth-century tower forms the oldest part of the house, which has grown through the centuries while remaining the home of the Hornyold-Strickland family. In 2016 the estate joined the Lake District National Park, linking its historic landscape to the wider fells. The castle is listed Grade I and cared for by the National Trust, yet daily life continues within its walls. Katherine Parr is thought to have stayed here after her first husband died in 1533. The Stricklands trace their ownership back to a marriage in 1239, when Elizabeth Deincourt wed Sir William de Stirkeland. The house holds remarkable interiors and art. Alice Tempest made inventories after her husband Walter Strickland died in 1569, noting three oak armchairs and chests still in the castle. The Inlaid Chamber’s panelling, decorated with floral and geometric patterns, was loaned to the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1890s. After decades of campaigning by experts such as Mark Girouard, the panelling returned in 1999 on long-term loan and entered National Trust ownership in 2017. Portraits include works by Alexis Simon Belle, George Romney and Harriet Strickland, alongside Stuart royal images from the Jacobite court. The great hall was enlarged in Elizabethan and Georgian times, showing successive fashions in country-house design. Outside, the gardens and estate offer varied scenes. A Grade II-listed garden contains a lake, kitchen garden and the largest limestone rock garden owned by the National Trust. The rock garden, built in the 1920s, shelters part of the National Collection of ferns. Wetland habitat has been created in the Lyth Valley to attract bittern and other wildlife, supported by Natural England and the Morecambe Bay Nature Improvement Area. Birdwatchers come to spot hawfinches around the main car park in spring, while fritillary butterflies drift over the meadows. A low hill called Sizergh Fell lies a kilometre to the south-west, where a group of stones may mark the remains of a stone circle.