Hayton Castle

Hayton Castle stands in the quiet countryside of Cumbria, north-east of the small village of Hayton. It is a fortified house built in the 14th or 15th century and later enlarged in the 16th and 17th centuries. The building is a simple rectangle with walls up to two metres thick and a barrel-vaulted basement. Three kinds of windows remain from different periods: 15th-century lancets, Elizabethan mullions and Georgian sashes. The castle was once home to the Musgrave family, who held the manor for fourteen generations. In 1967 it was recognised as a Grade I listed building. The castle’s long history is woven through the story of northern England. It began as a grant to a huntsman, Seliff, whose descendants took the name De Hayton. By marriage it passed to the Mulcaster family, whose members included William de Mulcaster, High Sheriff of Cumberland in the early 1300s. Later it came to the Musgraves through the marriage of Margaret Colville and Nicholas Musgrave in the 15th century. The line produced MPs, a Marshal of Berwick and a baronet created in 1638. Mary, Queen of Scots is said to have stayed one night in 1568 and left a miniature portrait set in a gold ring. Inside, visitors find three staircases and several carved stone shields. The main stair has the Musgrave coat of arms with six rings and a martlet, set above the words ‘Praise to Thee, O God, the King of Glory’ and the date 1609. A spiral stair survives from a taller medieval arrangement and leads to traces of a domestic chapel repaired in 1719. Outside, the north wall bears the arms of the Martindale and Mulcaster families, and the garden holds a sundial dated 1725 inscribed with the initials of Sir Richard and Anne Musgrave. Though now a working farmhouse, the castle still carries reminders of its grand past.