Peveril Castle

Listen for a moment. The wind moves across this hilltop in long, steady pushes, and somewhere below you a sheep calls from the dale. Under your feet the grass is short and springy, cropped close over old stone. The air smells of limestone dust and damp turf. You have climbed a steep, zigzag path to reach this point, and your legs probably know it. That climb is the first lesson Peveril Castle teaches. This place was built to be hard to reach.

Look around and you can see why the Normans chose this spot. On one side the ground drops away sharply into a deep gorge. On another, it falls toward the mouth of a great cave. Behind you, a narrow valley called Cave Dale cuts into the hills. Only one approach is truly gentle. Nature built most of the defences here long before any mason arrived. The builders simply finished the job.

The castle takes its name from William Peverel, a knight who served William the Conqueror. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, Peverel received large estates across the Midlands. These included the lead-rich hills of the Peak. The castle appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, the great survey of England that the new king ordered. That makes this one of the earliest Norman castles in the country. In that record it is simply the castle of William Peverel.

Those first defences were probably simple. A stone curtain wall ran along the edge of the hilltop, with buildings of timber inside. Some of that early wall still stands. Look closely at the stonework on the north side, facing the village. In places the stones are laid in slanting rows, leaning one way and then the other, like the bones of a fish. This is called herringbone masonry. It is a common sign of very early Norman building, and many visitors walk straight past it.

The Peverel family did not keep the castle for long. In the twelfth century, the family lost its lands, and the castle passed to the Crown. King Henry the Second took a close interest in it. Around the 1170s, his masons raised the tall square tower that still dominates the hilltop. This is the keep, the strongest building of the castle. It was a place for the lord's own rooms, and a statement of royal power that people could see from far down the valley.

Stand in front of the keep now and notice its surface. Much of the wall is rough, grey rubble. That was never meant to be seen. The keep was once faced with smooth, carefully cut blocks of gritstone, a coarse sandstone from the nearby moors. Over the centuries, local people removed much of that good stone for their own houses and walls. Here and there, a few dressed blocks survive near the corners and around the openings. They show how sharp and clean the tower once looked.

Why would a king care so much about a small castle in the hills? Part of the answer lies in the land around you. This area was the Royal Forest of the Peak. In medieval England, a forest was not always a woodland. It was a legal territory where hunting rights belonged to the king, and strict laws protected the deer. Peveril Castle served as a centre for running this forest. Officials here dealt with poachers, timber, and grazing rights.

The other part of the answer lies underground. The hills of the Peak held lead, and lead was valuable. It covered church roofs and lined water pipes across England and beyond. A castle here helped the Crown keep watch over a profitable industry. So this tower was about money and administration as much as warfare. There is little evidence that the castle ever faced a great siege. Its strength mattered more as a threat than as a battlefield.

Now walk to the edge and look down toward the village. Directly below the castle, the cliff opens into the mouth of Peak Cavern. It is one of the largest cave entrances in Britain. For centuries, rope makers worked inside its shelter, twisting fibres in the cool, even air. The cave also carried a much ruder old name, which local people still mention with a grin. Surprisingly, the castle and the cave sit almost on top of each other.

As the centuries passed, the castle slowly lost its purpose. By the later Middle Ages, it no longer sat at the centre of royal life. The buildings fell into decay, and the stone was gradually carried away. In 1823 the novelist Sir Walter Scott published a book called Peveril of the Peak. It borrowed the name of this place, and it helped spread a romantic image of the ruin. Today the castle is cared for by English Heritage.

Turn your attention outward. To the west rises Mam Tor, a broad hill with a scarred face. Locals call it the Shivering Mountain, because its layers of soft shale keep slipping and crumbling. On its summit are the earthworks of a much older hillfort. Below you lies the Hope Valley, with its fields divided by pale stone walls. On clear days the light moves across these slopes in bands, and the colours change from green to gold to grey.

The village of Castleton below grew up partly because of the castle. Its streets were laid out in a rough grid near the foot of the hill. The local caves also hold a rare mineral called Blue John, a banded stone in purple, blue, and yellow. You will see it in shop windows in the village. And every spring, on the twenty-ninth of May, Castleton holds its Garland Day, an old custom with a rider covered in a great cone of flowers.

Before you start down the path, stand still once more. Feel the wind against the old walls, and look at the slanting stones near your feet. These walls have watched over the valley for more than nine hundred years. Kings, officials, and rope makers came and went beneath them. As you walk down, glance back at the keep now and then. From each turn of the path, it looks a little different against the sky.