Norwich Castle

Stand at the foot of the mound and look up. A great pale cube of stone sits on top of a steep grassy hill, right in the middle of the city. Buses pass below. Shoppers cross the green. Gulls call from the rooftops. And above it all, this square block of stone looks almost too clean and too sharp to be real. That feeling is worth holding on to, because the story of this building is a story of layers.

The mound under your feet came first. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, the new rulers of England needed to control their towns. Norwich was one of the largest and richest places in the kingdom, so it got a castle quickly. Historians believe that houses were cleared to make space for it. The earth was piled into a huge artificial hill called a motte. It is one of the largest castle mounds in England, and you can feel its height in your legs as you climb.

The stone keep came a little later, in the decades around the year 1100. It was built for the Norman kings, and it was more than a fortress. It was a royal palace, a statement of power placed high above the city. The original walls were faced with pale limestone brought by boat from Caen, in Normandy, in northern France. Think about that journey for a moment. Stone was cut across the sea, shipped across the water and carried up this hill.

Now look closely at the walls in front of you. Here is the first surprise. The outer face of the keep is not the original Norman surface. In the 1830s, the old stone had become badly worn. The architect Anthony Salvin refaced the whole building in Bath stone. He followed the old Norman pattern of arches and blind arcading, which means rows of decorative arches set against a solid wall. So you are looking at a Victorian copy of a Norman design, wrapped around a Norman core.

That explains why the building looks so crisp. Most Norman keeps in England are rough and broken now. They are often roofless shells. This one looks almost new on the outside, because in a sense, much of its skin is. But the shape is the old shape. The proportions and the rhythm of the arches still follow the twelfth-century plan. Many visitors walk past without knowing that they are seeing two different centuries at once.

The castle did not stay a royal palace for long. Kings rarely visited, and the building found a harder purpose. From the medieval period onwards, it served as the county gaol, which is the old word for a prison. For hundreds of years, people waited here for trial, for punishment, or for the end of their lives. The great hall of a king became a place of cells, chains and locked doors.

One name stands out from that long prison history. In 1549, a Norfolk landowner called Robert Kett led a large rebellion. Thousands of people joined him and camped on the heights just outside the city. They protested against the enclosure of common land, which meant fencing off fields that ordinary people had used for grazing. The rebellion was crushed. Kett was hanged from the walls of this castle. Today he is remembered in Norwich more as a local hero than as a traitor.

The prison closed in the late nineteenth century. Soon after, the building was turned into a museum, and it opened to the public in the 1890s. This was a bold change. A place that had held people against their will now invited people inside to learn. Generations of Norwich families have climbed this hill on school trips, rainy afternoons and holidays. For many locals, the castle is simply part of growing up in the city.

Inside, the museum covers a wide range of subjects. One gallery tells the story of the Iceni, the people of ancient Norfolk, and their queen Boudica. She led a revolt against the Romans almost two thousand years ago. There are archaeology collections, natural history displays, and an important collection of paintings by the Norwich School. This was a group of nineteenth-century landscape artists, including John Crome and John Sell Cotman, who painted the rivers, skies and woods of Norfolk.

Here is the second surprise. The museum also holds a very large collection of British ceramic teapots. There are hundreds of them, in every shape you can imagine. Some are elegant and formal. Others are playful and strange, made to look like animals, buildings or people. It sounds like an odd thing to find in a Norman fortress. But it is a favourite with visitors, and it says something about this city. Norwich keeps its grand stories and its small domestic ones side by side.

In recent years, the keep went through a major restoration project. The aim was to help visitors understand the building as the Normans knew it. Floors were put back inside the great stone shell, so people can move through the levels of the old royal palace again. Displays show how the king's rooms might have looked and felt. The project also made the top of the keep easier to reach, so more visitors can enjoy the views across the city.

If you get the chance to look out from the top, take your time. To one side, you can see the slender spire of Norwich Cathedral, another Norman project from the same era. Below, the streets of the old market run downhill towards the river. Count the church towers if you can. Norwich has an unusually large number of medieval churches inside its old walls. From here, you can understand why the Normans chose this spot. Whoever held this hill could see the whole city.

Before you leave, walk slowly around the base of the mound. Notice how the modern city presses right up against it. A shopping centre lies partly underground, beneath the gardens nearby. Traffic moves along the roads below. Yet the hill still rises steeply, and the keep still stands square against the sky. Look once more at that pale stone. Victorian on the surface, Norman underneath, and sitting on earth that people piled up by hand more than nine hundred years ago.