Ashby de la Zouch Castle — Attraction in North West Leicestershire

We drove from London to visit this castle 🏰 on the way to York. If you park at the public carpark 🅿️ outside, please take note that the carpark is fairly small. You will need to walk down the road (keep road on your right hand side) and when you reach the Ashby Castle Lawn Tennis Club 🎾, turn left and enter.

You will see a shop that will look like an ice-cream 🍦parlor and strangely, that’s the entrance to the castle. You enter this gift shop, and you will need to pay for visitation to Ashby de la Zouch Castle. This is a 15thcentury castle, and it has seen a fair share of war, internal struggle and eventually being brought down to the ground. If you walk around, there are information posted all over the castle. The stairways goes both upwards and downwards. The upwards brings you all the way to the top which will give you a crazy rice view of the surroundings. The downwards leads you to a secret tunnel linking the kitchen to great tower. An escape route?

The remains kept key areas intact for you to visit. Kitchen, Cellar, Buttery & pantry, Porch, Hall, Great Chamber, Chapel, Inner Court & Great Tower. Keep a look out on the walls where you can see indent marks when cannons and sling shots were fired at the castle during the unrest which saw the downfall of the castle.

Pro Tip : If the weather is good, you can have a picnics 🧺at the grass patch under the trees 🌳. You will have an good overview of the castle while the kids 👦and pets 🐕run around. It would be a lovely way to spend...

There is no evidence that Hastings particularly favoured Ashby de la Zouch at first. Following Edward IV’s brief deposition in 1470–71, however, and subsequent reinstatement, he was rewarded for his loyalty to the king with much greater powers than previously.[3] He became a virtual vice-regent in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and parts of Warwickshire, and needed a residence that befitted his status.

In 1474 he was granted a licence to fortify four (possibly five) manors and create parks around them.[4] However, building at Ashby actually began the previous year: the first reference to work there is in the manorial roll for 1472–3, which refers to ‘diverse great works within the manor and the wages of carpenters, tillers, masons, plumbers and other artificers and their servants’.[5]

It is clear that Hastings intended Ashby to serve as his principal seat. He transformed the existing manor house with a series of vastly ambitious buildings and enclosed 3,000 acres (1,200ha) to create a park for hunting.

The architectural centrepiece of his new creation was a great tower, one of the largest structures of its kind in Britain. It placed Ashby firmly in the same architectural league as the greatest existing castles in the kingdom. Hastings apparently intended to create three further towers around the perimeter of a walled,...

I live in Ashby, and see the castle very regularly without much thought or admiration. However, once a year or so, I decide to visit the castle, and doing so reminds me how impressive it is. There is a castle in my own town! How exciting! It is a very good castle too, with lots of structure still remaining - enough to still be able to climb the tower and see views across Ashby. There are many interesting crevices and hidey-holes, accommodating a variety of pigeons and doves, as well as a few examples of intricate stonework. On the main tower, a corner of stone vaulting hangs from the wall, and further up is a complete fireplace surround, again hanging from the wall. A humorous audio tour is available, although this has been in operation for at least 10-15 years, resulting in the batteries of some of the audio devices to be past their best!

Off the castle site is a mysterious building, named Mount House, which was some sort of fortification built around the time of the castle. Its most distinctive feature is that it is shaped as an equilateral triangle... and it exists today, not that many people know about it. Try to spot it on Google Maps - it is East of the castle, nestled within some houses.

Overall - a much more substantial castle than what is expected for a small town. A very...