Looking at this end-on view of the ruin of Moreton Corbet Castle’s south range, you’d not think it was a castle at all, in the strict medieval sense . The same would be true of a view across the fields taking in what is left of the long south front of which my photograph above shows one corner. What is here are clearly the remains of an Elizabethan country house, and one of some grandeur. It was built by Robert Corbet at the end of the 16th century, who was extending the work done by his father, Sir Andrew, who had begun to transform the structure of his family’s ancestral medieval castle.
Sir Andrew turned his castle into a more fashionable residence by building new rooms against the old curtain wall. Ruins of these are still seen on the other half of the site, to the left of the building in my photograph. Sir Andrew died in 1578, and Robert was more radical, adding this new south range to create what Camden called a ‘gorgeous and stately house’. Its curvy gables, classical pilasters and large, rectangular mullioned windows will be familiar to anyone who’s seen more famous houses of this period – Blickling in Norfolk, for example has similar gables and windows; so does Montacute in Somerset.
So this is high-status building, and the amount of effort and expense involved in its construction is confirmed by the details, especially the pilasters and attached columns, together with the friezes they support (photograph below). These feature a variety of roundels, bits of strapwork, and carved animals of various kinds, some from the standard repertoire of the time (decorative flourishes influenced, like the house’s gables, by contemporary Flemish architecture), but also the heraldic beasts of the Corbet family.
Why is this marvel of late-Tudor architecture now a ruin? During the English Civcil Wars there was much fighting around the house (which was then occupied by Sir Vincent Corbet, who was on the royalist side). As a result, the house was badly damaged, and although the family continued to live in it, they abandoned it in the 18th century. There were plans to build a new house on the site but these came to nothing and the building was left to decay. It is a magnificent, if tantalising, ruin.
