Auckland Castle

Auckland Castle stands on flat ground between the River Gaunless and the River Wear, the land falling steeply to the water on three sides. It was probably begun by Hugh de Puiset, bishop of Durham from 1153 to 1195, and completed in the first half of the thirteenth century; the bishops of Durham kept a residence here from about 1183. The heart of the complex is the great four-bay aisled hall of Bishop Pudsey's palace, built around 1190 with unusually ornate arcades and capitals, and remodelled around 1300 for the warrior-bishop Antony Bek.

Bek also built himself a chapel in about 1300 at a cost of £148 — a building that would have ranked among the largest chapels in Europe. It was long known to stand somewhere in the castle grounds, but the exact site remained unknown until archaeologists announced in February 2020 that they had found its foundations in the castle grounds. In the fifteenth century Bishop Booth added a college for a dean and nine canons just west of the castle's enclosing wall, parts of which still flank the entrance.

In 1603, after the Union of the Crowns, Bishop Tobias Matthew invited Anne of Denmark, Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth to stay at Auckland on their journey from Scotland to London. Four decades later the palace fell with the church itself: after the disestablishment of the Church of England at the end of the First English Civil War in 1646, the castle was sold to Sir Arthur Haselrig, who demolished much of the medieval building — including the original two-storey chapel — and raised a mansion in its place. Excavations in 2024 uncovered large wall remains and rubble-filled cellars believed to belong to Haselrig's rectangular building.

After the Restoration, Bishop John Cosin demolished Haselrig's mansion in turn and rebuilt the castle, converting Pudsey's banqueting hall in 1661–1665 into the chapel that stands today. The pulpit, stalls and screen he commissioned mix Gothic and Baroque forms, and the room has been called one of the finest in North East England.

In 1756–57 Bishop Richard Trevor bought twelve of Francisco de Zurbarán's thirteen paintings of Jacob and his sons from James Mendez — seventeenth-century canvases possibly intended for South America that never reached their supposed destination. The thirteenth, Benjamin, was sold separately to the Duke of Ancaster and hangs at Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, so Trevor commissioned Arthur Pond to paint a copy and redesigned the Long Dining Room especially to take the set, where it hangs still. Trevor also built the Gothick clock tower of 1760 through which the castle grounds are entered from Bishop Auckland marketplace.

In the 1790s Bishop Shute Barrington brought in the architect James Wyatt to unify the palace's disparate architecture, creating Gothick state rooms that include an ante-room and throne room — fitting apparatus for the Prince-Bishops of Durham, who held quasi-regal powers until the nineteenth century.

In 1832 William van Mildert, the last bishop to rule the county palatine of Durham, gave Durham Castle over to found Durham University, and Auckland became the sole episcopal seat of the See of Durham. It remained the bishops' primary residence until 2012, when the castle and its contents were sold to the Auckland Castle Trust. The sale turned on the paintings: in 2001 the Church Commissioners voted to sell the Zurbaráns, a decision revoked in 2011 after a £15 million donation from the investment manager and philanthropist Jonathan Ruffer, who in 2012 purchased the castle and everything in it.

After a multi-million-pound restoration funded partly by the National Lottery, the castle reopened to visitors on 2 November 2019 as part of the Auckland Project, with a new 115-foot tower as visitor centre and fourteen restored rooms each devoted to a former bishop; the bishop's offices remained in the building. The Faith Museum, covering 6,000 years of British religious history, opened in the castle's Scotland Wing in October 2023, and the seventeenth-century walled gardens reopened in May 2024. The Grade I listed castle keeps its 800-acre deer park, with the fish ponds and woodland paths of the medieval bishops still legible in it.