Buckton Castle

Buckton Castle stood 335 metres above sea level on Buckton Hill, a steep sandstone ridge, with the Carr Brook and Tame valleys below; the site may have been chosen so that the garrison could watch the Tame valley. This was the eastern end of medieval Cheshire, in the manor of Tintwistle in the lordship of Longdendale. The ground had been cleared of woodland between the ninth and eleventh centuries, leaving little timber, which may partly explain the choice of stone. Buckton is among the earliest masonry castles in North West England.

No building account survives; set against Peveril Castle in Derbyshire, whose great tower cost £184 in 1175–77, the work at Buckton is estimated at around £100, close to the median annual income of a baron in 1200. Cheshire was a palatine county in which the earl controlled who might build a castle, and that control, with the cost, makes one of the earls of Chester the likeliest builder. It may instead have been raised by William de Neville, who held the lordship of Longdendale under the earl between 1181 and 1186, though he may have lacked the means.

The castle was probably built in the twelfth century, perhaps prompted by the earls' part in the Anarchy of King Stephen's reign or by the Revolt of 1173–74 against Henry II. Excavation identified three medieval phases: ditch, curtain wall and gatehouse; a re-cut ditch with further building behind the wall; and deliberate demolition. Many castles were slighted after the Anarchy to restore England to its pre-war state, which may explain Buckton's; alternatively it was pulled down after 1173–74 to punish the earl of Chester for joining a rebellion against the king. Little datable material has come out of the ground: four sherds of Pennine Gritty Ware pottery, broadly late twelfth century. That dearth, and the absence of finely finished stonework, indicates the castle was never completed, while the re-cut ditch points to a long occupation or to abandonment followed by repairs.

Buckton was a small enclosure castle, roughly oval and covering 730 square metres, ringed by a sandstone curtain wall 2.8 metres thick. A ditch 10 metres wide and 6 metres deep ran round it except on the south-west, where the hillside is steep enough to do without. The gatehouse in the north-west measured 9.3 by 7.5 metres. Built in the twelfth century, it was the earliest gatehouse in North West England and one of six stone gatehouses in the region from the twelfth or thirteenth century; its gate passage was offset to one side.

The earliest surviving reference is an estate survey of 1360 recording “one ruined castle called Buckeden and of no value”; the lordship of Longdendale then belonged to Edward, the Black Prince. The hill may have carried a beacon during the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536–37 and again in the 1580s under threat of Spanish invasion.

Treasure hunters began digging in the eighteenth century; in 1767 one party turned up a gold necklace and a silver vessel, both since lost. Antiquarians followed: in the 1770s Thomas Percival recorded a well and walls still standing 2 metres high inside the enclosure. The castle was scheduled in 1924, probably to protect it from the expanding Buckton Vale Quarry. In the Second World War one of nine Starfish decoy sites around Manchester was laid out close by, and a brick hut went up over part of the castle ditch; it went out of use in 1943.

A twentieth-century suggestion that Buckton was an Iron Age hillfort was set aside: it is topographically unlike the hillforts of Cheshire and Lancashire, and excavation in 1998 showed it to be medieval. D. J. Cathcart King and Leslie Alcock had taken it for a ringwork before digging showed the first phase to be a curtain wall, the earthworks being its collapse with soil above.

The Tameside Archaeology Survey began in 1990 under the University of Manchester Archaeological Unit, with £300,000 of Tameside Council money going to Buckton. Trial trenching in 1996 and 1998 showed a supposed outer bailey to be a twentieth-century feature; illegal digging in 1999 and 2002 forced remedial work. Full excavation ran in 2007, 2008 and 2010 across the ditch, entrance, interior and curtain wall, directed throughout by Brian Grimsditch; the work passed to the University of Salford's Centre for Applied Archaeology when the Manchester unit closed in 2009. More than 60 volunteers took part in those seasons. Nothing stands above ground; the scheduled site survives as buried remains under heather and peat.