Camber Castle

Henry VIII ordered an artillery tower and a new bridge at Camber in 1512, work carried out by Edward Guldeford at a cost of £1,309 over the next two years. The circular stone tower on the shingle of Kevill Point stood 64 feet across and around 30 feet high, controlling the Camber anchorage and the port of Rye, and was probably not permanently garrisoned. Its flat roof was built for heavy guns, yet none were supplied, and it was therefore unable to protect Rye against the naval expeditions of the 1520s; wrought-iron serpentines reached it only around 1536, after many letters from Guldeford to Cardinal Wolsey.

The invasion scare of 1539 set Henry VIII building the coastal chain known as the Device Forts, and Camber was expanded at a cost of £5,660 to a design by the Moravian engineer Stefan von Haschenperg. The old tower became a keep carrying guns on its roof, ringed by four stirrup towers and a bastioned curtain wall, and a frantic closing burst of work raised the wall, extended the gatehouse into an entrance bastion and drove underground passages through the site. By the end of 1540 Philip Chute was captain of a garrison of seventeen.

The flaws showed quickly: the design had focused on defence, with the result that the guns could not easily be brought to bear on shipping. Work began again in summer 1542 and ran to August 1543 at around £10,000, raising the keep, strengthening the curtain wall and replacing the old bastions with four larger ones. Even so it kept curved bastions where Europe had moved to the angular star forts; the historian Peter Harrington calls the result "more archaic than its predecessor". Haschenperg left England in disgrace in 1544, facing complaints that he was "a man who will pretend more knowledge than he hath indeed".

Fitted with 26 to 28 brass and iron guns, the fort was already obsolete when it was finished; Chute's garrison rose to 28 men and a captain after 1542. When the French raided nearby Seaford in July 1545 the castle may have seen action against their fleet. It kept 140 longbows and 560 sheaves of arrows in 1568, probably for the local militia.

Complaints reached Parliament in 1548 that silt was blocking the entrance to the Camber, and by 1573 the authorities at Rye feared the anchorage damaged beyond repair. Elizabeth I spent £171 on repairs in 1584, and in 1588, the Armada year, a Jesuit priest called Father Darbysher and Roger Walton, a spy in Spanish pay, made plans to hand the castle to an invading French and Spanish force; the conspiracy never came to fruition. In 1593 the navy's shortage of brass guns stripped Camber of its culverins and demi-cannon.

Peter Temple was appointed captain in 1610, and by 1614 the garrison had fallen to fourteen men. By 1623 closure was being proposed, and Charles I was briefed on the dilapidated state of a fortification now reported to stand some two miles from the sea. The local towns campaigned to keep it operational, but in 1636 Charles ordered its demolition; Captain Thomas Porter's garrison left the following year, the artillery after them.

The castle had not been entirely closed, and was serving as a royal munitions store when war broke out in 1642. Rye sided with Parliament, which had the weapons and stores carried into the town, then, concerned that Royalists might seize the place, spent the next year dismantling it — lead stripped from the roof, gunports blocked, living accommodation demolished. Several other Device Forts along the south coast were occupied during the Second Civil War in 1648; Camber, as a result, was not.

A royal survey after the Restoration of 1660 found the fortification in ruins, and through the 18th and 19th centuries its north-east corner became a popular site for picnics. A survey in 1804 examined turning the keep into a Martello tower; that came to nothing, as did a 1931 proposal to make it a golf clubhouse. J. M. W. Turner, visiting between 1805 and 1807, worked the castle into landscape paintings and sketches of the area.

The British Army used the site in the Second World War, possibly as an early warning post fitted with anti-aircraft searchlights. Archaeological excavation followed from 1963. The state took Camber into guardianship in 1967 and bought it from its owners in 1977; English Heritage took control in 1984 and reopened it to the public in 1994. Scheduled as a monument since 1919 and Grade I listed since 1961, it was open as of 2015 through guided tours organised by the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve.