Crayke Castle

Documentary evidence records a castle raised on the site soon after the Norman Conquest, the building reportedly attributed to Bishop Hugh Pudsey. Those early records give little detail, though the foundations of the present buildings are alleged to belong to that earlier work. The ground itself had been land of the See of Durham since Saxon times. A survey in 2005 found evidence of a monastic complex preceding the post-Conquest buildings, which occupied the site in a traditional motte-and-bailey layout, and evidence of a gatehouse.

The present building was constructed around 1450 for Robert Neville, Bishop of Durham, on the highest point in the parish, at an elevation of 379 feet. It is a rectangular tower house of four storeys, each storey marked off by a band of stonework, with a band of crenellation at roof level. A second, separate tower stands to the north-east — the "New Tower", once three storeys and built into the hill so that its upper level opened on to the summit. Up to the time of James I the castle was surrounded by a deer park.

In 1647 the House of Commons decreed that the castle should have no garrison and be dismantled. It was slighted by the Parliamentarians during the Civil War, at the time of the siege of York, and in 1648 was sold to Sir William Allanson, a former Mayor and MP of York. Allanson's son Charles repaired and restored the main building to the condition in which it has remained.

Around 1667 the manor was restored to the See of Durham and leased out as a farmhouse to a succession of tenants, until Bishop William van Mildert was allowed by Parliament to sell it into private hands in 1827. Canon Raine surveyed it for a report for the Victorian Associated Architectural Societies, and during the Second World War the buildings were temporarily requisitioned as a Land Army barracks. The castle was listed Grade I in 1952 and is also a scheduled monument.

Of the two separate, self-contained buildings on the roughly six-acre site, only the southernmost is habitable; the New Tower survives as a two-storey ruin with walls standing about 20 feet high. The castle was at one time the property of Kevin Hollinrake, Member of Parliament for Thirsk and Malton.