Dilston Castle

The three-storey tower at Dilston, in the parish of Corbridge in Northumberland, was built by Sir William Claxton in the 15th century on the site of an earlier pele tower.

The Catholic Radclyffes built the private chapel beside it in 1616. Four of the Radclyffe children, Margaret Radclyffe among them, were abroad in a convent. In 1621 the castle came to the Radclyffe family through the marriage of Edward Radclyffe to the Claxton heiress, and in 1622 Sir Francis Radclyffe incorporated the tower house into a new manor house, which became known as Dilston Hall.

Francis Radclyffe, 1st Earl of Derwentwater, was a Royalist during the Civil War, and his estates were sequestrated by the Commonwealth; the property reverted to the family at the Restoration of 1660. The 3rd Earl, James Radclyffe, was the son of Lady Mary Tudor and as such an illegitimate grandchild of Charles II. In 1709 he began ambitious works to replace the old house with a substantial mansion. They were never completed: he took part in the Jacobite rising of 1715 in support of James Francis Edward Stuart, the so-called Old Pretender, and he was convicted of treason and executed in 1716.

His brother Charles Radclyffe was also involved in the Jacobite rebellions. He escaped to France but was likewise attainted of high treason. He returned to support the rising of 1745, was captured, and was executed in 1746 under the sentence imposed on him thirty years before.

The castle appears in the folk ballad 'Derwentwater's Farewell', an imagining of the 3rd Earl's last words at the scaffold: "Farewell to pleasant Dilston Hall, / My father's ancient seat. / A stranger may now call thee his, / Which gars my heart to greet." The ballad is attributed to the antiquarian Robert Surtees, who was in the habit of inventing 'traditional' ballads. Folk legends also held that the Divelswater, the stream below the castle, ran with blood, either when the 3rd Earl was beheaded or on the anniversary of his execution. The ghost of his wife is reputed to haunt the castle.

The attainder of the 3rd Earl would in the ordinary way have carried his property, Dilston included, to the Crown. He held only a life interest under his marriage settlement of 1712, however, so his estates passed instead to his two-year-old son John, who died aged 18. On John's death in 1731 they would have gone to his uncle Charles Radclyffe, still living abroad, but Charles had been attainted in 1716 as well. After him they might have gone to his son James Bartholomew Radclyffe, Lord Kinnaird; an act of Parliament passed in 1731, amending an act of Queen Anne on naturalisation, excluded children born abroad to attainted persons from being British subjects, and since foreigners could not own land in England that barred Lord Kinnaird and his siblings from inheriting. The land was forfeited to the Crown.

The Forfeited Estates Commission had already offered the estates for sale in July 1723, as interests in remainder contingent on John dying without male issue, and William Smith of Billiter Square in London bought them for £1,060. The sale was irregular: the original contract was cancelled and a new one made in the presence of two commissioners rather than the required quorum of four, and without the re-advertisement the rules called for. It was declared void by act of Parliament in 1731. According to the commissioners' registrar the purchase had been signed on behalf of a group including John Bond, Sir Joseph Eyles and Matthew White. It was speculative, yet would have given Smith and his colleagues property worth £5,000 a year at the time of the sale and over £6,000 by the time it was impugned. Two commissioners, Denis Bond and John Birch, were held responsible for a contract both irregular and at an undervalue and were expelled from the Commons; Sir John Eyles and Sir Thomas Hales, who had conducted the original sale and whose names stood on the final contract, suffered no penalty.

The 1731 act directed the Court of Exchequer to sell the property, but no sale followed. An act of 1734 instead directed that the Crown's income from the estate, after various annuities and the interest on mortgages, be spent on completing the building of Greenwich Hospital, and a further act was passed in 1738 to deal with difficulties that had arisen under it. After Charles Radclyffe's execution his eldest son Lord Kinnaird petitioned the king, claiming to be entitled to the estate, and the Commissioners of Greenwich Hospital rejected the claim, both because his right had not been claimed before the Forfeited Estates Commission and because he was an alien. Unable to finance litigation, he asked the king to make financial provision for him, and his mother Charlotte Maria Radclyffe, 3rd Countess of Newburgh, asked with his approval for provision for his brother and three sisters, who would otherwise have been destitute at her death. The compromise, given effect by act of Parliament in 1748, had the Hospital Commissioners pay Kinnaird £24,000 and divide £6,000 among his siblings.

Dilston Hall, left uncompleted at the 3rd Earl's execution, became the residence of the hospital's local estate steward and deteriorated there. The commissioners ordered its demolition in 1765, leaving the castle tower and the chapel standing. By the 1780s the hospital's revenue from the estates had risen to £15,000.

On the Countess's death in 1755 Lord Kinnaird succeeded as 4th Earl of Newburgh, and he lived until 1786. The 5th Earl then applied to Parliament for restitution of the estates and was granted an annuity of £2,500 instead, which he and afterwards his widow drew until their deaths in 1814 and 1861. The estate stayed with the commissioners until they transferred it to the Admiralty Board under the Greenwich Hospital Act of 1865, and the board sold it to Wentworth Blackett Beaumont, 1st Baron Allendale.

Both the tower and its attendant private chapel are scheduled monuments and Grade I listed buildings, the tower listed since 1969. A restoration of the buildings began in 2001, and the large tower and chapel were opened to the public for part of 2003. The work, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, included a new roof, repointing, and the rebuilding in wood of the missing upper floor and the missing staircase.

In 2004 a further £220,000 was awarded towards renovating the early 17th-century bridge near the castle, known as The Lord's Bridge, and towards conservation of the Jacobean range of buildings with cobbled floors that shares the grounds. Excavations shortly afterwards documented the remains of the demolished Dilston Hall and its 17th-century service range, and produced evidence of the medieval manor. The castle shares its grounds with Cambian Dilston College, a residential college for young adults with learning difficulties.