Dobroyd Castle

Todmorden was a booming cotton town in the mid-19th century when John Fielden junior, son of the social reformer and MP known as Honest John Fielden, fell in love with a local worker, Ruth Stansfield. It is often said that her reply to his proposal was that she would marry him if he built her a castle. Whether or not the words were spoken, the couple married in 1857 and in due course a castle was built.

Fielden gave the commission to the architect John Gibson, who raised Dobroyd between 1866 and 1869 at a cost of £71,589 — more than Gibson's Todmorden Town Hall or the town's Unitarian Church. It was to "immortalise the name of Fielden" and to be "the most commanding object in the neighbourhood": two storeys with turrets at all four corners, a substantial four-storey tower, and battlements along most of the roofline that were there for effect rather than defence. Four tympana of Caen stone carry carvings drawn from the cotton industry, and because the Fieldens pushed for better conditions in the trade that made their own fortune, some have taken the carvings for a statement of those beliefs.

John and Ruth Fielden lived in the castle, but the couple became progressively estranged; a Swiss chalet was built for Ruth in the valley bottom, and it was said that she became an alcoholic. She died in 1877, aged 50, eight years after the castle was finished. John died in the castle in 1893, aged 77. The 66-room house stayed in the Fielden family after his death but was used infrequently, and was eventually sold for £10,000.

The Home Office used Dobroyd from 1942 to 1979 as an approved school where males of 15 to 18 learned manual skills such as building and carpentry alongside the rest of their curriculum. After a three-month closure in 1979 it reopened as the privately run Castle School, educating twenty boys with emotional and behavioural problems; when that closed in 1989 the castle lay empty for six years. It had been listed Grade II* in November 1966.

Buddhists of the New Kadampa Tradition bought the castle in 1995 for £320,000 and opened it as the Losang Dragpa Centre, named after a famous teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. Their departure was announced in 2007, with the roof in disrepair and the renovation put at around £200,000; they had secured a grant of £127,000 from English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund, but it would not necessarily transfer to a new owner. Robinwood Activity Centre Ltd acquired the castle and grounds for £2.2 million in 2008 and by March 2009 had turned it into an activity centre for primary school groups, which it remains.