England · Still standing
Kinnersley Castle
Kinnersley Castle is an Elizabethan manor-house built on the site of an earlier stone castle on the Welsh Marches in Herefordshire. The present building preserves visible Elizabethan fabric and contains an ornate plastered solar ceiling and a carved stone overmantel described in the article. It remains a standing house set beside a walled garden and churchyard.
Its prime
1590
Today
Still standing
As it stood in 1590
What Kinnersley Castle looked like in its prime.
A multi-storey Elizabethan brick manor with steep gabled rooflines and numerous tall, clustered red-brick chimney stacks rising above the roof. The façades show regular mullioned windows set in red brick with some stone dressings. A high red-brick garden/curtain wall with a small round oculus window runs across the foreground. The building sits immediately beyond a grassy churchyard with upright stone headstones and mature trees; at prime the chimneys, gables and windows would be complete and intact.
Its story
The story of Kinnersley Castle.
Kinnersley is one of the many Marches castles along the Welsh border, originally a stone structure thought to have been built in the reign of Henry I. The Elizabethan building that now occupies the site has obliterated all but a few traces of the medieval castle, though behind its predominantly Elizabethan exterior are features of many different periods.
Roger Vaughan bought the castle in 1588, and under the Vaughans it was renovated in the 16th century. Their solar ceiling survives, intricate plasterwork thought to be among the oldest in Herefordshire, worked with green men and serpent-hounds, much of the detail picked out in gold, along with a stone overmantel on the fireplace carved with a boy's head encircled by a serpent. Roger's son John Vaughan inherited the castle, then sold it to Francis Smallman. It still stands beside its walled garden and churchyard.
Step inside
5 places to explore in 1590.
The record describes 5 distinct spots at Kinnersley Castle, including 2 interiors: the solar with its ornate plaster ceiling, stone overmantel above the solar fireplace. Create your own photoreal reconstruction and explore every one, more scenes means more rooms, more angles, and more of the place to stand in.
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Recreate Kinnersley Castle with AI to explore it.
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Clans who held Kinnersley Castle.
The families that held Kinnersley Castle for a decade or more across its history, follow a name to its clan.
Bought by Roger Vaughan in 1588 and renovated under the Vaughans; his son John later sold it to Francis Smallman.
Nearby
