Lindisfarne Castle

Lindisfarne Priory was given up for the last time around 1537, in the dissolution of the monasteries, and Henry VIII's troops turned what was left of it into a naval store. Holy Island lay in the volatile border country between England and Scotland, and in 1542 the king ordered Thomas Manners, 1st Earl of Rutland, to fortify the site against a possible Scottish invasion. By December 1547 Ralph Cleisbye, captain of the fort, had an armament of a wheel-mounted demi-culverin, two brass sakers, a falcon and a second demi-culverin fixed in position.

The fort itself was built in 1549 on Beblowe, the highest point of the island, a rock about a kilometre east of the monastic buildings with the harbour lying below it.

When the military engineer Sir Richard Lee came to inspect in 1565 he found only a decayed platform and a turf rampart. Captain William Reed was still asking for money to finish the walls in April 1569. Elizabeth I then had the place strengthened and fitted with gun platforms to suit the newer artillery, work carried out in 1570 and 1571 at a cost of £1,191. The stone came from the priory, whose buildings were quarried while the work went on.

James I's accession joined the Scottish and English crowns, and with that the need for the castle declined. It stayed garrisoned from Berwick even so, watching over the small Lindisfarne Harbour.

In the eighteenth century Jacobite rebels held it briefly before soldiers from Berwick retook the rock and imprisoned them. The prisoners dug their way out, lay hidden for nine days near Bamburgh Castle and got clean away. Afterwards the castle served as a coastguard look-out and became something of a tourist attraction.

In 1901 the castle became the property of Edward Hudson, the publishing magnate behind Country Life, who had Sir Edwin Lutyens refit it in the Arts and Crafts manner. The story goes that the two men came upon it while touring Northumberland and climbed the wall to explore inside. Lutyens kept the Tudor fort legible — its vaults still carry the gun battery above them — and added a long gallery of his own, a small echo of the galleries of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses. He left the approach deliberately raw, a steep climb around the rock with neither rail nor fence to soften the exposure; the future George V and Queen Mary, visiting in 1908, are said to have been alarmed by the slope and its cobbles.

The walled garden, once the garrison's vegetable plot, was laid out some way from the castle by Lutyens's long-time collaborator Gertrude Jekyll between 1906 and 1912. For sheds Lutyens upturned disused herring busses, a device the Spanish architect Enric Miralles later took as inspiration for the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh. Guilhermina Suggia played in the music room often enough that a cello is kept there still to mark her visits.

Hudson sold the castle in 1922 to the stockbroker Oswald Toynbee Falk for £22,000. Falk kept it only a short time before selling on to the merchant banker Edward de Stein, and in 1944 the castle, its garden and the lime kilns beside it passed to the National Trust. It was listed Grade I in May 1952, and between 2002 and 2006 Jekyll's planting was restored to her original plan.