Pendragon Castle

According to legend the castle was raised by Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur, who is said to have tried and failed to divert the River Eden to fill its moat — a failure recalled in a well-known local couplet: "Let Uther Pendragon do what he can, Eden will run where Eden ran." Uther, if he was a real man at all, may have been a fifth-century chieftain who led resistance to the invading Anglo-Saxons; one local tradition has him and many of his men dying here after the Saxons poisoned the well, though other tellings place his death at St Albans.

The name itself is late. Pendragon is first recorded in 1309, and most likely came out of the medieval appetite for Arthurian romance rather than from the Brittonic pen, "head" or "summit", with dragon in its honorific sense of prince or warlord. Cumbria carries other Arthurian sites, King Arthur's Round Table near Penrith among them, and Celtic roots run through place-names across the north-west.

Legend aside, and despite a Roman coin turned up on the site, there is no evidence of any use here before the Normans. The castle was built in the 12th century by Ranulph de Meschines, above a bend in the Eden with Wild Boar Fell to the south-west and Mallerstang Edge to the east. The ruin holds the remains of a Norman keep, with a garderobe turret added in the 14th century and further work in the 17th.

One of its owners was Sir Hugh de Morville, Lord of Westmorland, one of the four knights who murdered St Thomas Becket in 1170; the high point on Mallerstang Edge called Hugh Seat carries his name. Another was Lady Idonea de Veteripont, who after the death of her husband Roger de Lilburn spent much of the rest of her life at the castle until she died in 1334, and who founded the church of St Mary at nearby Outhgill in about 1311.

Scots raiding parties attacked the castle in 1342, and again in 1541. After the second raid it was left an uninhabitable ruin, and stayed one until it passed to Lady Anne Clifford, who rebuilt it in 1660 and added a brewhouse, bakehouse, stables and a coach-house. Of her many castles Pendragon remained among her favourites until her death in 1676 at the age of 86.

Her successor, the Earl of Thanet, had no use for the place and removed anything of value from it, the lead off the roof included. By the 1770s much of the building above the second storey had come down, and it has decayed steadily since.

In 1962 the Appleby Castle Estate sold the castle at auction for £525 to Raven Frankland, a landowner and archaeologist whose father Edward had written a book during the Second World War on the Arthurian legends attached to the site. It passed to Frankland's cousin John Bucknall after Raven's death in 1998 and that of Raven's wife Juliet in 2013. Some of the rubble has been cleared and the crumbling walls partly consolidated, and the Lancaster University Archaeological Unit published a limited survey in 1996. Scheduled since 1922 and Grade I listed since 1957, the castle is privately owned and stands on farmland; there is public access to the outside of the building, with a warning that the walls should not be entered.