Penrith Castle

The castle site, in the west of the town, has an irregular quadrilateral layout that makes a Roman encampment there likely. The castle itself was built between 1399 and 1470 as a defence against Scottish raids, and it has been said that, unlike so many of its counterparts in the north, 'the building exhibits no indication of very ancient date.' The lordship of Penrith had been created in 1397 as a grant to the newly created Earl of Westmorland, and the castle is mentioned in a grant of 1437.

The builder was long taken to be William Strickland, later Bishop of Carlisle, but the lateness of that 1437 reference has been read as pointing instead to Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury — though whether this was 'new work on a fresh site, or whether he simply utilized Strickland's works as the core of his building' is not known. It is now considered more likely that what Strickland built was Hutton Hall, near the church in Penrith, and a tenurial reconstruction shows that he did not hold the castle site at all. There is a possible reference to construction on the site as early as 1412, and Westmorland is known to have granted the building of a tower there the following year, from his comital seat at Raby Castle. An older claim that it was raised 'not by a baron, but by the inhabitants themselves, for their own defence' is thought most unlikely.

The liberty and castle of Penrith became the most important offices held by the Neville family in the fifteenth century, and their most important source of patronage locally; A. J. Pollard has estimated the Nevilles' Penrith estates as worth approximately £350. By 1441, and until 1444, Salisbury, then Warden of the West March, was sub-letting the lordship of Penrith to Lumley, Bishop of Carlisle.

Following Salisbury's death in 1460 the castle and lordship were inherited by Richard, Earl of Warwick, the 'Kingmaker', who was himself slain at the Battle of Barnet without leaving a male heir, so they reverted to the crown.

In 1471 Edward IV granted castle and lordship to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who used Penrith as a base while 'taking effectual measures' against the Scots and enjoyed the revenues of the estates of the Forest of Cumberland. He was at the same time appointed sheriff of Cumberland for five consecutive years, and in 1478 was described as 'of Penrith Castle'. After his usurpation of his nephew's throne and then his death (1483–85), the castle and the town remained part of the Crown Estate.

A nineteenth-century account of the ruins records that after the great civil war the edifice was dismantled and part of the materials sold. Crown ownership lasted until the reign of William III, who in 1696 gave castle and town, with most other Crown property in Cumberland, to his friend Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland. The Earls and Dukes of Portland sold the castle to the Dukes of Devonshire in 1787.

The castle was later sold to the Lancaster & Carlisle Railway Company, which built Penrith railway station; the remains stand opposite the station today. Ownership afterwards passed to Penrith Urban District Council, which in the 1920s laid out the grounds as a public park and built housing nearby.

That same account called the ruins 'remarkable more for their extent than their magnificence', singling out the projecting corbels in the eastern front, which appear to have supported an open corridor, and some large vaults which were probably prisons. The castle is maintained by English Heritage and is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a Grade I listed building, designated in 1951.