Ripley Castle

Ripley came to the family in 1308/9, when Sir Thomas Ingleby (c. 1290–1352) married the heiress Edeline Thwenge and acquired the estate, with its medieval manor house, as her dowry. His eldest son, another Thomas (1310–1369), saved the king from being gored by a wild boar on a hunting expedition and was knighted for it, taking the boar's head as the family crest — a device still worked into the door handles of the gatehouse.

The gatehouse was built about 1450 under Sir John Ingleby (1434–1499), who had inherited Ripley at the age of five and later left it behind altogether, becoming a monk at Mount Grace Priory near Northallerton and eventually Bishop of Llandaff; his son William was raised by his deserted mother. Sir John's grandson, Sir William Ingleby (1518–1578), High Sheriff of Yorkshire in 1564–65, added the tower in 1548.

The family's Catholicism then turned dangerous. Two of Sir William's sons were fervent Catholics on the run from the authorities: Francis, a priest, was caught, sentenced and hanged, drawn and quartered at York in 1586, while David escaped to die on the Continent. In 1598 Stephen Proctor captured another priest, Christopher Wharton, in the park at Ripley; he too was executed at York.

Sir William Ingleby (1546–1618) was knighted by James VI of Scotland in 1603 as the king rode south to be crowned James I of England, and later that year captured one of the fugitive brothers of the Earl of Gowrie at Kirkby Malzeard. In 1605 he was drawn into the Gunpowder Plot, letting the plotters — one of whom, Robert Winter, was his nephew — stay at Ripley while they procured horses. Arrested and charged with treason, he was acquitted.

His successor Sir William Ingleby (1594–1652) backed Charles I in the Civil War and was made Baronet Ingleby in 1642. He fought at Marston Moor in 1644, and when the King's forces were totally routed he escaped to Ripley and hid in a priest hole, while Oliver Cromwell billeted himself in the castle for the night — held at gunpoint in the library by Sir William's sister, Jane Ingleby.

The baronetcy died with the 4th Baronet in 1772 but was revived in 1781 for his illegitimate son John (1758–1815), MP for East Retford and High Sheriff, who had the castle largely rebuilt in 1783–86 by William Belwood. He fell into debt and in 1794 fled overseas for several years, leaving the estate in the hands of its long-serving steward Ralph Robinson, who sold timber to raise money.

John's son William (1783–1854) — an eccentric, drinker and gambler who adopted the surname Amcotts-Ingilby — demolished and rebuilt the village of Ripley, complete with a Continental-style hôtel de ville. He died without an heir, the baronetcy lapsed a second time, and the estate passed to his cousin Henry John Ingilby, created baronet of a third creation in 1866.

Ripley descended to the 6th Baronet, Sir Thomas Colvin William Ingilby, and appeared on screen as Flaxton Hall in The Flaxton Boys (1969–1973), as Lord Harrogate's home in the 1976 Disney film Escape from the Dark, and in Gunpowder (2017) and Anne Boleyn (2021). In October 2021 the castle was one of 142 English sites to share a £35-million Culture Recovery Fund grant. In June 2024 it was announced that the castle and estate would be put on the market that autumn; the sale opened with a guide price of £21 million, and by November 2025 the asking price stood at £7.5 million — the closing chapter of an Ingilby tenure begun in 1308/9.