Saltwood Castle

Bronze Age implements and copper ingots turned up in Hayne's Wood in 1874, and the castle itself was probably raised on a Roman site. Tradition credits a castle here to Aesc, son of Hengist and king of Kent, in 488, but the place first appears on firm ground in a charter of King Egbert in 833. The manor of Saltwood was granted to the priory of Christ Church, Canterbury, by a deed dated 1026.

After the Norman Conquest Archbishop Lanfranc appropriated the castle, and under William of Normandy Saltwood — held by the archbishop and let under knights' service to Hugo de Montfort — formed part of the string of large fiefs running along the south coast from Hythe to the New Forest. A twelfth-century Norman structure replaced the earlier work, with building continuing over the next two centuries. For a time it was the residence of Henry of Essex, constable of England.

Thomas Becket had asked Henry II, on the Church's behalf, for Saltwood to be restored as an ecclesiastical palace. Henry gave it instead to one of his loyal barons, Ranulf de Broc — an arrangement that has left de Broc under suspicion of some complicity in what followed.

On 28 December 1170 four knights are presumed to have plotted Becket's death at Saltwood; the killing was done the next day in Canterbury Cathedral, about fifteen miles away. The four were Reginald Fitzurse, William de Tracey, Richard le Breton and Hugh de Moreville.

In the aftermath of the revolt of 1173–1174 Saltwood was demolished — slighted. Richard I returned the castle to the archbishop of Canterbury during his reign, and the archbishops built again: the gun-ports in the gatehouse, dated to 1385–94, are attributed to Henry Yevele, whom B. H. St John O'Neil called the English father of the science of artillery fortification.

The Wycliffite William Thorpe's account of his questioning at Saltwood in 1407 became a familiar document because sixteenth-century Reformers put it into print.

Saltwood stayed church property until the reign of Henry VIII, when Hythe and Saltwood were seized by the Crown; in 1540 Thomas Cranmer was compelled to cede the castle to the king. The earthquake of 6 April 1580 left it uninhabitable.

It was largely ruinous by the nineteenth century. Restoration in that century made it once more a residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the gatehouse has been lived in ever since; further work in the 1880s and again in the 1930s made portions of the castle habitable.

An ancestor of the journalist and politician Bill Deedes bought the castle in the late nineteenth century, and Deedes grew up there. It passed to Sir Martin Conway, who commissioned Philip Tilden to carry out a restoration.

The art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) bought Saltwood in the 1950s, and in 1971–72 employed John King to build a bungalow, The Garden House, at the edge of the moat as a home for himself and his wife. The castle became the home of his son, the politician and diarist Alan Clark (1928–1999), who was buried in its grounds; it stayed in the Clark family as the private home of his widow, Jane Clark.