England · Still standing
Sizergh Castle
Sizergh Castle is a historic stately home and estate at Helsington, Cumbria, long-associated with the Strickland family and now in the care of the National Trust. The house grew around a medieval tower with later Elizabethan and Georgian ranges and sits within formal gardens, a rock garden, an orchard and a large estate.
Its prime
1770
Today
Still standing
As it stood in 1770
What Sizergh Castle looked like in its prime.
A stone-built country house composed of an original tall medieval tower attached to long, low stone ranges extended in Elizabethan and later Georgian phases; prominent gabled roofs with wooden bargeboards; mullioned and later sash-style windows in the ranges; broad lawns, clipped yew hedges and mature specimen trees set in formal gardens with a nearby lake and extensive parkland. Interiors include richly oak-paneled rooms and paneling inlaid with pale poplar and dark bog-oak.
Its story
The story of Sizergh Castle.
The Deincourts, the Stricklands and the Medieval Tower, 1170s–15th century
The Deincourt family held the land at Sizergh from the 1170s. When Elizabeth Deincourt married Sir William de Stirkeland in 1239, the estate passed into what became the Strickland family. The earliest surviving part of the building is a tower dated to the 14th or 15th century, built well after that marriage. In 1336 a grant from Edward III allowed Sir Walter Strickland to enclose the surrounding land as his own exclusive park.
Katherine Parr and the Elizabethan Rebuilding, 1533–1569
Katherine Parr, later the sixth wife of Henry VIII and a relative of the Stricklands, is thought to have lived at Sizergh after her first husband, Sir Edward Burgh, died in 1533; her second husband, Lord Latymer, was kin to the dowager Lady Strickland, Katherine Neville. The house was extended in Elizabethan times. Some of the early furnishings date from the time of Walter Strickland, who married Alice Tempest in 1560; after his death, Alice drew up inventories of the house that still list three oak armchairs and three chests remaining there today.
Exile with James II and the Georgian Great Hall, to 1770
Sir Thomas Strickland followed King James II and VII into exile, and the family's Jacobite loyalty is preserved at Sizergh in a collection of portraits of the exiled Stuart court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, including works by Alexis Simon Belle, painter in ordinary to James VII and II and the Old Pretender, depicting Queen Mary of Modena and her daughter Princess Louisa Maria. Around 1770 the great hall was expanded again, this time in the Georgian style.
The Inlaid Chamber's Journey to the V&A and Back, 1890s–2017
The panelling of the Inlaid Chamber, worked in floral and geometric patterns of pale poplar and dark bog-oak, was sold out of the house to the Victoria and Albert Museum in the 1890s and displayed there as a reconstructed period room. Its return to Sizergh, urged among others by Mark Girouard, an authority on England's country houses, came in 1999 under a long-term loan, and by 2017 the panelling's ownership had reportedly been formally transferred to the National Trust.
Gift to the National Trust, 1950–2016
In 1950 Lieutenant Commander Thomas Hornyold-Strickland, 7th Count della Catena, a grandson of the 1st Baron Strickland, gave the castle, garden and estate — a Grade I listed building since 1952 — to the National Trust. The Hornyold-Strickland family remain in residence alongside the Trust's ownership, and in 2016 the estate was included within the newly extended Lake District National Park.
Step inside
10 places to explore in 1770.
The record describes 10 distinct spots at Sizergh Castle, including 3 interiors: great hall (interior), inlaid chamber (interior), portraits gallery / family portrait display (interior). Create your own photoreal reconstruction and explore every one, more scenes means more rooms, more angles, and more of the place to stand in.
Build Your Own Castle
Recreate Sizergh Castle with AI to explore it.
The artist rebuilds it as it stood in 1770, a photoreal reconstruction that belongs to you alone. Pay with coins, no subscription needed.
Recreate this castle →Castle Siege
Play Castle Siege at Sizergh Castle.
A strategy game played on Sizergh Castle’s real ground plan: the same surveyed walls shown in the archive below. Post your finite garrison on the battlements between assaults, then hold out as rams, siege towers, trebuchets and sappers arrive in ever-worse waves.
Sign in free to see the garrison muster. One castle costs 150 Clan Coins and is yours forever.
Sign in to take command →Whose castle
Clans who held Sizergh Castle.
The families that held Sizergh Castle for a decade or more across its history, follow a name to its clan.
Deincourt
Owned the Sizergh lands from the 1170s until the marriage of Elizabeth Deincourt in 1239.
Strickland
Held from the 1239 Deincourt–Stirkeland marriage until gifted to the National Trust in 1950; the Hornyold-Stricklands still live at the castle.
