The ruined south façade of Wressle Castle is a Grade 1 ‘listed ruin’, being 10 years or so past classed as ‘at risk’ various works were done to ‘increase the shelf-life’ of this standing ruin. Estimated to have originally been built in the late 14th century it was built to the standard lay-out plan of a quadrangular ‘palace-fortress’ (for a roughly contemporary comparison see Suffolk Palace in the Articles/ Publications section). Initially financed by the Percy family it was periodically in royal control during the 15th century (see Suffolk Palace). By the early 16th century Wressle Castle was again a home of the Percy family, now Earls of Northumberland, about this time the building was made much more grand and was surrounded by extensive formal gardens. Writing in 1540 John Leland describes Wressle Castle as having a moat with ‘orchards beyond’ and the building was all of ‘great squared stone’, ashlar building blocks, presumably from limestone quarries and brought to the site by water transport. The picture above shows evidence of a greyish hard limestone.
Most of the building complex was destroyed by Parliamentarian forces during the English Civil Wars, 1642-1651 and the surviving standing ruin has been the only remains above ground since the early 19th century.
So why build a late-medieval ‘palace-fortress’ near the River Derwent, a river with a history of notorious flooding even into the 21st century? Part of the answer is that the Percy family were lords of the manor of Wressle in the late 14th century and they may have built on the site of an earlier manor house. Furthermore there do not seem to be records of regular inundation of this prestigious property, did the Earl of Northumberland in the late 15th century improve the site’s flood defences? Maybe the transport availability of the River Derwent (its waters flowing into the Humber Estuary and beyond) outweighed potential disadvantages of the site.