page_title: Marlborough Castle
section_title: Later use
hierarchical_section_title: Marlborough Castle / Later use
caption_attribution_description: English: Plate in Itinerarium Curiosum written by William Stukeley illustrating Marlborough Mound as part of the garden of the Seymour family's country estate.
context_page_description: Marlborough Castle, locally known and recorded in historical documents as The Mound, was an 11th-century royal castle located in the civil parish of Marlborough, a market town in the English county of Wiltshire, on the Old Bath Road, the old main road from London to Bath. The barrow on which the fortification was built, perhaps the "barrow of Maerla", seems to be a prehistoric earthwork which formed the motte of the Norman Marlborough Castle. It survives as a tree-covered mound known as Marlborough Mound, within the site of Marlborough College.
context_section_description: The castle was in ruins by 1403. A new residence was built on the site by Francis Seymour, 1st Baron Seymour of Trowbridge (c.1590–1664), who had acquired the site from his elder brother William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset (1588–1660). It was replaced in 1683–84 by the "new house" for his grandson Charles Seymour, 6th Duke of Somerset, apparently to designs by John Deane, a surveyor of Reading, Berkshire. The house forms the nucleus of the present Marlborough College. In the 18th century it was the beloved residence of Isabella, Countess of Hertford, the patroness of William Shenstone and James Thomson. Stephen Duck, the "thresher poet", described the house during Lady Hertford's time in A description of a Journey to Marlborough....
  The house declined into a coaching inn, the Castle Inn, where the Marlborough Club, whose members were Tory gentlemen from Marlborough and the surrounding area, was established in 1774. The club met at the inn until 1842; the house became the nucleus of Marlborough College, founded in 1843.
caption: A plate of the Marlborough Mound illustrated in a 1776 copy of Itinerarium Curiosum by English Antiquarian William Stukeley.
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