page_title: Castles in Great Britain and Ireland
section_title: Social and cultural use
hierarchical_section_title: Castles in Great Britain and Ireland / 19th century / Social and cultural use
caption_attribution_description: Penrhyn Castle
context_page_description: Castles have played an important military, economic and social role in Great Britain and Ireland since their introduction following the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Although a small number of castles had been built in England in the 1050s, the Normans began to build motte and bailey and ring-work castles in large numbers to control their newly occupied territories in England and the Welsh Marches. During the 12th century the Normans began to build more castles in stone – with characteristic square keep – that played both military and political roles. Royal castles were used to control key towns and the economically important forests, while baronial castles were used by the Norman lords to control their widespread estates. David I invited Anglo-Norman lords into Scotland in the early 12th century to help him colonise and control areas of his kingdom such as Galloway; the new lords brought castle technologies with them and wooden castles began to be established over the south of the kingdom. Following the Norman invasion of Ireland in the 1170s, under Henry II, castles were established there too.
context_section_description: Many castles saw increased visitors by tourists, helped by better transport links and the growth of the railways. The armouries at the Tower of London opened for tourists in 1828 with 40,000 visitors in their first year; by 1858 the numbers had grown to over 100,000 a year. Attractions such as Warwick Castle received 6,000 visitors during 1825 to 1826, many of them travelling from the growing industrial towns in the nearby Midlands, while Victorian tourists recorded being charged six-pence to wander around the ruins of Goodrich Castle. The spread of the railway system across Wales and the Marches strongly influenced the flow of tourists to the region's castles. In Scotland tourist tours became increasingly popular during the 19th century, usually starting at Edinburgh complete with Edinburgh Castle, and then spending up to two weeks further north, taking advantage of the expanding rail and steamer network. Blair Castle remained popular, but additional castles joined the circuit – Cawdor Castle became popular once the railway line reached north to Fort William.
  Purchasing and reading guidebooks became an increasingly important part of visiting castles; by the 1820s visitors could buy an early guidebook at Goodrich outlining the castle's history, the first guidebook to the Tower of London was published in 1841 and Scottish castle guidebooks became well known for providing long historical accounts of their sites, often drawing on the plots of Romantic novels for the details. Indeed, Sir Walter Scott's historical novels Ivanhoe and Kenilworth helped to establish the popular Victorian image of a Gothic medieval castle. Scott's novels set in Scotland also popularised several northern castles, including Tantallon which was featured in Marmion. Histories of Ireland began to stress the role of castles in the rise of Protestantism and "British values" in Ireland, although tourism remained limited.
  One response to this popularity was in commissioning the construction of replica castles. These were particularly popular at beginning of the 19th century, and again later in the Victorian period. Design manuals were published offering details of how to recreate the appearance of an original Gothic castles in a new build, leading to a flurry of work, such as Eastnor in 1815, the fake Norman castle of Penrhyn between 1827 and 1837 and the imitation Edwardian castle of Goodrich Court in 1828. The later Victorians built the Welsh Castell Coch in the 1880s as a fantasy Gothic construction and the last such replica, Castle Drogo, was built as late as 1911.
  Another response was to improve existing castles, bringing their often chaotic historic features into line with a more integrated architectural aesthetic in a style often termed Gothic Revivalism. There were numerous attempts to restore or rebuild castles so as to produce a consistently Gothic style, informed by genuine medieval details, a movement in which the architect Anthony Salvin was particularly prominent – as illustrated by his reworking of Alnwick and much of Windsor Castle. A similar trend can be seen at Rothesay where William Burges renovated the older castle to produce a more "authentic" design, heavily influenced by the work of the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. North of the border this resulted in the distinctive style of Scots Baronial Style architecture, which took French and traditional medieval Scottish features and reinvented them in a baroque style. The style also proved popular in Ireland with George Jones' Oliver Castle in the 1850s, for example, forming a good example of the fashion. As with Gothic Revivalism, Scots Baronial architects frequently "improved" existing castles: Floors Castle was transformed in 1838 by William Playfair who added grand turrets and cupolas. In a similar way the 16th-century tower house of Lauriston Castle was turned into the Victorian ideal of a "rambling medieval house". The style spread south and the famous architect Edward Blore added a Scots Baronial touch to his work at Windsor.
  With this pace of change concerns had begun to g
caption: Penrhyn Castle in Wales, an early 19th-century recreation of a Norman castle
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