UK Tourist & Leisure Attractions - Lewes Castle

We found Southover Grange in Lewes, a popular wedding venue with some lovely extensive grounds behind.  We liked the effort the local authority had made to give the town its old-world charm, notice the quaint street lamp on the left here.

Walking up the hill from the Southover area to Lewes Castle, it was not hard to see that Lewes has changed little over the years, apart from the traffic struggling to negotiate the very narrow streets.  A 'park and ride' is surely needed we thought.

At the door of many Lewes properties are these old 'shoe scrapers' for scraping the mud off your footwear, a relic from bygone times when the streets were unmade and could be very muddy.  Mike remembers them well, ha ha!

Here's another very old building in Lewes, a bookshop with most of the books on the outside of the building!  The old beams were sagging and it seemed to be at odd angles, it must be the age.  Mike knows the feeling well!  (Ha ha again!).

We arrived at Lewes Castle just off Castle Hill and checked the details.  Lewes Archaeological Society manage the castle and adjacent Barbican museum.

It was good to take a rest on an old gun at the entrance to Lewes Castle before climbing up many steps to get to the main area of the castle; groan, more uphill climbing!  We're not castle geeks, but we do seem to explore a fair few on our travels (see below).  Check out some of our other tourist visits.

This is looking north-east from Lewes Castle's keep towards Ringmer.  In the foreground is the bowls green where the Kings of old entertained themselves between wars, and to the left is the hall where all the old records are kept and are available for study.  Please see our UK tourist resources for the Lewes Castle and other related websites.

After climbing up one of Lewes Castle's towers from the courtyard below we were rewarded with some fine views over the Sussex countryside.  The information and diagram plates here detailed the view.

Deep in the depths of the castle tower we read the info on the castle's past which was fascinating stuff as we learnt it was a late 11th century stone motte and bailey fortress.  While...

...right at the top of the tower we got an even better view looking down towards Lewes town.  The soldiers must surely have spotted invading forces approaching from miles away.

The narrow spiral staircases were rather awkward to climb, so imagine what they must have been like for the warriors of old in the heat of battle, rushing up and down, clanking in all their cumbersome armour.

Now talk about a posed photo!  The spears look real enough in this picture but are, in fact, just painted on the wall.  Still, we wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of a real one, ouch!  Let's just hope we can negotiate that spiral staircase back down without meeting anyone (especially a castle warrior) coming up.  Here's a fact: Lewes Castle was built by William de Warenne almost 1000 years ago.

Finally we visited the Barbican House museum at Lewes Castle (included in the £4 price) and saw the Lewes town model audio-visual show which runs every half hour; it sure made us glad we live now and not in the olden days!  We enjoyed our visit to Lewes, the castle and museum, and it enlightened us to the treasures to visit virtually on our own doorstep.

We left Lewes Castle through the arched barbican gate and down to the High Street beyond.  It turned out a lovely warm day for our visit to this rather quaint East Sussex Saxon town.