FRIENDS OF KENDAL CASTLE

Friends of Kendal Castle has been formed by a cross-section of local people to assist South Lakeland District Council's part in further fund-raising for consolidating the infrastructure of the Castle. The charity is solely for further archaeological digging to uncover more of the inner castle grounds. The total ideal being to see the full excavation of the Castle over the next few years. This can only be possible by fund-raising to present to the National Lottery and English Heritage to help carry on the work.

After seeing the result of Phase One, it is essential for the town that the rest is opened up to see what else lies below the rubble.

So why not give a bit of time to present your ideas (however small) and put them into practice. Come along to the Netherfield Cricket Club, Kendal on the 1st Thursday of every month at 7.30 pm and put your ideas in the frame.

The Castle comes into history through being the birthplace of Katherine Parr, the sixth and surviving wife of Henry VIIIth. The Parrs were not a very wealthy or prominent family before their connection with royalty and they did not live in the Castle very long afterwards. It was not therefore a very large or imposing building as castles go. When the connection with the Parrs was broken the Castle ceased to be of interest and no one really knows what happened to it. Nicholson's "Annals of Kendal" reveals that it was in a ruinous state in 1572.

At the lowest level of all there is a course of dressed red stone, evidently the base of the original wall. During excavations in 1951 and 1952, numerous fragments of similar worked stone were discovered, which showed that they must at one time have formed part of doors or windows facing on to the courtyard. Nothing of this original structure remains except one course of stone. The wall now visible above ground is of a quite different structure. Fragments of the same stone are to be seen embedded in the core of the outer walls. This must mean either that waste pieces were incorporated in the rubble wall at the time of building or that these are not the walls of the original castle. There is some evidence that there have been at least three structures on the site. There is also some evidence of three separate boundary walls, the latest being of recent construction.

At some time in the past, the building has obviously been used as a quarry We can tell this because the amount of rubble now left on the site is too little for a building that has fallen into decay and remained undisturbed and the absence of many foundation stones which could only have been removed by human agency.

Despite this depradation, it is fairly clear that the building consisted of a central gatehouse, with a large hall on the left, and the private apartments and ladies quarters on the right. A fragment only of the latter building remains, while the gatehouse has long since fallen into the moat. The two vaulted chambers on the left hand side of the entrance were almost certainly the kitchens, the fireplace and the flue and the arched drain leading to the moat. Over the centuries the soil of the Castle Hill has been washed away so that the remaining original foundations are now two or three feet above the ground but no doubt, they have been underpinned from time to time. This erosion was no doubt responsible for the fall of the gatehouse, the large piece of masonry now lying in the moat was part of it.

Unfortunately,some time in the present century restoration must have been attempted, without any very sound archeological advice. Shattered corners have been rounded off or even squared up so that it now appears as if there were openings where none originally existed and walls have been created where there were no walls before. At the same time, the holes that had contained the ends of joists and similar features were carefu1ly built up so that much evidence which might have helped in reconstructing the building has been lost. This of course makes any attempt to determine the original plan very difficult indeed in fact so far as the southern tower is concerned it is quite impossible to guess what was there.