Betchworth Castle

Last week the afternoon of my day off was so pleasant it would have been a shame to waste it, so I went for a walk to look at Betchworth Castle. The way I intended to go, from a glance at the map, turned out to have a large sign at the entrance reading 'Castle Gardens: No Access To Castle' and so I went walking along a bridleway through the golf course adjoining to see whether I could at least get a glimpse of the ruins. No ruins; only views of middle-aged gentleman ambling from tee to tee. I had abandoned the idea and was going to follow a different looped path around the hill to the south when I met another man, not visibly involved in golf, who told me there was in fact another access path opened up too recently to appear on the OS map when conservation work had begun on the Castle remains.

There's not a lot left of what was once a very dramatic building, perched on the top of a bluff overlooking the River Mole and its valley stretching up to the feet of the North Downs. Medieval, Tudor, and 18th-century owners all changed the shape of the Castle, and the final, Classical, additions were made by Sir John Soane in 1799. Now you follow a path around the fenced perimeter, at one point rather excitingly having to step across a gap between outcrops of stone, and gaze alternately up at the ruins and down at the lake. The conservation group looking after the site has a dream of building a house in the curtilage of the ruins, and using the revenue to fund their maintenance: a long-term aim, one feels.

The ruinous state of the Castle is essentially if improbably due to Mr Hope of Deepdene Hall, who on buying the estate in 1835 decided to take the roof off Betchworth and charge people to come and look at it: before that it had been in good order. Within a few years it was a heap.