Hidden down the windy and narrow country lanes, situated next to the Shaftesbury woodlands and large lakes, you will reach the spectacular Old Wardour Castle. Wardour is spectacular, from a distance you dont actually notice how much of this castle is preserved and how incredible the journey inside is until you reach the castle doors.

A 14th century castle greets you from afar, built by Baron Lovell circa 1390’s, commissioned by the then King Richard II to meet the demand for a prime defencing structure within Wiltshire. During the War of the Roses, the castle was confiscated by Tudor forces and awarded to the Arundell family whom held many different estates within and around Wiltshire during this time period.

When you visit Old Wardour Castle, you will find ample space to park just outside it’s ground, and now due to social distancing, you will have to provide your details from your booking to allow you entrance to the grounds. Once the horrible bit is out the way, walking onto the grounds provides you with an impressive open environment, fully maintained and clean picnic grounds, and ruins of the castle situated right in the centre of the grounds.

It is not clear until you walk closer to the castle that you get the sense of scale of the building, and the added bonus of how well preserved it is. Luckily for everyone that visits now, you are able to walk and explore inside the building, discovering and imagining how the rooms would have looked and felt like 500 years ago.

Overall, the visit was amazing for us. The castle was located in a very obscure environment, that luckily is reached by satnav, and has many brown landmark signs that will point to the castle off many different routes.

The grounds were impressive, and well worth the visit, allowing us around 2 hours at the least to explore the castle and another surprise was that their is a small ‘grotto’ sitting on top of the hill that you could also have a look in. There was nothing special about this grotto other than it has been featured in a few tv and films.

I think that the best part of the visit was that you were able to go inside the castle and actually climb the stairs and explore the upper levels of the castle, as not alot of ruins around Britain have that much preservation.

Thank you for reading this post, and we hope you enjoyed it. We hope to see you for our next post, continuing our adventures around the UK whilst this pandemic continues. We wish you all good health, and to stay safe, and please remember to visit our social media pages to give us your support in other ways! Thank you and see you on the next adventure.