Launceston Castle

About this place

The first thing you learn here is that locals say «Lawnston» and swallow the middle syllable; the second is that this castle is a 13th-century round tower standing inside an older circular shell keep, perched on a tall man-made mound that looks down on the whole town. Robert of Mortain, half-brother of William the Conqueror, raised the first mound within a few years of 1066, and Richard, Earl of Cornwall, added the high inner tower in the 13th century, partly so that guests could look out over his deer park. For centuries this was Cornwall's front door to the rest of England, and the county was governed from here until the assizes moved west to Bodmin in 1838. The visit itself is simple. You wander the green bailey, step into the small exhibition on the site's history, then climb 64 steps, with handrails and landings to catch your breath, up the motte to the keep; for the very top there are a further 68 inside the high tower, steep and narrow. The view is the one real prize: Launceston's grey roofs below and, beyond them, the empty sweep of Bodmin Moor. Behind all that sits a grimmer story. The castle served as Cornwall's county gaol into the 19th century, earned the nickname «Castle Terrible», and held George Fox, founder of the Quakers, in 1656. Be honest with yourself: an hour is plenty and less may do, because most of the walls have gone and the keep is hollow inside. What saves the place is its position and its view, not its stonework. Adult entry is £9 at the gate, rising to £10 on peak summer dates, and 15% less, about £7.65, if you book on the English Heritage website before midnight the day before; a family ticket trims the total further and members go free. It is genuinely seasonal and it does not open every day: Wednesday to Sunday plus bank holidays, April to the start of November, 10:00 to 17:00 (sometimes 18:00 in high summer, and only to 16:00 through October), then shut entirely until late March. Mondays and Tuesdays are closed days, so check before you leave the main road. There is no castle car park; a pay-and-display multi-storey sits directly opposite. There are no toilets on site, though the town is minutes away. Pushchairs are fine in the bailey and exhibition, but the climb is stairs only, and the slopes around the motte are steep and signposted, so keep small children by the hand. Picnics on the grass are allowed and there are benches with a view. This is a day trip from Cornwall in the literal sense: Launceston sits on the A30 at the county's eastern gateway, lost its mainline station in 1966, and now sees only the narrow-gauge steam railway that runs in summer, so a car is the only sensible way in. Allow 35 to 45 minutes from Bodmin, about 45 from Plymouth, and roughly an hour from Newquay or Padstow. It works best as a stop on the way into or out of Cornwall rather than a destination in its own right. If you do stop, give the town an hour too: the 14th-century South Gate, the last of the town's three gates, with the small pedestrian arch cut through it in 1887, and St Mary Magdalene church, built between 1511 and 1524, whose carvings were cut into unforgiving granite, a rarity worth a closer look.