Croft Castle - Cyclical but Timeless

Croft Castle is a delightful marcher castle, depending, of course, on how we define the ‘marches’…and ‘castle’.

Set in the deepest countryside of north Herefordshire, it is hard to imagine a more beautiful or less warlike setting. The grounds currently run to some 1,500 acres, and if it isn’t a deer park, it should be – the deer are missing out on a treat.

And yet it is a place of contrasts.?

The castle dates back to the eleventh century, so you might turn up looking for an ancient, crumbling military monument. If so, you will be disappointed. The current building on the site looks decidedly domestic and was mainly built??back in the period of welcome peace immediately after the English Civil War.?

It is none the worse for that. It feels like a home…a home, moreover, which grabbed the return of peace and took the opportunity for rebirth in both hands. It has a very tranquil feel to it. Dark wood and polish, large windows and light. A place to live and have children, and create family traditions.

The traditions seem timeless.?

The original family were the Crofts, who owned the land from 1085. And, almost a thousand years after the family moved onto the land, there are very moving photographs of the doomed generation of 1914, looking back at us with poignant confidence, and proud to be doing their duty. Young men dressed in the beautiful, crisp officers’ uniforms of the time – uniforms that would be torn to shreds, alongside those of the estate workers, just a few months later on the bloody battlefields of the western front.

But again, there are surprises. In the usual DNA lottery of history, the Croft family had in fact lost the house and the estates long before this. An incumbent in the early eighteenth century made the bold but foolish decision to bet the family fortune on the contemporary equivalent of crypto-currency – the South Sea Bubble of 1720. By 1746 the struggle to keep the estate was definitively lost, and it was sold.

Strangely, the pull of the house reverberated down through the ages. In 1923, the family were able to buy the house back again. Although it is part of the National Trust and open to the public most of the time, they are still there today. Traditions change and families come and go.

But Croft Castle is a reminder that history is also often more cyclical than one might imagine – an end can just be a beginning.

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