Ashby de la Zouch Castle

Ashby de la Zouch Castle is a medieval ruin in the market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, administered by English Heritage as a Grade I listed building and Scheduled Monument. The site began as a Norman manor house before William Hastings — confidant of Edward IV — transformed it in the 1470s into a fortified residence dominated by the imposing Hastings Tower, one of the tallest private towers built in 15th-century England. During the English Civil War the castle held out for the Royalists for over a year before surrendering in 1646; Parliament subsequently ordered it slighted, producing the dramatic fractured silhouette visible today. Visitors can walk a surviving underground passage connecting the tower to the chapel, giving a rare tangible sense of the castle's original defensive layout.