Our History

Greystoke Castle began as a timber pele tower built by Llyulph de Greystoke. After the Norman conquest, it was replaced in 1069 with a stone-built tower. In 1346, King Edward III permitted the building to be castellated, creating the castle proper. In the early 16th century, the Greystokes married into the wealthy Dacre family.

In the 1560s, Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, met and secretly married widow Elizabeth Dacre, who had inherited the castle and its land on the death of her husband, 4th Baron Dacre/Baron Greystoke. With Thomas Howard’s three sons marrying Elizabeth’s three daughters, the castle and its estate passed to the Dukes of Norfolk and the subsequent Howard family.

In 1660, the castle was destroyed by Cromwell and lay dormant for a generation. The castle was later rebuilt and enlarged in the 1840s and designed by renowned Victorian architect Anthony Salvin. The extensive estate was converted into a modern farm. In 1868, a disaster occurred when a maid left a lighted candle in a cupboard full of linen, causing a fire that destroyed large parts of the castle. Henry Howard rebuilt it, bringing Salvin to oversee the reconstruction using labour and materials from within the estate. Henry even returned some money to his insurance company, saying he had been over-compensated for his losses.

In 1912, author Edgar Rice Burroughs, a regular visitor to Greystoke Castle, wrote Tarzan of the Apes using the little-known place as Tarzan’s ancestral home. However, the work was purely fiction. All 18 generations of the Greystoke family had been accounted for, and none of them were ever raised by apes in the jungles of Africa.

In 1939, the estate was confiscated by the army, and the land became a tank drivers’ training ground, while the castle itself later became a prisoner-of-war camp primarily for Polish men who had been fighting for the Germans, with the prisoners providing labour to run local farms where the men-folk were away fighting.

In 1949, the army no longer wanted to retain the Greystoke estate. Still, by then, the damage to the castle and the estate was overwhelming, and the compensation fund had been exhausted. So began the long, slow process of restoration and modernisation, started by Stafford Howard and has continued in some form ever since. Of course, a castle isn’t a castle without an obligatory ghost or two, and Greystoke supposedly has nine, including the statutory white lady, a monk who was bricked up within the walls and a butler who likes to play tricks on people down in the wine cellar where he drowned in a massive barrel of the stuff.