Welcombe Castle Hill, Stratford Upon Avon

Description

Temple Hill or Castle Hill. Mound associated with a C19 landscape park, it has been suggested that it may originally have been a motte. Not near Church but by DMV of Welcombe. Temple Hill is a large isolated mainly natural mound, with a flattened top and a spiral path up to it. In its present form it is obviously a landscape feature connected with the 1869 Welcombe mansion; but it is an ideal motte (though the landscaping has destroyed any definite evidence) and its actually being such is borne out by the fact that -
1. its traditional name is 'Castle Hill, (Jorden)
2. Welcombe Estate was the chief manor of Old Stratford in surveys of c1182 and 1252; also the mound is only half a mile from the Domesday Manor of Clopton. (VCH)
3. fIn 1792 labourers found on the summit, some 14" below the surface, many human bones (including a whole skeleton with a small piece of iron weapon in the skull) and an 'ancient weapon' (evidently some sort of pike, see illus.) (Gentleman's Magazine) (PastScape – the reference source seems to be G.Stanhope-Lovell, S/S, 16.11.66)
Mr. Dufty suggests that the weapon is a late 16th - early 17th c. linstock (examples in Skelton's 'Engraved Illust. of Ancient Arms & Armour' Vol. 2, 1830, plates LXXXVI and CXIV, and elsewhere), but it seems equally to resemble a 15th c. 'Korseke' pole-arm (examples in 'Tables of Ancient Arms', Metropolitan Museum, New York). The finds therefore are unlikely to have any bearing on the mound as an artificial feature, except as giving a terminus ante quem. (PastScape - ref. oral information)

Comments

The location, next to a later high status house, does mean this mainly natural hill could have been used as a motte by a precursor medieval manor house although the actually evidence - which is mainly a C18 reference to a Castle Hill place-name - is weak. If a medieval castle then later mansion would occupy the site of the bailey making a castle of considerable size.