Bath Lodge Castle
Bath Lodge Castle
Bath Lodge Castle is a Hotel & Restaurant in Bath, offering a unique and romantic stay at a Castle. Grade II Listed and bursting with character, it is a wonderful fortress complete with towers, battlements and portcullis.
History
Constructed in 1806 as the principal of six gate lodges to one of the largest estates in England, Bath Lodge Castle was uniquely built to parody, in miniature, the principal estate buildings of Farleigh Manor and Farleigh Castle.
Originally named Castle Lodge, its history can be traced back as long ago as 987 AD when the land that it lies on, Fernleah, was mentioned in charter of King Elthelred. At the time of the Domesday Book Fernleah was known as Ferlege and by the 12th century it had become Farleigh and was owned by the Montfort Family who then sold it to the Burghershs in 1337. The estate then passed on to Sir Thomas Hungerford, who was speaker of the House of Commons in 1370. Sir Thomas failed to get the necessary Royal consent for fortification of the original Manor House but was pardoned in 1383.
However, the Hungerfords fared badly too: Two members of the family backed the wrong side of the ‘War of the Roses’ and lost their heads as a consequence. Farleigh was then confiscated and given to George, Duke of Clarence and brother of Edward IV, who later drowned in a butt of malmsey wine! His daughter, the Countess of Salisbury, was accused of treason in 1541, but refused to lay her head on the block on grounds of innocence and the executioner was obliged to follow her round the scaffold, chopping at her head until it fell from her shoulders.
Farleigh House then remained a modest one until Lt. Colonel John Houlton, a devotee of the Gothic Revival, succeeded to the estate in 1806. He enlarged and altered the house using the fashionable medieval style and spent £40,000 – equivalent to around a million pounds in today’s values – on embellishments including hot houses, conservatories, stabling and six lodges. These included the Castle Lodge, now Bath Lodge Castle, built between 1806 and 1813.