Mouse Castle

 I had a very enjoyable trip out to Mouse Castle with a friend yesterday.  We were going to have a look at the earthworks around the motte to see if they might possibly look Iron Age rather than Norman.  

It's a nice theory, but I think I agree with Tim Hoverd, the County Archaeologist, who has done a survey of the site and comes down firmly on the side of Norman.  

By the entrance to the wood, there's a strange earthwork in the field which also may be part of the castle defences, but we didn't want to trespass in the field, and it was difficult to get close enough from inside the wood because of all the undergrowth (the perils of archaeological surveying!).  There were also a lot of brambles around the motte, which have regrown since they were cleared a few years ago.

Very little is documented about Mouse Castle - I did a bit of preliminary research online, and one website suggests the castle was never finished, while another thinks it might have been built by Roger de Lacy - the de Lacys were an important medieval family in the area.

Kilvert has a charming diary entry about visiting the site.  Back then the top of the hill was clear of trees, apart from the top of the motte itself.  Kilvert met "a wild group.  A stout elderly man in a velveteen jacket with a walking stick sat or lay upon the dry turf.  Beside him sat one or two young girls, while two or three more girls and boys climbed up and down an accessible point in the rampart like young wild goats, swarmed up into the hazel trees on the top of the rock and sat in the forks and swung.  I could not make the party out at all.  They were not poor and they certainly were not rich.  They did not look like farmers, cottagers or artizans.  They were perfectly nondescript, seemed to have come from nowhere and to be going nowhere, but just to have fallen from the sky upon Mouse Castle, and to be just amusing themselves."