Cusop History Group

Most residents and many visitors are aware of Cusop's very own castle, an impressive, irregular ring-shaped earthen bank, opposite the entrance to the parish church and overlooking the hollow of farmland that is the heart of Cusop. Almost every medieval village in this area had a castle of some sort and this is generally assumed to be the remains of Cusop's (although, of course, Cusop has two: the other, known as Mouse Castle, stands on the ridge on the opposite side of the hollow to Cusop castle).
This much has been noted in successive history books, both popular and academic, since the 19th century, but start looking for the specific evidence and sources for this assumption and things seem less certain.
First of all the historical records. There is no known reference to a castle at Cusop in any medieval document (not uncommon since medieval estate documents were generally more concerned with land rights and income than with individual buildings). The earliest reference found so far is post-medieval: in the 1650s an antiquarian named Silas Taylor in his writings about Herefordshire mentioned Cusop's "Castle by the Church, and with large banks moated".
So the earthwork certainly existed by this date, although there is no mention of any substantial stone or wooden structures. After that we have nothing until the castle site appears in a 1772 estate atlas of Sir George Cornewall of Moccas who owned most of Cusop by this date. The estate map shows the earthwork with a track running through the middle and a building standing in the northern half. The atlas does not refer to the earthwork, merely to two plots: A21, a "small close above the mill", listed as "inclosed arable", and A2 listed as part of the "house buildings yard garden etc" belonging to Llydadyway Farm. It does not describe the nature of the building standing inside the earthwork, but it must have been in use, since the atlas would not have bothered to record it otherwise. In any event the building had disappeared by 1815 when another Cornewall estate map was produced (and the track had been diverted around the north-side of the earthwork - where it is still in use today).
Turning to archaeology we have even less to go on. No dateable materials or objects relating to the site have been found. It has never been excavated (except by the Victorian owner of Llydyadyway Farm, Charles Lilwall, who said in the 1880s that he had done some excavating and found "extensive remains of building stones" but he gave no more details). This is consistent with the antiqarian John Duncumb who in 1812 wrote that there were "quantities of loose stones" in the centre of the site. If Duncumb had seen any kind of standing stonework he would certainly have mentioned it, so the report by a later antiquarian, Charles Robinson, in his 1869 "History of the Castles of Herefordshire" that "Some rough stonework, the only remains of the Castle Walls, was visible within the memory of man (or rather of one old woman)" can be dismissed at best as the result of Chinese whispers. So too can Lilwall's later claim - going one better - that he had known an old man who remembered seeing a portion of the castle gateway still standing. All we can firmly say is that in the 18th century there was in the middle of the earthwork a building which might or might not have been part of a medieval castle and that by 1812 there was only a scatter of stones which might have been the remains of that building.
We can also try to compare our castle with other better understood monuments to see if that gives any idea of its likely age and type. Unfortunately even this is not a great help. The castle is close to a church and a stream with a mill - which is a common grouping for medieval castles.

On the other hand, its form is not common at all. Most castles in the area were erected by the Normans and most take the form of a "motte and bailey" that is a mound attached to an enclosure created by a surrounding earthen bank. Our castle is not like this: there is no mound, just an enclosure formed by the ring-shaped bank (although it is worth mentioning that Mouse Castle is just such a motte and bailey, built inside what seems to be an earlier Iron Age enclosure). The bank itself is surprisingly bulky, considering it encloses a space of only one acre.
And its entrance is strangely self-effacing, opening towards the nearby stream rather than, say, the church or one of the more obvious approaches to the castle.
The earthwork was first scheduled as an Ancient Monument in 1952 and the reason given is that it is a rare example of an Anglo-Saxon or Norman fortification that is just a "ringwork" without a motte. Of course, this rather begs the question, if it is so unusual, how do we know it is medieval at all. One explanation has been that it was built later in the middle ages when the fashion for mottes had passed. Then again, another possibility is that it is in fact much earlier (and possibly re-used by the Normans): with its small size, its location on an upland slope, its irregular curved bank, and its single entrance, the castle looks much like one of the small Iron Age enclosures that are scattered around the Welsh border.
So in truth all that we can confidently say about the castle at the moment is that "we don't really know". That is where we hope the Cusop Castle Project can change things. With modern geophysics equipment we have the chance for the first time to "see" beneath the ground without the cost and destruction of digging (followers of Time Team and similar programmes will remember the "geophyz" being wheeled in). Depending on what this reveals, it should then be possible to carry out some carefully targeted excavations to obtain critical information about the real date and nature of the site. We can't be sure what that will turn out to be, but we can be fairly sure that it will be a lot more than we know now.

Ian Jardin
April 2023

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