CLIFFE CASTLE

West Riding of Yorkshire

This bizarre building standing in Keighley (pron. Keithley) houses the Cliffe Castle Museum - a museum of local history.

It is, of course, a so-called "mock gothick" Castle of the 19th century and is remarkable only for its peculiar tower.  The castellation on the mansion is rather lacklustre and it really is a Castle in name only.  It was built for local lawyer Christopher Netherwood between 1828 and 1833.  The Butterfield family bought the Hall, as it then was, in 1848 and Henry Isaac Butterfield transformed the basic Hall into the large mansion we see today around 1878.  He actually added two towers, one at each end of the building and castellated them both heavily.

The Castle became a museum in the 1950s, and it was this recently that the second tower and third storey were removed and the main tower was lowered and the castellations removed, giving it the unfinished appearance it has today.

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2018