spacious apartments being without some design in that art. The well-known comedy of the " Drummer or Haunted House," took its rise from an incident which happened at this Castle. The whole of the interior of this splendid building was taken down in 1777. The plans of the interior of this Castle are preserved by the Earl of Ashburnham .
The Castle consists of three Courts, the largest of which was cloistered round ; the Hall was of large dimensions, and at its upper end were three spacious rooms, one of them sixty feet long, and beyond them was the Chapel. This part of the building, including the Hall and Kitchen, reached to the upper story ; the oven in the bakehouse was fourteen feet in diameter ; the left side of the entrance gate was a long gallery intended for a stable in case of siege: under the corner tower on the eastern side was the prison, having a stone post with an iron chain attached ; the rooms above in the south front were the best apartments, and in every window of the many galleries leading to them was painted the Alnat or Wolf Dog, the ancient supporter of the Fienne Arms. Many private staircases curiously constructed in brick, without any wood-work, led to these galleries ; the great staircase was forty feet square, the towers by the gateway in the south front are eighty-four feet high ; the north and south fronts were 206 feet, and the east and west 214 feet long.[1]
In the church, which is close by, are several monuments of the Dacres, formerly lords of the Castle, particularly one of Thomas Lord Dacre, who suffered death at the age of twenty-four, for being an accessory in the murder of Sir Nicholas Pelham's gamekeeper. It seems that a party, of whom his Lordship was one, in a youthful frolic, had engaged to take a -
- ↑ Gough's Camden.
