Remains of Deddington Castle?

[Paul Drawmer]

The house that we used to live in at Clifton had an unused doorway into the adjacent house.
This stone doorway was made out of much better quality stone than the rest of the building.
None of the rest of the house had sawn stone, and even though it doesn’t look it in this picture, the stone was a grey or blue sandstone.



At the Duke of Cumberland's Head, the inglenook in the main bar has a large piece of carved stone holding up the left hand side. This looks as if it has been brought from a different building.

I wondered if these were remains of the Castle that had recycled into later projects.

Does anyone know of any other 'out of place' stonework that might be re-used Castle parts?

[ColinR]

There are two arches in a house in the High Street.
See http://www.deddington.org.uk/history/buildings/deddingtoncastle
And years ago there were a few bits of carving lying around in the garden of what became the St Annes Residential Home in Clifton. I have some photos of them somewhere.

[B.Ritchie]

I think that  the stone arch in the righthand photo on that webpage captioned, "The distinctive profile of a Norman Arch, and  now....", is the arch inside Maund's Farmhouse (if memory serves me) and that it was on the basis of this  arch that the attribution was made several years ago  as to Maund's Farmhouse as being the  site  of the elusive "Third Manor" of Deddington .   New Street was a NEW street when the street and its burgage plots were laid out c. 12-something --it was  thus an example of a thirteenth c. "by-pass" around what had by then become the Church/market centre of the "town" which had grown up around Odo's defunct castle-- so, it seems that "there's nothing new under the sun", or something like that....

Cheers.

[Euryalus]

But how much of the castle was of stone and how much was timber? I suspect that a stone castle would have left substantial foundations, which do not seem to exist in the case of Deddington.

[minniemagoo]

See the four pictures I posted recently in the Gallery of stones allegedly from the Castle. In the 1970s when we took the pics, they were in the garden of a house in Clifton.

[Euryalus]

I am not saying that there were no stone buildings, but my suggestion is that much of Deddington Castle would have been of earthwork and timber construction. Stone castles leave substantial remains, an example being the long-demolished castle at Wallingford. When I worked for English Heritage as a Regional Curator we had virtually no excavated stonework from Deddington Castle. And what about Witney, were there was another Anglo-Norman castle; this demolished building has left some very extensive foundations. I suspect that the hall block at Deddington would have been of similar size and appearance - this portion (effectively the keep) would clearly have been of stone construction.