In her telling, Sally Nightingale didn’t want to buy Appleby Castle, a 900-year-old structure in Cumbria, UK.
But her then-husband Christopher, who, she says, “was a castle fanatic”—they already owned two—insisted on it, so in 1997 she found herself the doyenne of one of just a few intact Norman keeps remaining in England.
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She lived there through a highly publicised divorce, eventually turning the roughly 29 000-square-foot, 20-bedroom castle into a hotel in 2013, leaving a 7 750-square-foot wing for her private use. (The keep, a fortified tower within the castle complex, is not included in these measurements.)
Nightingale’s 27-year tenure in the building wasn’t the usual story of a gilded money pit—although she did, in her telling, put ample sums of money into its upkeep.
“It was habitable, in good order,” she says. “But we put a lot more money into it—we had to restore the keep, and re-lead the roof, which was no cheap affair.” That said, living in the building, maintaining it, and now running it as a hotel has been continuous work. For that reason she’s decided to put the castle, keep and outbuildings with 25 acres on the market, listing it with Guy Bradshaw of United Kingdom Sotheby’s International Realty for £9.5 million ($12 million).
The history
Defensive structures on the site date back to the Romans, but the current keep was built a mere nine centuries ago.
The castle’s most famous owner from that period was Hugh de Morville, a knight made famous for murdering Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Given its position in the north, the castle saw intermittent warfare between England and Scotland (and also, during the civil war, between England and England) for most of its history.
It was owned by members of the Clifford family for the better part of 400 years, although not necessarily occupied—for a period of time the keep seems to have been used as a prison. It then passed to the Thanet family, which owned it for 200 years. Tack another century onto that if you count a son born out of wedlock, who inherited the castle in 1849 and passed it down to his children.
The castle was eventually sold to a company that used the property as its headquarters, but also opened the building to the public. And in 1997, the Nightingales purchased the place for a reported £1.1 million, closing it once again and using it as a private residence for 16 years.
The property
The keep, whose walls are an estimated six feet thick, hasn’t been used as a residence since at least the mid-17th century, Nightingale says.
The mansion has a requisite great hall, dining room and state bedrooms. Spread across the property are three cottages, along with a variety of storage areas. On the land, which Nightingale says she didn’t really alter, there’s a walled garden and a tennis court; the entire property overlooks the Eden River.
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When Nightingale moved in, she says, the interiors were all in solid shape, with many of their original, 400-year-old decorations preserved. “There were some furnishings, but they weren’t the right period,” she says, describing them as mostly Victorian. “So we had to put things to match the authentic things that were already there.”
Today the house, Nightingale says, is filled with furniture from the appropriate period, which she says should stay in the house when it sells, “although there’s one or two pieces I’d like to keep, wherever I go.”
She’s turned the keep into a museum called the Norman Centre, whose four floors are filled with displays that connect the keep to the country’s history with the Normans, who invaded England from France in 1066 and ruled the country until about 1154. (The keep’s 100 steps, Nightingale warns, are a hazard: “If you’re not healthy and you’re not fit, beware of climbing those steps. But when you get to the top you have magnificent views of Eden Valley.”)
Staying in the castle
Turning it into a hotel wasn’t as significant an undertaking as you might think, Nightingale says, simply because she wasn’t allowed to make any serious modifications to the Grade 1 building. “People that come here like it because it’s the real deal,” she explains. “It’s done authentically, as it was. Nothing has changed.”
Many of her visitors are foreign, including Americans enchanted by the fact that George Washington’s father and uncles went to Appleby Grammar School. “That’s huge—the Americans love it,” she says.
Still, it wouldn’t be difficult, she speculates, to turn it back into a private house. Indeed, she occasionally will shut down the hotel and “come over to the main castle and sit in the dining room, which is obviously like Downton Abbey–it’s marvelous.”
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