Ennor Castle

Heritage listing

Details The monument includes a small shell keep castle known as Ennor, or Old Town, Castle in the present village of Old Town on the south coast of St Mary's in the Isles of Scilly. The castle occupies a small but prominent knoll on the east side of the broad Lower Moors valley behind Old Town Bay. The knoll has a semicircular rocky scarp facing west, up to c.10m above the valley floor, from which the knoll slopes steeply to more gently sloping land to the east. The castle encompassed the knoll with a subrectangular keep wall, now partly dismantled. An outer earthwork bank is visible along the foot of the slope and traces of walling indicate an adjacent enclosure south east of the knoll. The walls of the sub-rectangular keep no longer survive in their entirety above ground level. The wall survives above ground on the north west and part of the west side, where it is c.1m thick, of coursed rubble. Its footings vary in height with irregularities in the knoll, and the wall's height thus also varies, averaging 1m above interior ground level but reaching 2m high in places. Elsewhere, the line of the wall is now marked by earthwork banks between 2m and 4.5m wide and 1m to 1.5m high along the south west and east sides, and by a wider spread of dense rubble on the south east side. The keep's walls defined a subrectangular internal area measuring 22m north east-south west by up to 17m north west-south east, rounded at the south west end and squared at the north east. The interior of the castle has only a limited level area behind the south west end, beyond which the surface slopes fairly steeply. Internal buildings, typically of timber within small shell keep castles, have left no visible remains above ground level. An outer earthwork extends along the foot of the slope north e

From the Historic England List Entry under OGL v3.