Sigston Castle:

Heritage listing

Details The monument includes Sigston Castle, a 14th century enclosure castle situated 400m north of Kirby Sigston church. The castle lies on gently sloping land at the western edge of the floodplain of the Cod Beck stream and on the south side of a dry valley containing a piped tributary to the Cod Beck. Although they are not included in the scheduling, fields to the north of the castle contain extensive ridge and furrow earthworks indicating that they were in arable cultivation during the medieval period. The medieval village of Kirby Sigston, with which the castle must have been associated, is now deserted but survives as earthworks adjacent to the church. Although over the years the walls of the castle have been demolished to provide stone for buildings in the vicinity, the moat which surrounded it survives as an open ditch and, in places, the foundations of the curtain walls and central keep remain as upstanding earthworks. The castle has a trapezoidal plan, the moated island measuring 140m north-south by 110m east-west. The moat is up to 15m wide and varies between 8m deep on the uphill, north-western arm to 1m deep on the south-eastern arm which runs along the bottom of the slope at the edge of the floodplain. A 10m wide outer bank lies along the south- western, north-western and north-eastern arms of the moat and, although it has been altered in places by drainage works, road construction and possibly by quarrying, it survives up to 1.5m high on the north-western arm. There is no evidence of an outer bank along the south-eastern arm but it is thought that such a feature was not needed here, as the floodplain is likely to have been a marsh in the medieval period. The best-preserved part of the curtain wall lies on the inner edge of the north-western arm, where it

From the Historic England List Entry under OGL v3.