The Castle Hotel

The Castle Hotel is a public house, now serving as an Art Trust, built in the late 18th century and extended around 1805. It features a painted brick exterior with a slate roof and stands four storeys high with a basement. The ground and first floors have painted quoins, and there is a parapet at the roof with chimney stacks on the left, right, and at the end right. The original building has a regular arrangement of windows, including three segmentally headed sashes on the third floor, three segmentally headed glazing bar sashes on the second floor, and three canted bays with French windows on the first floor, which are adorned with a tented verandah supported by trellised piers and wrought iron rails. The ground floor also has two canted bays with pilasters and sashes, along with basement openings below. A central double panelled door is topped with a semi-circular fanlight set in a moulded surround. The large plastered doorcase is elaborately decorated with enriched and guilloched pilasters and large brackets featuring reliefs of castles that support the cornice. To the right, there is an additional wing with segmentally headed glazing bar sashes on each floor and a segmental plate glass window on the ground floor. Inside, there is a late 19th-century staircase and assembly rooms located on the second floor. The main block and the adjacent wing were owned separately in the 18th and 19th centuries by Tomson and Wootton, operating as the Castle Hotel (which was "lately rebuilt" in 1814) and the Castle Tap, and were not originally interconnected.