Historic Description of Ince Castle

Trematon and Ince Castles

These two strongly contrasted castles lie quite close to each other as the crow flies, both looking out on the broad waters of the great estuary into which the Tamar and so many other streams discharge themselves. But though they are distant from each other only some two miles upon the map, it takes a long circuit of five or six miles over very difficult ground to get from one to the other.

Ince Castle

Ince is at the end of a long low peninsula, which projects into the tidal flats of St German’s River. It is but a few feet above high water level, and was obviously built in the Middle Ages to command the passage of the river and protect the low lying shore along it.

Ince is a complete antithesis to its neighbour Trematon. It is low-lying, comparatively late in foundation, small, and very simple in plan.

Ince is a corruption of “Innis,” the isle, sufficiently explains its character – it is on a long low peninsula projecting into the broad estuary of the Linher, the St German’s river, and watching all this backwater of Plymouth Sound. It was apparently built by the Devonshire Courtenays – who had an outlying patch of land here – presumably in the later fourteenth century, the plan being a regular quadrangle with a tower at each corner, somewhat like those of Shirburn or Bodiham; but at Ince they are square, not rounded, as in the other two castles. The original building seems to have been much pulled about when it was in the hands of the Killigrew’s in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - they modernized all the windows, enlarging them and cutting them square, and clapped on to the main front, that which faces west towards the neck of the peninsula, a broad flight of steps and a classical pediment, so that the whole building has the effect of a house of the time of Charles II rather than a mediaeval castle. This is all the more the case because Ince, unlike all other Cornish castles, is built of red brick – probably in its flats brick-clay was easier to procure than the stone available in all the upland regions. Indeed, at a first glance, Ince might pass for a seventeenth century building, if it were not for its battlements and its four solid corner towers.

It was, perhaps, the isolated aspect of these towers which inspired the local legend of the eighteenth century which related that a Killigrew – it sounds like a story of Thomas of that name, the notorious Master of the Revels to “Old Rowley” – kept a mistress in each of them, so secretly, that none of the ladies was aware of the other three. “But, writes the old historian of the duchy, “I cannot believe in the tale of the towers having been constructed for a purpose in strict conformity, indeed, with Mahometan law, but at such complete variance from our own.” There is a somewhat similar, and equally absurd, folk-tale of the same sort, with regard to a great Gloucestershire house.

Share this page on the Social Networks