A random trip with my roommates from Leeds.

Spofforth castle is a ruined castle in Spofforth, near Leeds, UK. It was the seat of the Percy family, an influential Northern English family, until the 14th century and it is rumoured that the rebel barons drafted the Magna Carta there. While nothing remains of the original 11th century building, the castle was fortified in the 14th century and that is the ruin still remaining today.

I visited the castle with some of my classmates, who were also my housemates, while studying in the UK in 2017. It was a rather impromptu daytrip from Leeds, as I decided I’ll start exploring my new surroundings and the guys decided to join to me. We made quite the international collective, originating from Bangladesh, Montenegro, India and Slovenia, and we were eventually joined at the house by another classmate from Ethiopia.

On the day of the trip the four of us managed to navigate the infrequent buses and arrived to Spofforth castle, which was fenced off in a rather uninviting way. It took us a bit to decide if we would be trespassing someone’s private property or not (the castle is state owned, so we needn’t have worried), but we went in anyway. We had the ruins all to ourselves, which made for some pretty epic photos.

Impressions of Spofforth castle

The bus to Harrogate took forever to come and it even started raining (the famous English weather had showed up to greet us properly), so we had plenty of time to talk about our home countries and habits and I remember us laughing like idiots by the roadside about the name of some province in India (Udupi, which only Balkan people will find funny). Afterwards we briefly explored the town of Harrogate, where we had to wait for our bus back to Leeds, which was luckily on time.

Tiny bit of Harrogate

Getting there: If you’d like to visit Spofforth castle, you first need to take a bus from Leeds or any nearby town to Harrogate. From there you can take a local bus to the Low Lane Farm bus station and the castle is about 500 meters away from there (obviously there’s no entrance fee).

Photos of me by M. Tošić.