‘Grand Designs’ castle comes to market
A NORTH Yorkshire castle which featured on television show Grand Designs is up for sale with a £1.65m price tag.
The castle, which is located just outside the village of Hellifield near Skipton and dates back to medieval times,has come to the residential market through property agents Carter Jonas.
Hellifield Peel Castle was made famous when it appeared on Grand Designs in 2007 and later in 2009 when the journey of Francis and Karen Shaw to restore the property from a wreck was charted for the show.
Francis Shaw, an architect, fell in love with Peel Castle as a child when he first saw it on a family holiday. Many years later when looking for a family home with his wife Karen in 2004, he found the castle on the English Heritage ‘Buildings at Risk’ register and put in a successful offer to purchase and rebuild the property, starting his childhood dream of restoring the dilapidated castle to its original grandeur.
The original Peel Tower was built in 1305 by Bishop Alexander Bek of Durham, whose nephew, Sir John Harecourt, was one of the last Templar Knights. The tower passed on to Harecourt and was extended and remodelled over the centuries, and is today the last standing Knights Templar castle in England.
The Hamerton family, who owned the property and surrounding estate for over 500 years, remodelled it into a castellated home and later into a Georgian country house in the 1780’s, which is the structure that Francis sought to restore. The property was requisitioned as a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War and then fell into disrepair after it was dismantled by its latter owner, who stripped the castle of its interiors and roof in order to avoid post-war taxes on uninhabited properties in the late 1940’s.
Peel Castle was left vacant for over 50 years before Francis and Karen took it on.
Tony Wright, head of residential sales at Carter Jonas’ Harrogate office, which is managing the sale, said: “This is an extremely rare opportunity to purchase a tremendously unique property that has been so thoughtfully and painstakingly restored by its current owners. The purchaser has the benefit of walking into a property of such character that has been thoroughly polished down to the last inch and is unrecognisable from its dilapidated state twelve years ago.”
Hellifield Peel Castle has been run as a successful bed and breakfast since 2007.
Mr Wright added: “Peel Castle is ideally configured to function as a spacious family home or to continue as a boutique bed and breakfast business. It is perfectly situated for enjoying a peaceful country lifestyle but without being remote as the amenities of Hellifield village are on the doorstep. Hellifield has its own railway station with links to mainline rail including to Leeds from which London can be reached in just over two hours, making it a convenient location for those needing to be in easy reach of the capital.
“This is a once in a lifetime chance to own a property that is classed as a scheduled ancient monument, one of only a few in Yorkshire that are in private ownership, that has been so expertly renovated.”
