Name: See behind the scenes of an unusual family home, Brancepeth Castle
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T13:20:51.000Z
Duration: 9 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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And I'm Richard and welcome to our home, Branspeth Castle.

Mum bought the castle for a book warehouse.

As London publishers, they needed a warehouse and she thought, what a grand idea.

The building wraps right round two thirds of this gorgeous enclosed courtyard.

And when I was first here, I just thought how magic to live in a walled garden sort of a building.

We live up there, we have, my brother in law lives down there, my daughter in law lives over there.

So we basically occupy different areas of the castle.

In 1820, this would have been where the carriages would have arrived and the guests would have walked into the main hall of the castle at that time.

The origins of castle date back to about 1138.

Within the castle, of course, it's been through a whole myriad of different owners.

An amazing amount has taken place in the old part of the castle.

This was where they plotted the rising of the north.

It just exudes such an atmosphere of strength and age.

After the medieval period, the castle went through a series of mixed owners.

His son, Matthew Russell developed the castle as a Regency stately home.

So we're currently standing in the, the ballroom added in 1820.

You see what we call the grand staircase.

So when the Russell family had their, their gatherings, their social gatherings, they would have come down through the door here and swept down the staircase and this would have all been part of the, the guest presentation room.

So many of the rooms would benefit from maybe a week, I say unrealistically, maybe a month, but

even a week, even a week of just going, what should we do in here?

When they modernized the castle in 1820, they built the Regency Castle onto the existing medieval castle.

So we still have the full blown medieval castle with this Regency stately home sort of glued on the front.

This is the lowest level and we're still 15ft above ground level, even though it feels like you're underground.

When we first moved here, our children used to call this the dungeons.

They used to play hide and seek down here, but they've grown out of that.

They just exude atmosphere and gradually they're getting tidied up because this was full of rubble five years ago.

We hadn't Even started on getting this emptied out.

So these barrels would have been for the beer, for the estate workers.

When the Hamilton Russell family left, they had a big auction and this barrel here was lot number 1,855 15.

We still have it because when the person who bought it couldn't get it out through the door.

This is a quite an interesting part of the old castle.

Mind your head as you go over the doorway and the threshold and then through here we have the loo.

It drops straight down and there's even a fitted hand basin cut into the wall with drainage.

So pour the water, use a little bung, wash their hands and that for the 1300s.

Quarter of a million pounds of 1820 money was spent making this medieval castle a des res and high tech in its day.

And come and look at this Regency stair that he put in.

When we got married, it was raining so much we couldn't have an outside photo.

So we got all our guests to stand around this staircase and the photographer laid down on the floor there and everybody peered over.

So we got a group photograph of all our guests up the staircase here.

So we come up here and here at the top we have what my kids call the horror cabinet.

He was born in 1919 and as an only child was bought lots of toys.

So some of my brothers and sisters just couldn't bear to get rid of them.

The future of the building relies more on the commitment of people than it does purely on money.

You could put a lot of money at the building, but

actually the building has to be loved and looked after.

Right, Come out onto the old medieval roof here.

Excellent condition considering the age of this stonework.

Main thing we come up here for is inspecting the gutters, making sure the gutters are clear.

So the water that runs off the roof goes outside of the castle and doesn't go into the castle.

You can see here, there's quite a lot of build up of stuff down here.

So clear this stuff out, do a quick check.

And as you can see from this side here, you've got the.

The Regency tower that was added by the Scottish architect Paterson when that was built in 1820.

They were building out over what was the old defensive moat that ran round the old medieval curtain wall, and

Patterson didn't get his foundations right and the whole tower started to keel over.

And so they had to demolish the buttressing on this side of the tower just so the whole thing didn't fall over.

How many kilos did we get off it last year?

We sell chutney in the shop, we take it in the kitchen and we brew it all up.

There's no end to the money that this building could soak up.

The challenge is, can you eke it out in such a way that you keep on ticking?

If it's got a heartbeat, that's good enough.

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See behind the scenes of an unusual family home, Brancepeth Castle

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