£1.5m home comes with its own castle

4:49pm Wednesday 7th May 2008

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ANYONE with £1.5m to spare has a chance to buy a 600-year-old piece of English history that boasts a connection with King Richard III.

The owners of Sheriff Hutton Castle, in the village of the same name near York, have placed it on the market.

The ruins have been an unusual garden feature for Dr Richard Howarth and his wife, Jenny, who have enjoyed viewing them from their home in a converted granary for 13 years.

The ravages of time and the weather mean there are only a few signs of its former glory, but people travel from all over the world to Sheriff Hutton to see the castle from which Richard III ran the Council of the North in the 15th century.

The sale, being handled by York estate agents Blenkin and Co, includes the castle along with Dr and Mrs Howarth's four-bedroom house, an adjoining cottage, outbuildings and land.

In 1919 the castle was bought by Dr Howarth's grandfather, a West Yorkshire businessman. When Dr Howarth inherited it from his father he left his job as a senior fellow at Bangor University, in North Wales, and moved to live permanently in Ryedale, where he grew up, in 1995.

He said: ''I love the castle. I can remember clambering all over it as a child. For me it was a magical playground. It is incredibly atmospheric.'' Although the castle is not open to the public, visitors are shown the gatehouse, the towers and a dungeon full of bats.

There are no plans for any organisation to buy the site.

Dr Howarth said: ''It is stable and resilient, though bits do fall off it. My hope is that we find an eccentric buyer who loves history and has a lot of money to throw at a ruin."

The building can be traced back to Bertram de Bulmer, Sheriff of York, but after it passed to the Neville family through marriage, it was John, Lord Neville, who in 1382 got a licence to turn it into a castle by crenellating the walls.

It then passed to other members of the Neville family and with the end of their line the castle and lands were given to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III. He often stayed there during his time as Lord of the North and in 1484 it became one of the two headquarters of the Council of the North. Records show it was in royal hands until the early 17th century.