Stones From One of Henry VIII's Fortresses Spent More Than a Century Hidden in Plain Sight. New Research Suggests the Victorians Repurposed Them as Building Materials

In the final years of Henry VIII’s reign, the Tudor king embarked on an ambitious building project intended to shore up his kingdom’s defenses. Concerned about an invasion by Spain or France, Henry erected fortifications of varying sizes along the English and Welsh coasts. Some, like a trio of castles in Kent, were imposing fortresses; others, such as a blockhouse in Milford Haven, were far more modest.

One of these Kentish fortifications, Sandown Castle, was built on the county’s eastern coast between 1539 and 1540. The artillery fort remained in use long after the Tudor era ended in 1603, but centuries of waves and storms took their toll, battering the castle and rendering it increasingly obsolete. Now, new research conducted by Christopher Moore, a research fellow at the University of Kent, suggests that stones from the Tudor fort gained another lease on life during the Victorian era, when they were repurposed by workers building a new addition to the centuries-old Constable’s Gate at nearby Dover Castle.

The findings shed light “on how Dover Castle’s 19th-century works incorporated masonry from an earlier Tudor fortress,” Moore says in a statement. As he tells Smithsonian magazine, he was reading The History of the King’s Works, a multivolume account compiled by architectural historian Howard Colvin in the 20th century, when he noticed a reference to a Tudor-era diary detailing construction of Sandgate Castle, which was built in Kent around the same time as Sandown. Moore asked staff at the British Museum if the London institution housed a copy of the diary, but they couldn’t track it down, so they suggested he consult the British Library instead.

The library also failed to find the volume. The text mentioned historic buildings that had been demolished to build Sandgate in the 16th century, with their architectural fragments (known as spolia) repurposed in the new fortification. Such materials were “generally recycled” from local religious houses targeted by the king as part of the English Reformation, Moore explained.

After breaking away from the Catholic Church in the early 1530s and declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England, Henry dissolved the kingdom’s monasteries and seized their riches for himself. Although Henry is best known today for his chaotic love life, he was respected in his youth as a Renaissance monarch, “a great sportsman and great scholar of a number of subjects,” as Moore tells Smithsonian. Engineering was of particular interest to the king, and Moore’s research suggests that he might have even played a direct role in the design of Sandown and its sister castles, Walmer and Deal, both of which still stand today.

According to Moore, Robert Nicholl Dawson-Scott, an engineer who designed alterations to Dover Castle in the late 19th century, read the diary detailing Sandgate’s construction and drew inspiration from it. This connection is confirmed by a report discovered in the archives by Moore a few months after he located the diary. Dated to 1883, it explicitly stated that stones extracted from Sandown were bound for Dover, where they would be used to construct new quarters for the castle’s commanding officer.