The castle that was a bell tower

The story

Seatown Castle keeps a misleading name. The surviving square tower was the bell tower of a Franciscan friary, recorded by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage as built around 1240. Its pointed openings, thick rubble walls and prominent position make it an arresting survivor within the modern town. It belonged to a religious complex, rather than being simply a lord’s defensive castle.↗1

Seatown was an important monastic suburb, with St Leonard’s foundation established in the late twelfth century and the Grey Abbey in the thirteenth. Archaeological work on Mary Street places it close to the medieval river estuary, in waterlogged and marshy ground. The setting helps explain a town developing around waterways as well as roads. The lone tower is a fragment of a much larger religious and urban landscape, much of it now hidden or lost.↗1