Note 594 — Chapter III

Unless Orderic’s words just quoted are mere rhetoric, we must infer that the site of the castle, and not the site of the present church, had been the site of the forsaken monastery. Well suited as the whole peninsula was for the purposes of a castle, the actual isthmus, where three small knolls rise above the general level of the hill, must have been the most tempting spot of all. On two of the knolls remains of its masonry are still to be seen, and the outworks reach far down the hill on its western side. The place seems to have been a simple fortress, with no town or village, beyond such houses as may have grown up around the castle.