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Chilham Castle is a Jacobean manor house and keep in the village of Chilham, between Ashford and Canterbury in the county of Kent, England. The keep is of Norman origin and dates to 1174, although it may have been built on an older Anglo-Saxons fortification. The manor house was completed in 1616 for Sir Dudley Digges. Various renovations and improvements to the Manor House and surrounding gardens took place in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Jacobean building, within sight of the keep, was completed in 1616 for Dudley Digges on a hexagonal plan, with five angled ranges and the sixth left open. It has battlemented , clustered facetted columnar brick chimneys and corner towers with squared ogee cappings.
The Victorian tradition that this house was designed by Inigo JonesSir Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (1901:407) listed Chilham among Jones' works, apparently the last historian to do so: "Many buildings have been attributed to Jones with very slight authority. They include Chilham Castle in Kent..." DNB reports ( s.v. "Inigo Jones"); George Mabbitt ( Mabbitt, "Chilham: The Unique Village," 1999 ), alludes to original plans in the Royal Institute of British Architects; this is apparently an error, but there is one unsigned outline plan, apparently most ancient, now in the keeping of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. is not credited by architectural historians.Neither by Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 3rd ed. (Yale University Press) 1995, who makes no attribution of seventeenth-century Chilham, nor by Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 1480-1680 (Yale University Press) 1999, who discusses Chilham briefly (p. 33) and illustrates both new and old castles (p. 32, figs 19 and 20). Indeed, Nicholas Stone, a master mason who had worked under Jones's direction at Holyrood Palace in 1616, and at the Whitehall Banqueting House, was commissioned to add a funerary chapel to Chilham Church for Dudley Digges to contain Stone's funerary monument to Lady Digges in the early 1630s.Colvin 1995, s.v. "Stone, Nicholas"; Stone's chapel was demolished in 1863. If any traces of Jones were discernible at Chilham Castle, Nicholas Stone might be considered as a candidate.John Newman, "Nicholas Stone's Goldsmiths' Hall: Design and Practice in the 1630s" Architectural History 14 (1971:30-39, 138-141) discusses Stone's role in the dissemination of Jones' architectural ideas in England. It is, nevertheless, one of the finer mansions in the south-east of England and commands exceptional views across the valley of the River Stour, Kent.
The gardens, originally thought to have been laid out by John Tradescant the Elder, were redesigned twice in the 18th century. First, under the London banker James Colebrooke,One of his sons was Sir James Colebrooke, 1st Baronet. (who bought the estate from the Digges family) fine vistas were created stretching to the river and then under Thomas Heron (who acquired the estate from Colebrooke's son Robert),Robert's domed mausoleum, designed by Sir Robert Taylor, 1755, attached to the chancel of the parish church, was demolished in 1862 (Colvin 1995, ''s.v. "Taylor, Sir Robert"). Capability Brown made further recommendations for change, some of which were implemented.
Chilham Castle was purchased by James Wildman in 1794Edward Hasted, (1778-99) The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent. and in 1816 was inherited by his son James Beckford Wildman, who sold it in 1861 because of falling income after emancipation of the slaves on the family estates in the West Indies. Plans of Chilham showing some of the substantial changes made to the building by David Brandon for Charles Hardy in 1862 and by Herbert Baker for mining magnate Sir Edmund and Lady Davis in the early 1920s are conserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The present terracing, altered in the 18th and 19th centuries, leads down to a fishing lake dating from the time of Charles Hardy's son Charles Stewart Hardy in the 1860s. The walls to the grounds date mostly from the 18th century, although the two gatehouses were only added in the early 1920s, again replacing a very different 19th-century one.
In the 1920s, The Keep was the country residence of the well-known British painters and art collectors Charles Ricketts and Charles Haslewood Shannon.
From 1949 until his death in 1992 it was owned by John Whyte-Melville-Skeffington, 13th Viscount Massereene.() states:"In 1949 Chilham was offered for sale by auction with its remaining 400 acres and bought by “Jock“ Skeffington for £94,000. With his wife Annabelle McNamara née Lewis, he lived there until his death in 1992. In 1956 on the death of his father, Skeffington became 13th Viscount Massereene and Baron of Loughneagh, 6th Viscount Ferrard and Baron Oriel of Collon in Ireland and Baron Oriel of Ferrard in the United Kingdom." Chilham Castle was owned by the financier and UKIP activist Stuart Wheeler, who lived there with his three daughters, Sarah, Jacquetta, and Charlotte until his death in 2020. Stuart's wife died in 2016.
The site now hosts the Chilham Park Equestrian Centre.
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In 1994, the castle featured in an episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot (ITV), as Simeon Lee's manor house Gorston Hall. It was also used in the 2006 TV episode, The Moving Finger (part of Agatha Christie's Marple) as the magnificent home of Cardew Pye. The rest of the village also features in the film. Miss Marple – The Moving Finger (2006), Kent Film Office, retrieved 5 February 2017
The castle has also featured in productions such as Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Married... with Children season 6, and the drama series Moon and Son.
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