Unusual historic stays

Unusual historic places to stay in the UK

Towers, follies, forts and gatehouses you can book.

A Duke's Spectacular grand folly - The Temple, Euston

Not every historic stay is a castle hotel. These 168 places are towers, follies, forts and gatehouses that you can book for a night or a week, most of them self-catering.

We are still checking the history of each building in this group, so each card carries a provisional level 3 and the pages for individual stays are not yet part of our reviewed list. Some turn out to be newer than their name suggests; when that happens, they leave this page.

The list: 168 stays

This list shows 96 of the 168 stays here, the highest rated first. Every one of them is also on its regional page, linked below.

96 stays on a map.

Map tiles from OpenStreetMap.

Towers, follies and forts

Flat 4 Tower House, Grange Over Sands

Tower houses

Tower houses are small fortified homes built upwards rather than outwards, common in Scotland and the Borders from the 14th to the 17th century.

A Duke's Spectacular grand folly - The Temple, Euston

Follies

A folly is a building put up mainly for effect, often in a landscaped park: a mock ruin, an eye-catcher tower or a garden temple.

#118 Modern&Cozy Flat in the Heart of Gravesend, Gravesend

Forts & gatehouses

Gatehouses guarded the entrance to an estate or a town; forts were built for coastal defence, many of them in the 19th century.