Castle on a Cloud – West Sussex

High on a hill overlooking the South Downs, Arundel Castle is one of Britain’s most spectacular

The chalk downs that roll through the county of West Sussex to the south coast of England are softly, gently stunning: the foundation for some of the most beautiful natural landscape in Britain, ending in brilliant white cliffs around Eastbourne.

Commanding this vista from its spot on the hillside just a few miles from the sea is Arundel Castle: a vast, fortified stately home which has for centuries been the seat of England’s premier aristocratic family. They are the Fitzalan-Howards: earls of Arundel and dukes of Norfolk. The castle is still their family home and a monument to some of British history’s most turbulent and iconic periods.

Like most of England’s great castles, Arundel was founded after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel to claim victory at the Battle of Hastings and set about subjugating England, parcelling it up into giant fiefdoms for his allies.

The lush countryside surrounding Arundel was given to William’s friend and counsellor Roger de Montgomery, becoming part of a vast network of estates which made Montgomery one of the richest men in the realm. By today’s standards he would have been a multi-billionaire, and to protect his newfound riches he built castles, including the first one to exist in Arundel.

Castles were the hubs of Norman power and, whenever war broke out in England, they became the focus of political and military attention. Arundel’s first great moment in history came during a 12th-century civil war known as the Anarchy, when two cousins – Matilda and Stephen – fought over the English Crown for nearly two decades. In 1139, Matilda stayed at Arundel Castle, narrowly escaping capture by the enemy army camped outside. As you explore the oldest part of the castle, you can look around the room in which Matilda (may have) slept, transporting yourself back to those bleak, war-torn days of which medieval writers lamented: “It was as if Christ and his saints were asleep.”

More gloriously medieval are those parts of the castle that showcase its link to a later conflict: the Hundred Years War, which raged between England and France in the 14th and 15th centuries. There are whole rooms filled with suits of armour and weapons typical of the medieval battlefield. In a sense, the castle itself is a testament to the war booty that was accumulated by the 10th Earl of Arundel, Richard Fitzalan, who fought alongside his comrade and friend King Edward HI and was richly rewarded for his efforts: when the earl died in 1376, he left £30,000 in coin (worth many millions of pounds today) in one of the castle’s towers.

The Fitzalan family (earls of Arundel) was joined with the Howard family (dukes of Norfolk) by a marriage alliance in Tudor times, and the two families’ heraldic symbols, a lion and a horse, are captured in two great stone statues in the castle grounds. Many of their leading members are buried in grand tombs in the Fitzalan chapel, which is, unusually, joined to Arundel’s parish church, partitioned only by a glass screen.

Nowhere speaks so much to the long history of the dynasty as the magnificent gallery corridor in the main castle building, where you can view priceless portraits of illustrious noblemen and women who have lived there, reaching back to the 15th century. The most famous include King Henry VIII’s strongman Thomas Howard and the Elizabethan courtier Philip Howard, who was executed for his Catholic faith in 1595 and declared a saint by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

But beyond the family “snapshots” Arundel Castle is packed with fine art, including stunning works by Canaletto, Gainsborough and Anthony van Dyck, who visited England before the Civil War of the 17th century and painted some of the most famous images from the court of King Charles I. Much of it is the legacy of the “Collector Earl”, another Thomas Howard, who scoured Europe for great works old and new before his death in the 1640s.

Unlike many British castles, which were abandoned after the Civil War, Arundel remains a home. Although the family resides in a private section, the public rooms retain a rich, lived-in feel, particularly the extraordinary wood-panelled library and the Victorian bedrooms, which were designed for a visit in the 19th century by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the royal court.

Outdoors, though, is where the castle really dazzles with its magnificent gardens. There is the Italian-influenced “Collector Earl’s Garden”, a huge glasshouse filled with grapevines and peach trees and acres of slightly wilder green space cut through with tree-lined avenues. Stroll out of the castle and through the picturesque village around it and you’ll also find Arundel Castle’s famous cricket ground, where some of the greatest players in the modern game have appeared, and where charity matches are still contested today. For my money, there are few more beautifully, classically, exquisitely English castles anywhere in the nation.