“The castle consists of a large oval motte, 250 × 200 feet at its base, rising 40 feet above the marshes of the river Stort, and crowned by a keep with walls of flint rubble, 12 feet thick. On the S. of the motte there are traces of a pentagonal bailey, covering 2½ acres. It is enclosed on four sides by the narrow streams which intersect the marshes. The dry ditch on the fifth side, facing the motte, is discernible. The castle abuts on the road called The Causeway, which crosses the valley; it is in a good position to command both road and river.”[288] The value of the manor had gone down at Domesday.[289]
Bourn, Lincolnshire ([Fig. 10]).—The manor of Bourn or Brune appears to have been much split up amongst various owners at the time of Domesday. A Breton named Oger held the demesne.[290] A charter of Picot, the Sheriff of Cambridgeshire, a person often mentioned in Domesday Book, gives the church of Brune and the chapel of the castle to the priory which he had founded near the castle of Cambridge—afterwards removed to Barnwell.[291] Bourn was the centre of a large soke in Anglo-Saxon times. Leland mentions the “Grete Diches, and the Dungeon Hill of the ancient Castel,”[292] but very little of the remains is now visible, and the motte has been almost removed.
“The castle lies in flat ground, well watered by springs and streams. The motte was placed at the southern apex of a roughly oval bailey, from which it was separated by its own wet ditch, access being obtained through a gatehouse which stood on the narrow neck by which this innermost enclosure, at its N.W. end, joined the principal bailey, which, in its turn, was embraced on all sides but the S. by a second and concentric bailey, also defended by a wet ditch, which broadens out at the S.W. corner into St Peter’s Pool. There is another enclosure beyond this which may be of later date. The inner bailey covers 3 acres. Very little is now left of the motte, but a plan made in 1861 showed it to be fairly perfect,[293] and some slight remains of the gatehouse were excavated in that year. The castle is on the line of the Roman road from Peterborough to Sleaford, and close to the Roman Car-Dyke.”[294]
The value of Bourn had risen at Domesday.
Bourn, Lincs.
Bramber, Sussex.
Fig. 10.