The rooms west of the hall extend to and include the western or angle tower. The room next the hall had two large Tudor windows in the curtain; they are flat topped, of three lights, with a transom, and within flat-arched recesses; they are evident insertions. The interior of the west tower is roughly four sided, and the gorge wall is gone. It had a basement with three loops, with large splayed and pointed recesses, and above were three floors, each with an excellent one-light trefoiled window of Decorated date; the two lower are towards the west; the upper, a marked feature in the view of the castle from the town, is towards the south. In the north wall a straight stair leads up to a mural garderobe, the opening of which is projected upon two corbels high up at the junction of the curtain with the tower. The lower part of this tower seems original; the upper part has been rebuilt, no doubt in the Decorated period. Twenty-two feet in the rear of the tower remains the base of a doorway which led into these chambers from the upper ward. The well was a yard or two from the entrance to the room below the hall. Its place is now marked by a pump.
The Lower Ward is much obscured by the erection against the north curtain of a dwelling-house, and against the south, of stables, both modern. A building has also been placed against the east wall, connected with the gatehouse. The south-eastern angle is formed by the Flag Tower, 32 feet square, and projecting outwards about 9 feet upon the two curtains. It has a basement and two upper floors, each entered from the court, and the two latter by external separate stone stairs. A third stair, also exterior, ascends from the east curtain to the battlements. The arrangement is altogether peculiar. Moreover, the roof of the tower is high pitched, having the south gable stepped in the Scottish fashion, flush with the outer wall, while the north gable is set in about 3 feet so as to allow of a rampart walk along three sides of the tower. The tower is occupied, and locked up.
The tower corresponding to this, and forming the north-east angle of the ward, is the gatehouse. It is rectangular, 50 feet broad by 22 feet deep, and pierced by the gateway passage, with spacious rooms on each side and above, all inhabited. The outer gateway is round headed, and rather less than half a circle. The passage is vaulted, and has rebates for a central and two outer doors, of which that next the entrance seems to have been inserted to replace a portcullis. Over the front, beneath a long flat label, are five shields of arms: 1. What seems to have been a cinquefoil within an orle of crosslets flory, Umfranville. 2. Barry of 6, Multon. 3. Three luces haurient, Lucy. 4. A lion rampant, Percy. 5. A saltire, Nevile. The gatehouse has two floors over the gateway in the Perpendicular style, and later than the lower part, which is Decorated. To this has been added an upper story, built into the battlements of that below, which appear in the face of the wall.
The portal is flanked by two flat pilasters, which have been partially concealed by the addition of a Barbican, composed of two lateral walls of 18 feet projection, and 7 feet 6 inches thickness, terminating in square piers, which supported a cross arch of entrance, over which was a parapet, now gone. These walls were about 12 feet high, parapeted, and the ramparts reached by two lateral straight stairs niched in the wall. There was no doubt originally a drawbridge to the main gate, which may have been moved forward when the barbican was added. Grose’s drawing shows a sort of ravelin of earth in front of this outer entrance, which probably was thrown up during the Parliamentary struggles. All this front, outside the walls, has been levelled and converted into a garden and approach. Outside the north and south curtains, between the wall and the top of the slope, is a walk of about 9 feet broad.
The accounts of this castle claim for it a very remote origin, and describe the knoll upon which it stands as artificial. This, however, is not the case. The knoll is evidently natural, and the point of a tract of high land which is bounded by two rivers. The position is not the less strong, and is such as either Britons, Romans, or Saxons might very well have availed themselves of. There is, however, no positive evidence that they did so, and nothing now seen is of necessity older, or as old, as the Conquest. The foundations of the western tower, and of the greater part of its contiguous curtains, so far as they contain the upper ward, are probably Norman, and may be the work of William de Meschines, in the reign of Henry I. As the works could scarcely have been confined to so small an area as the present upper ward, it is probable that the whole of the present area was included in the Norman castle, and that the cross ditch was then excavated. How the area was then occupied, where was the hall, where the kitchen, does not appear; probably not on the present site, seeing that the windows are evident insertions in, and the buttresses additions to, the north curtain. Moreover, no part of the line of buildings dividing the upper from the lower ward shows any trace of Norman work. Whatever or wherever were the Norman buildings, they probably stood until the Decorated period, or early in the fourteenth century, when the present cross buildings, the kitchen and the hall, seem to have been erected, and much of the curtain rebuilt or strengthened.
The outer gatehouse and the south-eastern tower are not unlikely to be of the same date, though there have been large additions to, and alterations in, the former building, in the Perpendicular period, when the barbican was added. The Tudor windows in the upper ward are the only traces of still later alterations. The effects of the Parliamentary strife upon the building, beyond the removal of the roofs, do not appear to have been serious; and, as the gatehouse seems always to have been inhabited, no doubt some sort of attention was paid to it, and to the flag tower. More recently, a dwelling-house has been built within the area, within one window of which hangs a curious relic of the past, in the shape of an escutcheon of Percy and Lucy quartered, in old stained glass.
The remodelling of the Norman castle in the Decorated period was probably the work of Anthony de Lucy, who held the lordship from 2 Edward II. to 17 Edward III., and was an active soldier, a great military chief in the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and likely enough to put into the best possible order a castle important both to his own estates and to the national frontier committed to his charge.
The Perpendicular additions, including the armorial shields over the gateway, must have been later than 22 Richard II., when Maud, the Lucy heiress, carried Cockermouth Castle to Henry Percy, who agreed to quarter her arms. The Umfranville shield commemorates Maud’s first husband, Gilbert, Earl of Angus. The Nevile shield is that of Henry Percy’s first wife, who was a daughter of Ralph Lord Nevile. As this Henry was a very considerable person, and survived till 1408, it is probable that he built or rebuilt the upper part of the gatehouse between 1388–9 and 1408.
Cockermouth Castle has but a scanty history, which perhaps accounts for the perfect condition of its outer walls. In 1221 Henry III. ordered it to be laid siege to, and, if taken, destroyed; but this fate it either escaped, or, if carried out, it was restored a century later with great completeness. It makes no figure in the Wars of the Roses, nor does it appear to what extent it shared in the vicissitudes of the house of Percy. The town seems to have been taken by surprise in 1387 by a band of Scottish marauders. Mary of Scotland rested here, no doubt on her way from Workington to Carlisle, after her landing in Cumberland. In August, 1648, the castle, held for the Parliament, was attacked by the Royalists of the neighbourhood, and held out a month, till relieved by the Parliamentary General Ashton. It seems to have been spared the usual fate of English castles of that period at the hands of one or the other party. In 1688, the only habitable parts were the gateway and the courthouse, probably the adjacent building.