Tamworth; Saturday, 05 July, 2025

I knew there wasn’t a vast amount to see in Tamworth, so I had a bit of a slow morning with a lie in and a late breakfast, finally heading out of the hotel just after 11am.

I wandered into town with the intention of having a look around the church before heading to the castle, but by the time I got to the church they were already closing the for the day as they had a wedding in the afternoon and wanted to prepare, so instead I headed over to the castle to look around that.

The castle is, in the most part, Norman and located on the former Saxon and Mercian fortifications of Tamworth. The original wooden Motte and Bailey castle was quickly erected shortly after the Normans arrived and then relatively quickly rebuilt in stone so that they could keep control of the area.

Alterations were made during the Tudor period at which point it was becoming more of a stately home than a castle, a role it fully reverted to during the Georgian period before just becoming a regular family home by the Victoria era, that just happened to be inside the remains of a then over 800-year-old castle.

Throughout the building there are examples of how the rooms would have looked at different points through its life from a Tudor dining room through Georgian and Victorian family rooms before ending in the Great Hall, still looking as it would have done in the Medieval period.

The second floor of the castle houses an exhibition on the history of the Mercians from their founding by Saxons and Angles arriving after the Romans and how in a generation it went from the poorest of the Kingdoms on the island of Great Britain to the most dominant and wealthiest, a position it would hold as it slowly merged and took over the other kingdoms before finally being unified under Æthelstan in 927. His coronation as King of Mercia taking place in July 925, so the town centre was preparing for the 1,100 anniversary when I was visiting.

I spent a good couple of hours exploring the castle, but with that I had pretty much exhausted all there was to see in Tamworth, and with plans for Sunday it meant that I had most of the afternoon with not much to do, so after a quick lunch in town I hopped on a bus and headed into Birmingham for the afternoon to kill some time.

I spent a couple of hours in Birmingham, taking advantage of the significantly greater choice of options for food, before heading back to Tamworth in the late evening and then going for a wander through the town in the twilight to get some more photos before returning to the hotel for a relatively early night.