Hylton Castle

On one of our walks in Sunderland, by absolute chance, we found in a park north of the city this wonder by the name of Hylton Castle that is now in ruins. Its name comes from a Norman family who named a natural woodland area, the Hilton, which was transformed by medieval scribes into Hylton (either mistakenly or due to a lack of grammar rules). Orginally, after the Battle of Hastings (1066) it was a wooden fortification that was turned into stone during the fourteenth century. The last Baron Hylton died in 1746 and the new owner applied Gothic motifs. The strange thing is that it worked as a school 1840-1862, after being abandoned and falling into the hands of the British government in 1950.