Cresswell Pele Tower: A well-kept secret on the Northumberland coast

At the south end of Druridge Bay in the village of Cresswell, partly hidden in woodland, is a Pele Tower. Easily overlooked en route to the beach or the Drift Café, it has in fact stood there for over six hundred years. The site of the original home of the Cresswell family, it was still in their possession until the 1920s. The tower as seen now was added to with a fairly large mansion in the eighteenth century, then used more as a folly when that house was demolished for a more elaborate hall in the 1820s. After slowly deteriorating during the twentieth century it was restored with a substantial Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 2021 and is open on selected dates throughout Spring, Summer and Autumn.

Pele towers were built at the time of the Border Reivers when Northumberland was very much a no-man’s land between England and Scotland. Like many others the Cresswell Pele Tower had a ground floor more given over to storage with living accommodation and a main entrance door on the first floor.  In 1380 John Cresswell was captured and ransomed and it is believed the building of the Pele Tower resulted from that incident.

But the tower in the woods is not the only hidden gem. From the eighteenth century until relatively recently a series of walled kitchen gardens stretched away to the south back towards the village of Ellington. With the growth of Cresswell’s caravan parks and private housing they gradually disappeared and now a single triangular garden of around 0.4 acres remains. This has been lovingly discovered, uncovered and recovered. It has undergone a mixed programme of restoration and development for the future, again with funding from the Heritage Lottery fund. The nurturing of this space by teams of volunteers led by Barry Mead and Steve Lowe over several years, took the garden from a willowherb dominated wilderness to its current layout of broad borders, greenhouse, gazebo, pond, raised beds, lawns and orchard.

Much more information can be found on the website https://cresswellpeletower.org.uk/ and in the booklets Cresswell’s Curiosities and Ower the Wall. Cresswell’s lost garden: from ruin to restoration.

Philip Hood