Castles with dungeons you can visit.

13 of the 432 castles on The Castle Rolls have a dungeon the record says is part of a normal visit, 6 in Scotland, 5 in England and 2 in Wales. 2 more open theirs only on a separately booked tour, 2 sit behind a hotel door, and 2 are here because their own visitors wrote down that you will not be shown one. Every entry prints the sentence it rests on: at some of these you climb down into the pit, at others you look into it from above, and at two it is a display you walk past.

A dungeon is the thing children ask about on the drive, and it turns up in the record of only 20 of the 432 castles on this roll. A list of famous names leaves the visitor to discover on arrival that the dungeon is a display board, a paid show, or nothing. So this page splits them by what actually happens when you get there.

The split matters more than the count. 2 of the castles here have a real dungeon that ordinary admission does not include, 2 more keep theirs behind a hotel reception, and 2 are here because their visitors raised the subject to warn that you will not be shown one.

The 13 where the dungeon is part of the visit

Ranked by the review-weighted score used across this site, which holds a castle's rating toward the national average of 4.50 until it has the reviews to stand on its own. Pembroke Castle leads at 4.7 stars from 8,098 Google reviews, and between them these 13 carry 40,424 reviews. The quoted line under each is the evidence, labelled with where it came from, and for many of them it is also what tells you whether the dungeon is walked into, looked down into, or shown as a display.

Real, and behind a separate booking

Both of these are worth the trip and at neither is the dungeon included in ordinary admission. Norwich moved its dungeon tour out of the main admission price and onto a counter booking, which one reviewer was told fills up in busy holiday periods; Pontefract's site is free to walk into and its dungeon tours carry a small extra fee.

Behind a hotel door

2 castles on the roll have a dungeon that exists and is not part of any normal visit. One is normally locked and was opened as a favour to a guest who wrote about it; the other has been fitted out as a private dining room, and one reviewer records arriving for a booked dinner in it to find it closed. Neither is a reason to drive somewhere.

Named in the record, with nothing on file about getting in

1 castle sits between the lists. The dungeon is described in what visitors write about the tower's original layout, and nothing on file says whether it can be reached today. Absent evidence is not evidence the door is locked, so it is listed here rather than dropped or promoted.

No dungeon on the visit

These 2 are on a dungeon page because their own visitors raised the subject to warn that you will not be shown one. Neither review establishes that no dungeon exists, only that it is not part of what you see, and at Durham the guided tour is the only way in at all. Both are well worth visiting on their own terms and neither will satisfy a nine-year-old who has been promised a pit.

What a dungeon actually was

The word is a demotion. Dungeon comes from the Old French donjon, the great tower at the centre of a castle. It named the grandest building on the site, and within a few decades of reaching English around 1300 the sense had narrowed to a prison, while great towers were still going up. A lord who needed to hold someone usually held them in a chamber in that tower, comfortably enough if they were worth a ransom, which the high-status prisoners were.

Purpose-cut prison pits do exist and they are rare. Few castles on this roll can offer one. St Andrews has the best known of them, a bottle-shaped shaft in the rock beneath the Sea Tower, now covered by a grate and looked down into from the vault above. What visitors walk into there is the siege mine and counter-mine tunnelled during the siege of 1546 and 1547, which the roll's own record on the castle describes as a rare chance to walk through tunnels dug by attackers and defenders. The word oubliette, from the French for forget, is attested in French from the 14th century and did not reach English until the 19th. The castle ranking highest on Google UK for the phrase castles with dungeons, checked on 31 August 2026, sells a separately ticketed live-actor show, and the castles that genuinely became prisons mostly did it centuries later, as Georgian and Victorian gaols.

Getting to them

One of the 13 is an open-access site with no ticket and no booking, Crookston Castle, and Pontefract Castle is free to walk into with the dungeon tour charged on top. The rest are staffed and ticketed. Station distances are straight lines between the castle and the station, taken from DfT open data, so the walk is longer than the figure and at Hastings it is also uphill. Ratings and review counts come from Google, last read across the roll on 17 July 2026 and moving since, opening hours can lag a seasonal change, and a dungeon is the part of a castle most often shut on wet days or for conservation, so each entry links to that castle's own page here, which carries the operator's link.

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