Sir Walter Raleigh




Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan adventurer and "discoverer" of tobacco, bought Sherborne ("old") Castle and built a splendid hunting lodge in its grounds. This is now known as the "new" castle. In the castle you can see exhibits including Raleigh's own smoking pipe, and in the grounds you can sit it Raleigh's seat, where legend has it that a servant, coming upon Sir Walter smoking his pipe, was horrified to see his master ablaze and so threw a pitcher of beer over him to extinguish the flames.



"Sir Walter Raleigh coveted old Sherborne Castle and in 1592 induced the elderly Queen Elizabeth to grant it to him. Unfortunately she soon discovered his secret marriage to one of her ladies-in-waiting and threw them both in the Tower. Today this building is one of the oddest houses in England. Raleigh’s Elizabethan structure was pulled, pushed, distorted, rendered and set about with hexagonal towers. In the right light Sherborne is like a ghostly galleon, a Mary Celeste lost at sea."
Simon Jenkins, "England's Thousand Best Houses".


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