William I threw up two castles in York in 1068–69 after the city resisted him. This is the mound of the larger one. On 16 March 1190, during the anti-Jewish violence that followed Richard I’s coronation, about 150 members of York’s Jewish community — who had taken refuge in the wooden tower on this motte — died there; many killed themselves rather than surrender, and the rest were killed when the tower burned. A plaque at the foot of the mound records it. The stone tower you climb to was begun for Henry III about 1245 and finished around 1270.
Its plan is the unusual part: a quatrefoil, four overlapping round lobes around a central space, with the entrance through a forebuilding on the south side that held a chapel at first-floor level. Almost nothing else like it was built in England. The interior was gutted by an explosion in 1684 and the tower has stood open to the sky ever since, which is why what you see is a shell of thick walls, fireplaces and window embrasures hanging above you rather than rooms.
English Heritage reopened it in April 2022 after inserting a free-standing timber structure: walkways at the level of the vanished first floor and a roof deck at the top of the walls. From there you get the whole medieval town at once — the Minster, the line of the walls, the two rivers, and directly below you the flat green of the Eye of York where the JORVIK Viking Festival stages its finale battle every February.
Practically: the climb up the motte is steep, with three places to stop and rest built into it, and there is a tactile map of the tower at the bottom. Inside, the interpretation is done through fictional voices from the tower’s history rather than object cases, which is a choice you will either like or ignore. Allow 30 to 45 minutes. It stands next to the York Castle Museum in what is otherwise a car park, so the approach is bleak — the view from the deck is the payoff.
