Away days, training sessions, focus groups, product launches, private parties and wedding receptions can be held at Brancepeth Castle, a medieval fortress and family home in the village of Brancepeth, about 5 miles southwest of Durham in northeast England. The ground floor has four principal reception rooms that can be combined through anterooms, a chapel that seats 70 to 100 guests and a large enclosed courtyard.
Seminars and company events
The castle offers rooms for away days and quiet or training days, from small spaces for focus groups to larger rooms for corporate presentations and product launches. Its rooms range from quiet, intimate spaces to echoing halls, and the castle has been used for recording, performances and residential music workshops. Groups of 10 or more can add a private guided tour of the castle's history, with refreshments. Events can also be linked with Outlaws and Vagabonds, a medieval re-enactment group that appears at many of the castle's public events.
Weddings and receptions
The chapel, with a wooden vaulted ceiling and Gothic tiling, opens off the courtyard and seats 70 to 100 guests. It is not licensed for marriages, so it suits blessings and vow renewals, while church weddings can take place next door at St Brandon's, the parish church. Receptions then move into the ground-floor rooms. Couples choose their own menus and may set up rooms, flowers and decorations during the three days before the wedding, with a day or two afterwards to clear.
Rooms and capacities
The four principal reception rooms each have a different character, with waxed oak floors, high vaulted ceilings and working fireplaces. Two of them belong to the original medieval fortress. The Dining Room and the Ballroom are named on the wedding page, and the medieval Constable's room is part of the castle's open mornings. Some rooms are supplied unfurnished and others keep their furniture. The castle says its larger rooms seat hundreds but gives no room-by-room figures, so organisers should ask for a layout for their numbers. The enclosed courtyard is used for summer theatre and concerts.
Accommodation
There are no bedrooms for event guests in the castle itself. Quartermaster's, a modernized ground-floor flat, is let as a holiday home.
Catering
Menus are chosen by the client. Café Burgschneider, in the gatehouse, serves homemade German cakes and hot and cold drinks from Thursday to Sunday.
History and setting
A Saxon wooden castle probably stood here before 1066. Bertram de Bulmer built the first stone castle around 1140, and his descendants, the Nevilles, rebuilt it as a palace fortress in the late 14th century; most of that structure survives. The Nevilles lost it after the failed Rising of the North in 1569. William Russell, a Sunderland banker, bought it in 1796, and his son Matthew began a remodelling as a stately home, finished after his death in 1822. The castle later served as a hospital in the First World War, as headquarters of the Durham Light Infantry from 1939 to 1961, and as research laboratories for a glass maker. The Dobson family bought it in 1979 and are restoring it as their home. It is a Grade I listed building.
Getting there
Brancepeth lies on the A690 southwest of Durham, close to the city and its railway station. A golf course designed by Harry Colt in 1925 occupies the castle's former deer park.
