Cool Finds

Stones From One of Henry VIII’s Fortresses Spent More Than a Century Hidden in Plain Sight. New Research Suggests the Victorians Repurposed Them as Building Materials

Recently discovered archival records indicate that workers constructing an extension of the Constable’s Gate at Dover Castle in the late 19th century reused fragments of the Tudor-era Sandown Castle

Meilan Solly | Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

September 1, 2026 8:52 a.m.

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In the final years of Henry VIII’s reign, the Tudor king embarked on an ambitious building project intended to shore up his kingdom’s defenses. Concerned about an invasion by Spain or France, Henry erected fortifications of varying sizes along the English and Welsh coasts. Some, like a trio of castles in Kent, were imposing fortresses; others, such as a blockhouse in Milford Haven, were far more modest.

One of these Kentish fortifications, Sandown Castle, was built on the county’s eastern coast between 1539 and 1540. The artillery fort remained in use long after the Tudor era ended in 1603, but centuries of waves and storms took their toll, battering the castle and rendering it increasingly obsolete. Now, new research conducted by Christopher Moore, a research fellow at the University of Kent, suggests that stones from the Tudor fort gained another lease on life during the Victorian era, when they were repurposed by workers building a new addition to the centuries-old Constable’s Gate at nearby Dover Castle.

The findings shed light “on how Dover Castle’s 19th-century works incorporated masonry from an earlier Tudor fortress,” Moore says in a statement. “Sandown Castle is best known as a casualty of coastal erosion, but the documentary trail and the surviving fabric show that parts of it lived on at Dover Castle and at other sites across East Kent.”

To identify the connection between the two castles, Moore drew on archival research and architectural evidence. As he tells Smithsonian magazine, he was reading The History of the King’s Works, a multivolume account compiled by architectural historian Howard Colvin in the 20th century, when he noticed a reference to a Tudor-era diary detailing construction of Sandgate Castle, which was built in Kent around the same time as Sandown.

Moore asked staff at the British Museum if the London institution housed a copy of the diary, but they couldn’t track it down, so they suggested he consult the British Library instead. The library also failed to find the volume. “This led to both organizations assuming the other” held the diary, Moore says, “and it had at this point vanished.”

Luckily, Moore managed to track down several Victorian-era citations that enabled the British Library to find the incorrectly cataloged diary among some unrelated manuscripts. The text mentioned historic buildings that had been demolished to build Sandgate in the 16th century, with their architectural fragments (known as spolia) repurposed in the new fortification.

“Henry wanted to use as much spolia as possible to build these castles,” Moore told Sarah Morris of the “Tudor Travel Guide” in 2024. Such materials were “generally recycled” from local religious houses targeted by the king as part of the English Reformation, Moore explained. After breaking away from the Catholic Church in the early 1530s and declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England, Henry dissolved the kingdom’s monasteries and seized their riches for himself.

“He’s then using the bones of the Rome-controlled monasteries to build these castles,” Moore told Morris. “It’s a very provocative thing to do. … You’re destroying their infrastructure” to erect fortifications.

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Although Henry is best known today for his chaotic love life, he was respected in his youth as a Renaissance monarch, “a great sportsman and great scholar of a number of subjects,” as Moore tells Smithsonian. Engineering was of particular interest to the king, and Moore’s research suggests that he might have even played a direct role in the design of Sandown and its sister castles, Walmer and Deal, both of which still stand today.

According to Moore, Robert Nicholl Dawson-Scott, an engineer who designed alterations to Dover Castle in the late 19th century, read the diary detailing Sandgate’s construction and drew inspiration from it. This connection is confirmed by a report discovered in the archives by Moore a few months after he located the diary. Dated to 1883, it explicitly stated that stones extracted from Sandown were bound for Dover, where they would be used to construct new quarters for the castle’s commanding officer.

Contrary to popular belief, Moore tells Smithsonian, “Sandown did not just fall in the sea.” Instead, “it was systematically robbed through the centuries for a number of uses,” ending up scattered across at least five sites in the region.

Moving forward, the researcher says that he hopes to identify all of these repurposed fragments to paint a clearer portrait of the Tudor-era ruins that remain hidden in plain sight. (Moore and fellow University of Kent scholar Manolo Guerci are the co-founders of the Henrician Archaeological Research Foundation, which seeks to uncover and preserve lost early modern architecture in England.)

As Moore says, “Old buildings tell such great stories if only we learn to speak their language.”

Meilan Solly is a senior associate digital editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she oversees the online history section and writes about everything from archaeology to the British royal family. Solly’s specialties are Tudor England, Renaissance and modern art, and World War II.