A fortified medieval tower built to guard a rabbit warren from armed poachers near Thetford
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
A squat flint tower stands alone in Thetford Forest, built around 1400 for the prior of Thetford, who had been granted free warren, a licence to hunt small game across the land. The surrounding warren, a stretch of ground managed for farming rabbits, was valuable enough to attract armed poachers, so the prior fitted the tower with narrow loop windows, walls up to a metre thick, and a hole above the doorway that let his warrener drop a bar across the door from the room above. Much of the tower survives close to its original height, with two fireplaces and part of a staircase still inside. After Henry VIII’s dissolution closed Thetford Priory, a couple of miles away in the town, the land passed to the Duke of Norfolk in 1540, and from at least the 18th century warreners lived and worked here, using the ground floor to dry rabbit skins and store their traps. You can’t get inside, but you can wander up whenever you’re passing and peer through the grille in the door for a view of the ground floor.
