When Viscount Newport (later 6th Earl of Bradford) detonated explosive charges to demolish the remains of Tong Castle in 1954, he was perhaps realising a long-term ambition for his family, as owners of the neighbouring Weston Park estate. His early nineteenth-century forebear, the 1st Earl of Bradford, had tolerated insults against his family by Tong’s then owner George Durant II. Durant’s feud had even included erecting a gibbet supporting a dummy of Admiral John Byng, a kinsman of Lady Bradford. Even earlier – in the seventeenth century – when Weston belonged to Elizabeth Mytton, Lady Wilbraham, and Tong was the seat of the Pierrepoints, Dukes of Kingston, there was evidently a rivalry being waged between the two estates, albeit then led by Tong’s architectural dominance.

Prior to its eighteenth century rebuilding, Tong Castle was architecturally important. The certainty of its significance, however, is something that cannot now be fully appreciated since the building no longer exists. Event when extant, it was not adequately recorded and the documentary sources that do survive are incomplete in providing full and continuous evidence of the building in its different forms. What does survive, however, in scant archival sources and in the architecture of buildings associated with the Castle and its estate is tantalising.

Tong was an ancient castle, rather than the manor house that existed on the neighbouring properties. Associated with Roger de Montgomery in Norman times, the castle passed by descent to the de Belmais family, the la Zouche family and from them, through the de Harcourts, to the Pembridge, or Pembrugge, family. In 1381 Fulk Pembrugge IV acquired a licence to crenelate, indicating significant building works were taking place at the Castle. Fulk died in 1409 and his widow, Isabel nee Lingen, obtained a licence that same year to found a college, of five priests and two lay clerks, and to build a church in which masses could be said for the souls of her husband and others.