Orford Castle – an update and unexpected response from English Heritage relating to Laura’s discovery

A couple of months have passed since our visit to Orford Castle back in August, which have proved eventful on many levels.

Our visit appears to have left its mark upon Laura, with more information coming to her on a regular basis, even though we haven’t been anywhere near the castle since.

This stream of information subsequently led to a further visit over the weekend, which we will write about in another post in the near future, but there have been far more interesting developments in respect of Laura’s discovery at the Castle back in August, which we briefly touched upon in our blog about our visit at the time (click here).

To recap, this is what we wrote:

“Whilst she was in the chamber, Laura suddenly felt that she had to go to a particular location in the Keep to find ‘something’. The feeling was very intense and conveyed a matter of urgency in the task – she needed to find ‘it’.

Leaving the Well Room, Laura returned to the Lower Hall and found herself entering one of the side chambers. Travelling to the end of the short passage, she looked up and immediately spotted her goal.”

The petroglyph, outlined in red.

Laura’s ‘goal’, we can now reveal, was what we interpreted as a ‘hand print’ (a petroglyph), carved into the stonework of the garderobe in the lower hall.

The print fitted Laura’s right hand perfectly, an exact copy, as if Laura’s hand had been the blueprint, at the risk of stretching the point too far.

As Laura pressed hard into the handprint, a secret door
to a hidden room slowly opened....

Sadly, no matter how hard we pushed into the handprint, no secret chamber was revealed.........

As we have previously stated, we didn’t wish to publicise the find at the time as we could find no reference to it anywhere, in any of the reference works about the Castle or even online and, we were very conscious that our interpretation could have been mistaken, although we were very confident in what Laura found.

We subsequently entered into correspondence with English Heritage about Laura’s find, who, having referred the matter to their team in East Anglia, advised that they were very excited about Laura’s discovery and, confirmed that it was indeed a hand print.

Needless to say, we have not revealed to English Heritage how Laura came to discover the hand print, other than she just did, but, in private correspondence, English Heritage also informed us of other features in the Castle that were not currently in the public domain. These are of great interest to us and possibly links into our ongoing research.

Taking a step back for a moment, I guess what we’ve described here is how Laura, via some unknown means (we’ll stop short of using the term psychic), has discovered a previously unrecorded feature of a 900 year old Castle, that has been validated by English Heritage.

Food for thought.

As we mentioned at the start of our update, our research into the Castle is ongoing and, we may possibly have a further ‘discovery’ made by Laura to discuss, although we will need to have additional discussions with English Heritage first before we will reveal further details.

To be updated...

Laura and Mark.


Part one of this feature can be viewed at: Orford Castle - Part One
Part three of this feature can be viewed at: Orford Castle - Part Three