We come to the north-west tower, and look beyond its ragged outline to the distant country lying to the west, grass and arable land with trees appearing to grow so closely together at a short distance, that we have no difficulty in realizing that this was the ancient Forest of Galtres, which reached from Sheriff Hutton and Easingwold to the very gates of York. The greater part of the forest, however, was, in Leland’s time, only low meadows and ‘morish ground ful of Carres,’ while in other places it was ‘reasonably woddid.’ Galtres remained a royal forest until 1670, when an Act was passed for its enclosure. In the complete loneliness of the ruins, with the silence only intensified by the sounds of fluttering wings in the tops of the towers, we in imagination sweep away the haystacks and reinstate the former grandeur of the fortress in the days of Ralph Neville, first Earl of Westmorland. It was he who rebuilt the Norman castle of Bertram de Bulmer, Sheriff of Yorkshire, on a grander scale. Upon the death of Warwick, the Kingmaker, in 1471, Edward IV. gave the castle and manor of Sheriff Hutton to his brother Richard, afterwards Richard III., and it was he who kept Edward IV.’s eldest child Elizabeth a prisoner within these massive walls. The unfortunate Edward, Earl of Warwick, the eldest son of George, Duke of Clarence, when only eight years old, was also incarcerated here for about three years. Richard III., the usurper, when he lost his only son, had thought of making this boy his heir, but the unfortunate [Illustration: SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE Belonged to Warwick the Kingmaker, and the arms of the Nevilles still appear on one of the ruined towers. Princess Elizabeth, afterwards Queen of Henry VII., was imprisoned here for a time, and also her cousin, the unfortunate Earl of Warwick, eldest son of the Duke of Clarence, who passed all except the first years of his childhood in confinement.]