Does Joe Gilligan have the quirkiest address in the UK? We discover what it takes to be a Pontefract Castle Site Officer while living in the ruins of an 11th-century castle.
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00:00 I'm Jo Gilligan and I'm the live-in site officer at Pontefract Castle.
00:06 I've worked for the council now for around 30 years and I used to work for the social
00:11 services which I enjoyed and unfortunately I had a shoulder replacement operation which
00:20 basically put me onto the redeployment list.
00:23 And I got a phone call from Wakefield Council saying we've got a little job come up to be
00:28 a part-time custodian at Pontefract Castle and you would be living in the Victorian Lodge.
00:35 So obviously that was very surprising to hear.
00:39 I remembered the castle from when I was younger when I came with brownies, guides and things
00:44 but hadn't really visited in quite a few years.
00:49 But I'm a big history fan and the way that they described the job it would be very sort
00:55 of outside and doing a lot of different sort of physical work and I thought yes I'm going
01:03 to get straight back to them and say I will go ahead.
01:06 The castle formed the medieval centre to Pontefract and without the castle here none of the rest
01:12 of Pontefract would be here so it's immensely important to the town's history.
01:16 Cromwell called it Britain's strongest inland garrison and it was in medieval England an
01:23 immense fortification.
01:24 The castle is over a thousand years old now and was first built as a wooden Motten-Bailey
01:30 castle and it was when Elbert de Lacey who was a knight he was honoured the land, the
01:38 surrounding lands and the castle was first came about then.
01:44 Then eventually became made out of stone and became a royal castle when Henry Bolingbroke
01:51 came to throne.
01:52 When I first started here unfortunately it had sort of been let go of and it was just
01:58 really a dog walking place.
02:01 Very luckily for us we won the lottery funding so we were able to do a lot of conservation
02:06 work.
02:07 We have got a new fabulous visitor centre.
02:11 It's really important for me to keep the site looking as well as it did in the sort of 1880s
02:18 when it first became the park that it is today.
02:20 We've planted just under a thousand saplings on site this year and 2000 bulbs the year
02:27 before so there's a huge number of plants that have gone into the ground.
02:30 It's nearly 18 years now that I've been here so the castle is my home and I look after
02:39 the castle like you would look after your own garden and home.
02:44 I'm very honoured, I'm always grateful to have been given this opportunity.
02:50 Whether it's raining, snowing, we're still working out on site and take great pride in
02:57 that it's a fantastic place for people to come and I'm really glad that I'm part of
03:02 this.
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