Homes & Property | Property News In the last scene of Shane Meadows’ 2004 cult classic Dead Man’s Shoes, a derelict Riber Castle looms over a grisly face off between Paddy Considine’s Richard and the final gang member he has vowed to dispatch. Then the Derbyshire castle was a storybook ruin, equal parts striking and sad, with tumbledown walls and a presumed terminal entry on the ‘At Risk’ register. Today it houses 26 box-fresh apartments, all tasteful herringbone parquet and duck eggs walls, slowly coaxed from a site that not so long ago lacked foundations or a roof.
Savills has been instructed to sell the luxury flats , with a one-bedroom starting at £575,000. Technically grand Victorian folly rather than bona fide castle, the Grade II-listed building enjoys a lofty position overlooking the town of Matlock on the edge of the Peak District National Park, some 11 miles from Chatsworth House. It was built in the 1860s by local industrialist John Smedley to his own castellated design, before being turned into a boarding school a few decades later.
The building itself had been derelict since the Second World War, though a hilltop wildlife park with several European lynx was run from the grounds until 2000. The Wright family bought the gritstone shell a year later, thus initiating a protracted development period that has sparked significant local interest. Jamie Adam, who heads up new development in the north for Savills, says it’s the most impressive conversion of a .