Acquiring a castle for £1 sounds like the greatest bargain since a man bought an old painting for $4 and found an early copy of the Declaration of Independence tucked inside. But property sold for such a paltry fee tends to come with some added costs and that is certainly the case with Betchworth Castle.

Several historic properties have famously sold for the symbolic price of £1, most notably Stalker Castle in Scotland (though that was a family transaction) and more recently, various derelict structures in Northern England and Scotland aimed at urban renewal. One of the most famous "one pound" stories is the Castel di Sclafani in Sicily, which was part of a broader Italian initiative to sell abandoned historic buildings to anyone willing to commit to their total restoration. In the UK, the most prominent example of a symbolic sale involved Achnacarry Castle or similar estates where the "sale" was a legal mechanism to transfer responsibility for astronomical maintenance costs to a trust or a new owner. The catch is always the "fine print": while the purchase price is £1, the new owner is usually legally bound to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds on restoration and historical preservation within a specific timeframe. These "bargain" castles are essentially a liability transfer, where the buyer saves the structure from ruin in exchange for a lifetime of expensive stewardship.