Group Travel > Activities and Attractions > Historic Homes and Buildings > Berkeley Castle and Edward Jenner Museum join forces

Berkeley Castle and Edward Jenner Museum join forces

Visit the infamous Norman Castle, home to the murder of a King and the Queen Anne house where a devastating disease was cured...all in a day's visit!

During 2007, The Edward Jenner Museum and Berkeley Castle celebrated 21 and 50 years respectively of public opening. To celebrate, and for the first time ever, they offered their visitors a joint ticket to the two top attractions, so successful was this that the joint ticket is carrying on into 2008!

Tickets for both attractions can be purchased via the Castle ticket office. The Edward Jenner Museum is a short walk from the Castle via a lane leading from the Castle through the nearby churchyard. The museum is set in the former elegant Queen Anne home and grounds of Dr Edward Jenner (1749-1823).

Dr Jenner was most famous for developing a vaccination against the deadly smallpox in 1796. Smallpox was the most feared and greatest killer in Jenner's day. In today's terms it was as deadly as cancer or heart disease. Jenner was also a naturalist, geologist, balloonist, musician, and founding father of Immunology.

12th century Berkeley Castle was completed in 1153 by Lord Maurice Berkeley at the command of Henry II. It is the oldest English castle to be inhabited by the same family, and features a Norman Keep, a Mediaeval Buttery and Kitchens, and Elizabethan terraced gardens and lawns. It was the scene of the brutal murder of Edward II in 1327. The Castle has been home to twenty-four generations of the Berkeley family, who have spent more than eight hundred years living in and now preserving it.

Historically, there have been many occasions when the two households have collaborated, including when Edward Jenner launched his hydrogen hot air balloon from the Great Hall of Berkeley Castle in 1784!