Castle wall

“ No traces of any wall of masonry are known to exist, but outside it, to the west, and at the foot of the slopes of the castle, is a bank with a ditch, looking very much like a local dyke of the age of that of Offa, but which is reputed to be what remains of the town wall. The curious thing is that this dyke, which, while opposite to the castle is commanded and therefore strengthened by the castle rock, passes southwards along the steep slope of an opposite hill, and is there commanded from the outside, and would be utterly untenable. ”

“ On approaching its walls it is difficult at first to believe that a city so quaint and peculiar still exists intact. It is precisely like looking at a pictured town in an old missal, with its series of square towers, and long curtain wall embracing its entire circumference; its old castle perched on the rock, and its great massive round towers proudly protecting its chief gates upon all sides. ”

“ The castle of my fathers is strangely incrusted into an excavation in a wall of basalt 500 feet high. The base of this wall, with that face to face with it, identically the same rock, forms a narrow and sinuous valley, through which winds and leaps an inoffensive torrent in impetuous cascades. The Château de la Roche is a nest of troglodytes, inasmuch as the whole flank of the rock we occupy is riddled with holes and irregular chambers which tradition points out as the residence of ancient savages, and which antiquaries do not hesitate to attribute to a prehistoric people. ”

“ When the surrender, or the turning over, of the castle took place, all the population, including women and children, marched en masse upon the structure, and wall by wall and stone by stone dismantled it, leaving it in the condition one sees it to-day. A castle of sorts still exists, but it is a mere wraith of its former self. ”

“ They are eight or nine feet thick in many places, a stone staircase having been cut in the south side, from the second to the third story through the breadth of the wall, leaving still a breadth on both sides equal or more than equal to the thickest modern walls, a fact pregnant with history—a stony tome, from which we may gather the perils, and prescience, and laborious endeavours of a brave, persistent, deed-living, deed-loving race, now but too inadequately represented. The part of the castle now converted into a dairy seems to have undergone the least change. ”

“ Outside the walled area the ground falls slightly, and there are traces at about 30 yards’ distance, towards the south, of a ditch and internal bank protecting this, by nature, the weakest side. The valley towards the east is occupied by one of the brooks which flows a few feet only from and below the wall. There is no trace of any second or outer circle of masonry, so that probably the castle was composed of a single ring wall, possibly set with turrets, but if so, of no great size. ”

“ It formed the back of the stage, the permanent scene, and its enormous face was coated with marble. It contains three doors, the middle one being the highest and having above it, far aloft, a deep niche apparently intended for an imperial statue. A few of the benches remain on the hillside, which, however, is mainly a confusion of fragments. There is part of a corridor built into the hill, high up, and on the crest are the remnants of the demolished castle. The whole place is a kind of wilderness of ruin; there are scarcely any details; the great feature is the overtopping wall. ”

“ The castle is composed of a keep, an inner, and an outer ward. The outer, about thrice the area of the inner ward, intervenes between the inner ward and the town. Its narrow south front has been described. Towards the north-east the hill is very steep, and the revetment wall on this face is not reinforced by buttresses or flanking towers. On the opposite face the ground is far less steep, and the platform projects in a bold salient towards the south-west, the revetment of which is strengthened by eight mural towers or bastions, some half-round and the others rectangular. ”

“ Ribbed vaults, Gothic mouldings, and traceried windows afford a clue to the dates of the various parts of a medieval castle, as they do to those of a church; but they are merely incidental to a type of construction to which the solid and impregnable wall is all-important. The cases are rare in which the builders of castles paid much attention to elaborate detail in the minor parts of their building: their decorative work is used with the economy and simplicity appropriate to the massive construction which their fortresses demanded. ”

“ It has an arched roof, and at each end there is a long loophole, now glazed, by which, through the thick walls, the shadowy light reaches its interior. There is also, on the right-hand side of the entrance, the form of a door, now built up, which probably in some remote times led to a staircase, or was the opening of a staircase in the wall, by which it communicated with the upper stories. Standing on this floor, reflections of the stormy past come thickly and fast to the mind. Who, in anguish or despair, had trod that narrow space in the older days of the castle? ”

“ Henry I., Robert de Monte tells us, strengthened this castle with a keep. Probably this was the shell wall which now crowns the motte; the smallness of the masonry (stones about 5 inches high, rudely dressed and coursed) and the slight projection of the buttresses (9 inches) agree with much of the work of his time. There would be a wooden tower inside. [1159] The chemise or shell wall is pierced by loopholes, a very unusual arrangement; they are round arched, and of very rude voussoirs. ”

“ The building and the family are an exception in the history of these lands; both exist to this day, and are prosperous and undaunted, notwithstanding all the efforts of enemies, time and circumstances to the contrary. The strongly-turreted wall runs from the castle till it loses itself in the rock, and the building has a home-like inhabited, complete look; which, in virtue of the quaint irregularity and magnificent natural position of the castle, standing guard over the foaming Eltz, does not take from its romantic appearance, as preservation or restoration too often does. ”

“ If there are no forts nor block-houses any more, nor arrows shot from bows, nor melted lead poured down on one from some castle wall, there are at least high stone barriers and big dogs and guardians of all ranks to serve their masters as faithfully as did the serfs and vilains of old. ”

“ There can be little doubt that this land was purchased to build the great Plantagenet castle whose splendid keep was once one of the finest in England. [331] The portion of the castle wall which can still be seen does not stand on an earthen bank, an indication (though not a proof) that the castle was on a new site. Henry II. was a great builder of stone keeps, but he seldom placed them on artificial mottes. It is no uncommon thing to find an old motte-and-bailey castle abandoned for a better or larger site close at hand. ”

“ How the castle was connected with the defences of the city does not appear. The city wall is said to have been built about 1225, on the Roman site, as far as the south gate, from which it seems to have left the Roman line, and to have included the subsequent earthwork of Boley Hill. When this was done the old ditch was widened in some places to 85 feet and made deeper. Part of this wall is said to stand upon arches, like that of the castle; if so, there was probably an earlier wall, of Norman date. The city wall is so blocked in, that little is visible to an ordinary visitor. ”

“ A huge cube of solid masonry with a great cylindrical tower alongside perched upon a mass of rock precipitous on two sides is the distant view of the castle, and coming closer, although you can see the buttresses that spring from the rocky foundations, the description still holds good. You should see the fortress in the twilight with a golden suffusion in the sky and strange, purplish shadows on the castle walls. ”

“ To the student of the Wall, however, the collection of Roman antiquities which the castle contains, will be the object of greatest interest. In the number and importance of its altars and inscribed stones, it excels every other museum in Britain. As the Castle contains so many of the spoils of the Wall, it is much to be wished that it could be made the depository of all that have been discovered on the line. ”

“ The Keep is the most interesting part of this very remarkable castle, since it is a shell keep of a known date. It is nearly circular, about 50 yards diameter, and the containing curtain-wall is about 8 feet thick, reducing its inner area to near 45 yards. The floor, of earth, is about 22 feet higher than the exterior ground, and, the wall being 40 feet high inside, is about 62 feet outside, the lower 22 feet being a revetment, and very thick. ”

“ The castle occupies the north-western extremity of the platform, of which the remainder is occupied by the town. Upon three sides the natural defence is the steep hill-side, the upper 30 feet or 40 feet of which are rendered vertical by art, and faced with masonry. The (wholly artificial) defences of the town on the south front are a deep ditch, extending from cliff to cliff, and dividing the town from the castle, within which is a curtain wall, flanked at its ends by two round towers containing vaulted chambers, and with a central gatehouse, also so flanked. ”

“ To guard against uprisings of the conquered people, the barons used villein labor to build about a hundred great stone castles, with moats and walls with towers around them, at easily defensible positions such as hilltops all over the nation.
A castle could be built only with permission of the King. A typical castle had a stone building of about four floors [a keep] on a small, steep hill. Later it also had an open area surrounded by a stone curtain-wall with towers at the corners. Around the outside of the wall were ditches and banks and perhaps a moat. ”

“ The hall and domestic buildings stand against the south wall, and are continued a short distance along the east wall. A large square tower is placed at the south-west angle, and covers a postern. The west wall is free, and seems to have been low. The castle is about 50 yards from the river, and 30 feet above it. The entrance was from the east, along the bank of the river. A ditch, wholly artificial, and probably filled with rainwater, protected the west, south, and east fronts. Towards the west it is broadest and deepest, that being the exposed front. ”

“ But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. ”

“ The walls of the castle are nine feet thick, and are faced, both inside and outside, with stones taken from the Roman Wall. It is a singular thing to see a building, formed out of a prior structure, itself 272in ruins, and becoming a prey to yet more modern depredators. ”

“ With the exception of the Norman tower and wall above mentioned, the masonry above ground seems of Decorated date and of excellent character. Enough remains to show, that with the slight exceptions already mentioned, the whole castle was rebuilt in the Decorated period in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. The work is of a very substantial character, and the appearance of the castle when complete, with its large enceinte, deep ditches, and lofty inner ward and keep, must have been grand. The main approach lay from the east. ”

“ At twilight, when the hoary old castle appears a colossal purple mass, every tower and every turret strongly outlined against the sunset sky, Nature comes forward with her brilliant palette and paints in a background of glorious prismatic hues: great rolling orange and pink clouds on a sky of blue—combination sufficient to send a colourist wild with joy.
Every inch of the castle walls has been utilized in one way or another to economize material. 44 Houses have been built hanging on to and clustering about the walls, sometimes perched on the top of them, like limpets on a rock. ”

“ I AM now nine miles from Carlisle, and four from Boulness, the termination of the Wall. The Castle stands upon a rising ground, at the extremity of the marsh; and was erected by the Dacres, two hundred years ago, with the materials of the old Castle, and upon the old foundation. Their arms are placed in the front. It is no more than a large, handsome farm-house. ”

“ Where the mural galleries are at all expanded in breadth, and in the door recesses of the cross-wall and of the outer entrance, the vaulting is lightly groined; and this, which occurs375 also in the Tower of London and at Rochester, produces a good effect, and takes off from the sameness of the barrel-vault. In the kitchen are piled up a heap of fragments of carved stones found in or about the castle. They are in all the styles—Norman, early English, Decorated, and a few Perpendicular. Probably some came from the chapel of St. Nicholas; many of them can scarcely have belonged to the keep. ”

“ The castles of this time (twelfth century) usually consisted of a keep, or castle proper, surrounded at some distance by two walls, one within the other. Each wall was encircled on its outer side by a moat, or ditch, which was filled with water, and was crossed by means of a drawbridge. Before the main entrance of the outer wall was an outwork called the barbacan, which was a high wall surmounted by battlements and turrets, built to defend the gate and drawbridge. Here, also, were placed barriers of palisades, etc., to impede the advance of an attacking force. ”