When I was looking for medieval topics to blog about, I thought about castles. If you sign up to my mailing list, you get two free booklets, one of which is Life in a Medieval Castle. But what about building a castle in the first place?
When I started my research I found that the subject had been tackled very well already, so here are the best sites I found:
History Extra Magazine recently had an excellent article entitled How to Build a Medieval Castle. This considers everything from choosing the site to the final furnishings. There are some great pictures too.
The BBC ran a series of TV programmes called Secrets of the Castle. In this, volunteers got involved in experiencing all sorts of aspects of castle life, under the direction of historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold. Unfortunately the programmes are no longer available on BBC iPlayer, but the website is still there. As part of the series, they got involved in a 25-year project to actually built a real castle, and the executive producer wrote a great article on the programme’s website, How do you build a medieval castle from scratch?
The Castle Magic website contains advice on how to go about building a castle today, including warnings about problems with planning departments! See How to build a real stone castle.
Believe it or not, people are still building castles, some of them out of the most remarkable materials. The Gizmodo website has information and stunning pictures of 10 Incredible DIY Castles Built by a Single Person. Some of them were really built by one man, some were masterminded and seen through by one man, but actually built by several. For all that, they are pretty amazing.