cAtAlogue

steve marshall

except where noted

pre-conQuest FortIFIcAtIons

ALTHoUGH THE CASTLE PRoPER DID NoT ARRIvE IN BRITAIN until after the Norman Conquest, fortifications had been a feature of the landscape for thousands of years. Excavations at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire and Hambledon Hill in Dorset have revealed that fortified enclosures were built, occupied and violently assaulted as early as the Neolithic period (4000–2500bc).

`e most impressive pre-Roman defences are the majestic earthworks of the Iron Age. often sited in naturally defensible positions on high ground and commanding panoramic views of the surrounding country, these hill forts provided refuge from rival tribes and invaders. Among the most dramatic are Maiden Castle in Dorset and British Camp in Worcestershire. `e earthen banks would once have been topped by wooden palisades and the entrances blocked by stout wooden gates.

`ese forts proved little obstacle to the invading Romans who built their own defences to pacify the population. `eir most striking legacy is Hadrian’s Wall running for 73 miles from coast to coast near the Scottish border. Punctuated by milecastles and garrisoned by troops in sixteen forts, the wall was designed to keep the barbarians at bay. Later the threat from coastal raiders led the Romans to build a chain of forts along the southerly coasts evident today in the stone walls of Burgh Castle in Norfolk and Richborough in Kent.

It seems each new invader overcame existing fortifications before having to build their own. `e Saxons gradually established their rule in Britain but in the vikings faced their own formidable threat. By the ninth century all the Saxon kingdoms except Wessex had fallen. King Alfred defeated the Norsemen in battle and then protected his people by organizing a network of forts called burhs so that no-one would be more than twenty miles from a defensible refuge. `e earthwork banks at Wareham in Dorset and Wallingford in oxfordshire are notable survivals of Alfred’s project.

It was expedient to make use of surviving defences and walls left by the Romans were often used by later settlers. `e Romans built the fort at Portchester around ad290, surrounding it with stone walls and distinctive D-shaped towers. `ese walls were re-used for the Saxon burh established by King Edward the Elder and then for the medieval castle which still stands today.

Fiona mcIntyre-b.1963 british camp hill Fort, malvern

2016 / oil on linen / 600 x 1300 mm artist’s collection / © the artist British Camp is an Iron Age hill fort located at the top of Herefordshire Beacon in the Malvern Hills and composed of extensive earthworks around the base of the central hill otherwise known as the citadel. I was struck by the grid-like structure of this ancient man-made landmark so I painted it as a geometric patchwork of colour. It was the year of the blood moon so I combined this powerfully evocative motif with the hill fort as Paul Nash had done in his prophetic landscapes of the same hills. A sense of time passing was implied by dividing the sky into night and day, thereby echoing the changing relationship of man within this landscape.

Fiona McIntyre

howard phipps-b.1954 winter stubble Fields, winklebury hill Fort

2004 / linocut / 230 x 300 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Hambledon Hill and Winklebury Camp are Iron Age hill forts, about ten miles apart, in Dorset and Wiltshire respectively. I have a particular interest in the chalk downland of this area, where the rounded hills and steep-sided coombes have precluded intensive agriculture, and reminders of remote human history are consequently still apparent. Much of my art is a response to this seemingly timeless landscape, and over the last decade I have been drawn to observe several hill forts such as Eggardon and Cadbury Castle, as well as those featured here.

Winklebury is a massive promontory that thrusts out from a chalk ridge at the head of the Ebble valley, in Cranborne Chase. I made a watercolour of it on location one winter, when the first plough lines had been cut through the stubble field, and I used this to lead the eye to the distant hills. I liked the contrast of field patterns with the strong shape and tones of the hill. I subsequently used the watercolour study as the basis for the linocut, and cut three separate blocks from which to print the four colours, each being superimposed at the printing stage.

Howard Phipps

howard phipps-b.1954 hambledon hill

2008 / wood engraving / 115 x 152 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Wood engraving, also a relief printmaking process, is the medium used for my interpretation of Hambledon Hill. one of the most impressive defensive settlements in Dorset, it dominates the surrounding Stour valley landscape. `e ramparts here ofer strong sculptural forms, and the fall of light across surfaces and planes fascinates, especially in winter when the light is low, enabling me to selectively emphasise the most dynamic shapes apparent in the subject. Transposing a drawing or watercolour study to a wood engraving enables me to intensify these efects on a relatively small scale.

Engraving a boxwood block using traditional tools, with names such as graver, scorper and spitsticker, make possible a wide variety of tones capable of describing form as well as fine detail. In a way the engraver is working in reverse, for he begins with a black rectangle and is essentially drawing with light, creating a chiselled repertoire of textures and lines, each of which will appear as white in the final print, for it is the surface of the block which will eventually receive the ink. Proofs are taken by applying pressure to paper, laid upon the block, using my 1862 Albion hand press.

Howard Phipps

heywood sumner (1853–1940) A bird’s eye view of badbury rings looking south

1914 / watercolour / 444 x 606 mm private collection Badbury Rings is situated to the north west of Wimborne Minster. Although one of Dorset’s lowest-lying earthworks, the location was clearly chosen for its naturally rising ground and the clear lines of sight extending for miles in all directions. `e defences comprise three rings of banks and ditches surrounding a domed interior. Archaeological excavations suggest the fort was developed during the later Iron Age and may well have been in decline before the Romans arrived.

Heywood Sumner was closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, producing designs for William Morris and others. Sumner settled in the New Forest in 1904 and gradually turned his back on the art world to concentrate on archaeolon. He produced two volumes cataloguing the earthworks of Cranborne Chase (1913) and the New Forest (1917) marked by beautifully drawn and embellished plans. `is stylised watercolour clearly sets out the arrangement of the rings and archaeological features such as barrows, enclosure banks and a Roman road. In the distance, beyond Poole Harbour, Corfe Castle can be glimpsed nestling in a gap in the Purbeck hills.

Alan sorrell (1904–74) housesteads roman Fort

1957 / mixed media / 345 x 530 mm Historic England Archive Hadrian’s wall is one of the most famous legacies of the Roman occupation and is now a World Heritage Site. It was built on the orders of Emperor Hadrian after ad122 to keep out the barbarians beyond and was in use for nearly three hundred years. Gates were placed along the wall guarded by milecastles, in between these were observation towers. `e wall was defended by garrisons of infantry and cavalry based at forts placed at seven-mile intervals. Housesteads lies about halfway along the wall. It housed an infantry regiment of eight hundred men and was occupied until the end of the fourth century.

Alan Sorrell’s reconstruction shows the neat, symmetrical layout of the fort with the commander’s house, headquarters and granaries in the centre, flanked by long barrack accommodation for the soldiers. A gatehouse was placed in each wall and interval towers provided additional protection. `e wall itself can be seen disappearing into the distance along the top of the ridge, while to the south of the fort is the vicus or civilian settlement that grew up around it.

Alan sorrell (1904–74) portchester castle as it might have appeared in 1415

1959 / watercolour / 400 x 570 mm Historic England Archive A Roman fort was established at Portchester by ad290, part of a building programme intended to fend of attacks by Saxon raiders. `e flint and pebble walls of this original fort still stand today and were incorporated into later defences on the site. `e ready-made fortifications were certainly adopted at the beginning of the tenth century for a West Saxon burh fort built to keep viking raiders at bay. When the Normans took their turn to invade a castle was established here shortly after 1066. `e keep and inner bailey seen in Sorrell’s reconstruction was added by 1140.

Alan Sorrell studied at the Royal College of Art and was awarded the Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting. `e trip encouraged his interests in history and mural painting. During the Second World War he joined the RAF but was soon enlisted to work on camouflage for the Air Ministry, flying over airfields to see how visible they were from the sky. `is bird’s eye view seems to have had a major influence on his later work as a reconstruction artist. Today Sorrell is principally remembered as a pioneering archaeological illustrator, producing artist’s impressions of ancient buildings for publication and for the Ministry of Works, English Heritage, Cadw and Historic Scotland.

motte-And-bAIleY cAstles

CASTLES HAD A DUAL FUNCTIoN, PART FoRTRESS, PART LoRDLy residence. `ey were introduced into Britain by the Normans in 1066. In England defences were communal and state controlled due to King Alfred’s victory over the vikings whereas in France they were fragmented because the vikings had remained undefeated, and a new military or feudal society centred on local magnates and their private defences (castles) had been conceived and developed for survival. In return for grants of land knights had to ofer 40 days a year military service to the king.

`e English were horrified by these alien and oppressive constructions that locked down territory and made their lives a misery; castles were the principal means of conquest of a large country by a small army. Following the Battle of Hastings the Normans embarked on the most extensive castle-building programme ever seen in Western Europe, establishing more than 500 in a few ensuing decades’ – and that was just the start. `e total now recorded exceeds 1,500.

`e term moat derives from motte, the Norman word for a mound, the common early castle design being the motte-and-bailey as represented in the Bayeux Tapestry. `e lesser model, a simple palisade surmounting a bank with a ditch is known as a ring work. Both were constructed of earth and timber – cheap and plentiful materials, and they were quick to build for an army on the move. A wooden tower stood behind a palisade on top of an artificial mound, the excavations forming a surrounding ditch – the moat. Below the motte, the larger bailey was an area defended by bank and ditch and housed the support services.

Water was an essential for the comfort and survival of a castle’s garrison. Castles were often sited over springs or underground streams and wells became a vital source of water. Fire could be used with devastating success against wooden castles (hence the term ‘with fire and sword’) and well-water was a vital counter measure in addition to a drinking supply.

When time and funds permitted many castles were re-built in stone, the dominant element being the rectangular great tower, donjon or keep. `ey vary greatly in detail but conform to a common pattern, square or rectangular, tall, and the walls are frequently reinforced with small buttresses or pilasters. At the corners were small towers. `e lower part of the keep was usually devoid of openings, the entrance being on the first floor and approached by a flight of steps set at right angles to the entrance to stop battering ram attacks. `e entrance was often given extra protection by the construction of a fore-building which might include a drawbridge or a portcullis. Donjons were known for their immense strength: they were symbols of lordship, prestige and power.

Tim Craven

Alexandra makin-b.1977 motte-and-bailey castle inspired by the bayeux tapestry

2016 / crewel wool on linen / 300 x 420 mm artist’s collection / © the artist `e last motte-and-bailey castle shown in the Bayeux Tapestry represents the one built at Hastings. `e embroidery I have created is based on this scene. `is is not a copy but my representation of the original. I have used slightly diferent shades of coloured thread to give it a deeper, vivid hue, and I have used the colours more consistently than can be seen in the original. Although I have used the same stitches that are found throughout the hanging – laid work, stem stitch and chain stitch – I have alternated them more extensively. Finally, I wanted to show the ‘workings’ of this scene, how this image was created, so the embroidery on the left shows the same image from the reverse.

I feel that the back of embroideries are often much more interesting than the front. People expect to view the front of an embroidery, the tidy image and the story it portrays; however, the back is far more telling, giving us a glimpse into the working mind of the embroiderer. `is side explains how threads were used and what order the picture was worked in, and therefore the mind-set of the worker. Most of the areas had their outlines sewn first and their fillings second, except for the hill which was filled in first and then outlined. So here we can see the worker(s) concentrating on finishing their section of work and not wasting materials. `ey made things more interesting by alternating the order in which they stitched things but they were not interested in the image they were creating. `is was a commission to be completed.

Alex Makin

diana craven-b.1953 winchester castle

2016 / crewel wool on linen / 390 x 500 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Inspired by the Bayeaux Tapestry, I have created an embroidery to show my idea of how Winchester Castle may have originally looked. It holds a prominent position in English history. `e earthworks and early castle were built within a year of the Norman Conquest. `e castle may have been constructed by William fitz osbern, Earl of Wessex and close counsellor of William the Conqueror. He was one of the major castle builders for the Normans as they asserted control over England and Wales. At the time, the castle was one of the greatest strongholds in England, and for over a century it served as a seat of government and housed the Royal Treasury.

`e castle was extended and rebuilt under Henry iii, who added the Great Hall. In 1302 Edward ii and his second wife, Margaret of France, narrowly escaped death, when the royal apartments of the castle were destroyed by fire. `e castle was held by Royalist forces during the English Civil War, and when the fortress finally fell in 1646, oliver Cromwell ordered its destruction. `e site was later acquired by Charles ii. It was his intention to build a grand royal palace, called King’s House, elaborate enough to rival the palace of versailles in France. Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned but plans were abandoned by James ii. of these early buildings only the Great Hall of Henry iii survives.

Alan sorrell (1904–74) totnes castle

1965 / watercolour / 450 x 630 mm Historic England Archive Sorrell’s reconstruction of Totnes Castle perfectly illustrates the layout of a motte-and-bailey castle. To the left is the manmade motte originally topped with a timber tower but shown here with a later stone shell keep. Below is the bailey enclosed with a wall and containing a chapel and other domestic buildings. `e first castle at Totnes was a wooden motte-and-bailey construction probably built soon after a Saxon rebellion at Exeter was crushed in 1068.

`e motte was expanded and a stone shell keep added by the de Braose family in the early thirteenth century. `is watercolour shows the castle as it may have appeared in the fourteenth century after the stone keep was remodelled and the curtain wall rebuilt in stone. It is a fine example of Sorrell’s work, marked by precise draughtsmanship and a characteristically muted palette.

Ffiona lewis-b.1964 norman keep, totnes lookout

2016 / oil on board / 925 x 1025 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Totnes Castle sits on top of its steep hill town, on the River Dart, Devon. originally built by a lieutenant and feudal baron of William the Conqueror, probably in timber, it was rebuilt in stone in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was fortified during the Wars of the Roses; fell into disrepair following the English Civil War; and is now a monument and garden park.

Growing up in Totnes, its castle has always been in my sights – from attending a nursery school at the foot of the motte, to family visits, and not forgetting `e Castle Arms. Challenged now to make a study of the castle, I track its public character brought into focus as the summit and icon of the town, an undulating earthwork topped by a ground-down keep: ancient, revered, out of use. `e bleak shell keep is remembered in twilight, in its park: ochres, ivory black, Davy’s Gray and raw umber.

Ffiona Lewis

James bateman (1893–1959) cattle market

1937 / oil on canvas / 914 x 1118 mm Tate Collection, presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1938 © Tate, London, 2017 `e castle at Lewes was built shortly after William’s victory at Hastings, one of five new motte-and-bailey castles designed to impose Norman control over Sussex. Lewes Castle is unusual in that a second motte was constructed with the bailey stretching between them. Sometime around 1100 the original timber towers were replaced by stone shell keeps. one of these has been lost but the other still stands and can be seen in Bateman’s painting: the wall of the shell keep to the right and two angular towers added in the fourteenth century rising above.

James Bateman was primarily a painter of agricultural subjects and rural landscapes. He trained with the Artists Rifles during the First World War and was later wounded while on active service. Bateman was an o2cial War Artist during the Second World War. `is characteristically detailed and afectionately observed scene contrasts the noise and bustle of modern life with the quietly detached dignity of the ancient castle beyond.

mary Anne Aytoun-ellis-b.1966 lewes castle remembered

2017 / egg tempera and watercolour on paper mounted on board / 60 x 450 mm artist’s collection / © the artist I have lived in Lewes most of my life and its Norman castle has fascinated me since childhood. Begun in 1067 it is built on an artificial mound of chalk blocks on the highest point of the town and is one of only two castles in the country with two mottes.

Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis

tim craven-b.1953 clun castle

2015 / casein on canvas / 508 x 662 mm artist’s collection / © the artist A motte-and-bailey castle was built at Clun in the late eleventh century on a natural craq headland by a bend in the River Clun in south Shropshire, positioned to guard against Welsh incursions. In the early thirteenth century, William Fitzalan built the now ruinous four-storey keep that dominates a site which also includes three other mounds and the remains of towers and walls. `e keep is curiously of-centre, possibly to allow the foundations greater reach and to avoid too much weight and thus instability on the mound. Typical of late Norman keeps, it displays pilaster buttresses and roundheaded windows; it is however, something of a compromise between comfort and security.

Clun Castle saw action in the Barons’ war of King John’s reign but was later abandoned by the Fitzalans in favour of their more luxurious Arundel Castle. In the 14th century, the family converted the castle into a hunting lodge and added pleasure gardens. To add insult to injury, it was slighted in 1646 to prevent its being used as a base for a Royalist uprising.

one of Roger Mortimer’s knights, Edmund Hakelut, opportunely discovered the large sum of £1,568 at the castle in 1328. `is stash had been the property of the poor old Earl of Arundel recently executed as an enemy of the all-powerful Mortimer. `e latter efectively deposed Edward ii and ruled England with Queen Isabella for three years until he in turn was overthrown by the young Edward iii in 1330.

Tim Craven

leonard squirrell (1893–1979) morning in durham

1935 / etching and aquatint / 240 x 328mm Stuart Southall collection / © Estate of Leonard R Squirrell rws re All Rights Reserved, DACS 2017 After the victory at Hastings the Norman invaders were faced with the task of pacifying the kingdom. To stamp their authority on England the Normans had built some five hundred castles by 1087. yet outbreaks of rebellion were common and a major one in Northumbria in 1069 was met by a brutal reprisal known as the ‘Harrying of the North’. King William ordered the building of castles to consolidate his power in the north including a motte-and-bailey castle constructed at Durham in 1072. `is was to be a secure home for the Bishops of Durham although it did not avail Bishop Walcher who was killed in an uprising in 1080.

In Leonard Squirrell’s serene aquatint all this upheaval and bloodshed is long forgotten. `e castle dominates the horizon but a mood of calm pervades a quiet morning in the city. In time a shell keep was built on the castle mound, but the one shown here dates from the 1830s when sleeping quarters for university students was a greater priority than defence.

Annie ovenden-b.1945 restormel castle, lostwithiel, cornwall

2016 / oil on board / 405 x 585 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Eighteen months ago I moved to Lostwithiel. one of the town’s outstanding features is the Norman-built Restormel Castle which stands high on the hill overlooking the town. In truth, when Tim Craven asked me to paint a castle for the exhibition he was planning, it seemed the obvious choice. I’ve known about the castle for a long time, often visiting with my children when they were young; on one memorable occasion we all went to a medieval re-enactment there. I painted the castle from the road opposite, one of my favourite views.

`e eleventh century castle, one of the oldest and best preserved motte-and-bailey fortification in Cornwall, was re-built in the thirteenth century on artificially steepened slopes behind a 17 metre moat by Edmund, Earl of Cornwall to make a splendid home and deer park. Despite a long history its only military action was in 1644 when Charles i ousted the Parliamentarian troops during the Civil War. obviously it is in ruins now but you can still map out the keep, gate, great hall, and even the kitchens and private rooms. `e castle now belongs to the Duchy of Cornwall.

Annie Ovenden

F.A. stewart carisbrooke castle from mount Joy

c.1831 / oil on canvas / 680 x 891 mm Carisbrooke Castle Museum A castle was first built at Carisbrooke around 1100, probably a timber motte-and-bailey with a square footprint, the motte sited in the north corner. By the 1130s the castle had been redeveloped with a stone curtain wall and a shell keep (basically a stone wall around the top of the motte that housed a few lean-to buildings). During the Hundred years War with France (1337–1453) the Isle of Wight was raided a number of times and Carisbrooke was besieged in 1377. `e French were persuaded to retire after their commander was killed and one thousand marks changed hands.

Stewart’s painting shows the keep atop its mound with the Royal Standard flying above to mark the visit of the Duchess of Kent. To the left is the curtain wall terminating at the southeast tower. Below can be seen the east bastion added at the end of Queen Elizabeth i’s reign when the castle was refortified to meet the threat of Spanish invasion and assault by artillery.

Frances macdonald (1914–2002) tomen-y-bala

1942 / watercolour / 387 x 473 mm Victoria and Albert Museum / given by the Pilgrim Trust Today little remains of many early Norman castles. `ey were either superseded by bigger and better defences or abandoned once the invaders’ power was secure. `e odd survival still exists such as the motte at Bala, now a topographical curiosity and view point. `e castle at Bala seems to have been in use into the thirteenth century and the settlement that developed around it was granted a charter in 1310 to establish it as an economic as well as administrative centre.

Happily today the mound looks rather less forlorn than when Frances Macdonald painted it in 1942. Her visit was part of a commission from the Scheme for Recording the Changing Face of Britain (1940–43). Although the catalyst for the project was the danger of wartime destruction, the greater threat to these ‘places and buildings of characteristic national interest’ was seen as modernization, development and neglect.

charles cundall (1890–1971) the tower of london

1930 / poster / 1016 x 635 mm London Transport Museum Collection / © TfL

After his coronation on Christmas Day 1066 William had three castles constructed at London to keep the unruly population under control. `ese were most likely basic wooden motte-and-bailey castles, one of them making use of the settlement’s surviving Roman walls. It was here that a great statement of Norman power began to rise from the 1070s, a huge keep that became known as the White Tower. `is enormous stone tower, combining defensive strength with impressive royal apartments, paved the way for the next generation of castle building.

Charles Cundall’s poster exaggerates its height, but gives a sense of how the great keep must have dominated and intimidated Saxon London. As a painter Cundall is probably best known for panoramic crowd scenes at social occasions and sporting events. He was also one of the few full-time, salaried o2cial War Artists during the Second World War.

cAstle development And sIeges

A CASTLE CoULD BE CAPTURED By ATTACK ovER, UNDER oR through the walls, by siege and starvation or through treachery. Like any arms race, castle design developed in response to siege warfare advances from the eleventh century to the concentric defences of the late thirteenth century.

By the mid-1100s the keep-tower was seen as too passive: the castle needed to become more dominant and aggressive. Curtain walls enclosing larger baileys were now built thick and high with wall walks protected by battlements. Projecting mural towers gave added protection and firepower. `ese innovations were the result of developments in weapon technolon and of the introduction of the accurate and deadly crossbow. Interlinked fields of fire across the wall faces were a great deterrent to the attackers. Wooden fighting platforms or brattices overhung the tops of towers to protect the base of the walls. `ese were later replaced by a French invention known as machicolations – narrow, projecting stone parapets with holes cut in the floor.

`e bases of towers were splayed out to give greater strength and stability and to act as a ricochet for missiles thrown from above. Rectangular towers with sharp angles vulnerable to giant picks and with blind spots were replaced with stronger, circular and polygonal designs. `e weakest part of the castle was the entrance, so ever larger gatehouses with flanking towers, incorporating multiple portcullises, heavy gates, arrow loops and murder holes provided maximum defence. Accommodation for the castle constable and guard was often sited above the entrance. To give further protection, outer stone works known as barbicans funnelled would-be attackers into exposed spaces.

As most medieval weapons were relatively short-ranged, one of the principal arts of castle defence was to keep the enemy at the maximum possible distance. If projectilethrowing siege engines such as the ballista, mangonel or trebuchet could also be kept at a distance their accuracy and impact were reduced. Moats became wider and could be anything up to ten metres deep, preventing attackers from getting close to the base of castle walls, keeping at bay picks, battering rams, scaling ladders and belfries (mobile towers to carry infantry attacks over the walls). Besiegers had to fill in moats and ditches under fire from the castle’s crossbows, a dangerous occupation, before launching an attack with any hope of success. Small discreet gates, known as posterns and often sited at the back of a castle, enabled the garrison to sally out and beat-up a surprised enemy, attack being both chivalric and the best form of defence. Moats also prevented undermining, one of the great fears of any castle garrison and famously used by King John at Rochester in 1215. Miners would dig a tunnel under the wall which was then collapsed bringing the masonry above down with it. Castles built upon rock were safe from this danger.

Tim Craven

philip wilson steer (1860–1942) chepstow castle

1905 / oil on canvas / 765 x 918 mm Tate Collection / presented by Miss Mary Hoadley Dodge, 1909 © Tate, London, 2017 After his coronation William i rewarded his supporters with grants of land. one of his staunchest allies and closest friends William fitz osbern was given the earldom of Hereford and asked to build castles to secure the Welsh border. one of these strongholds was Chepstow, built along a narrow strip of land between a steep valley and clifs above the River Wye. At the heart of the new fortification was a donjon with a long rectangular design, which can be seen at the centre of Steer’s painting. `e original tower was two storeys high with a basement storeroom and large audience chamber above.

Steer’s composition is inspired by an engraving from J.M.W. Turner’s Liber Studorum published in 1812, but based on drawings from 1798. In Turner’s picture the sun is setting and while Steer’s work also shows the day drawing to its close, it is much brighter in mood, marked by complex variations of light and shade suggested with brushwork and a use of colour inspired by French Impressionism.

Joseph mallord william turner (1775–1851) rochester, on the river medway

1822 / watercolour / 152 x 219 mm Tate Collection / accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 © Tate, London, 2017 A simple motte-and-bailey castle was built to protect the crossing over the Medway soon after the Norman victory in 1066. Something on an entirely diferent scale emerged from 1127 when Henry i instructed the Archbishop of Canterbury to build a new tower within the castle walls. `e massive new keep took nearly ten years to build and was the tallest of its type in Europe. In 1215 it enabled rebels defending the castle against King John to withstand a siege for two months. John resorted to undermining the south-east turret, which collapsed bringing down parts of the walls on either side. Even then the rebels fought on before finally being starved into submission. `e keep was eventually repaired, the old square turret being replaced by a round one.

Turner’s painting is based on drawings made at Rochester in 1820 and was published as a mezzotint in `e Rivers of England series (1823–27). Turner’s love of castles is reflected by their appearance in ten of the eighteen river subjects. Even Turner’s champion Ruskin noted the artist’s apparent lack of interest in the rivers themselves. Indeed Rochester is one of the few that focus on bustling activity on the river itself. `e castle and cathedral are veiled in mist, providing a picturesque backdrop to a prison hulk, `ames barges and the other sailing vessels thronging the Medway.

Alan sorrell (1904–74) kenilworth castle

1959 / watercolour / 420 x 600 mm Historic England Archive `e first castle at Kenilworth was built in the 1120s by Henry i’s chamberlain Geofrey de Clinton. Such was the castle’s strategic importance that Henry ii took it under royal control in the 1170s. By this time a stone tower and its bailey were reached via a causeway across the surrounding lake. King John built the outer bailey walls and towers, added a barbican and heightened the keep. In the fourteenth century the inner buildings were redeveloped by John of Gaunt (fourth son of Edward iii) to create sumptuous new apartments. Sorrell’s reconstruction shows the castle as it might have appeared in 1575 when Elizabeth i visited. By this time Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester had added a new gatehouse, apartments for the Queen and a formal garden.

Kenilworth has the distinction of being subject to the longest siege on British soil. In June 1266 disinherited and desperate supporters of Simon de Montfort were besieged by the forces of King Henry iii. However, the catapults and trebuchets of the royal forces were foiled by the superior range of those belonging to the defenders who also repeatedly sallied forth to disrupt the work of their attackers. `e strength of the castle and the determination of its garrison held the assault at bay for six months, but in the end dwindling supplies and disease forced them to surrender.

richard ernst eurich (1903–92) richmond castle

c.1950s / oil on canvas / 355 x 610 mm private collection / © estate of the artist / photo: Paul Carter A castle was first built at Richmond around 1070. `e stone outer walls date from the 1080s and are the most complete elements of an eleventh-century castle surviving in England. `e castle was laid out in a triangular shape but unusually had no motte or tower keep. `e great keep was built over an existing gatehouse after 1171 and was surrounded by a barbican adding an extra layer of defence and incorporating a new gateway into the castle. Richmond was the strongpoint and administrative hub of the Honour of Richmond, a huge estate controlled at times by the Dukes of Brittany and the Crown.

Eurich’s view from the south places the emphasis on the castle’s position above the River Swale and the remains of Scolland’s Hall. `is contained the great hall (where the castle’s household ate and slept), the lord’s private solar and storage rooms on the floor beneath. Also visible is the entrance to the cockpit that contained the castle’s gardens. Eurich was born a few miles south in Bradford and knew the yorkshire landscape and its attractions well. In 1934 he settled at Dibden Purlieu near Southampton. `e Solent at Lepe would become a recurring subject in his later life. During the Second World War he was an o2cial War Artist for the Admiralty.

Josiah wood whymper (1813–1903) richmond castle, Yorkshire

1857 / watercolour / 475 x 875 mm UK Government Art Collection Whymper’s panoramic vista shows that even in the nineteenth century the huge tower at Richmond dominated the landscape for miles around: a mighty statement of its former owners’ power. Its position beside a gorge cut by the River Swale was also naturally defensible. In more peaceful times the castle fell out of use and by 1538 was derelict. However, this was to give it a new lease of life as a picturesque ruin, popular with visiting artists.

Whymper was following in the footsteps of Girtin, Turner and Cotman by presenting the castle as a romantic feature in the surrounding landscape. Whymper was an extremely successful wood engraver and illustrator who also exhibited with the New Watercolour Society, becoming an associate in 1854 and a member in 1857.

John hawkesworth (1920–2003) the keep, dover castle

1950 / pen, ink and watercolour / 485 x 592 mm UK Government Art Collection / © Estate of John Hawkesworth `e great tower was an important feature of many twelfth- century castles. `e magnificent example at Dover was the last of its type, built during the 1180s by Henry ii who had already raised square towers at Peveril, Scarborough and Newcastle. Dover’s huge and elaborate keep was extremely costly, a majestic construction fit to house a royal residence and impress visiting dignitaries.

Hawkesworth’s drawing shows the great tower viewed from the west surrounded by the walls and buildings of the inner bailey. In medieval times these would have included a great hall, royal chambers, a chapel, stables, a brewhouse and bakehouse. `e buildings shown here are barracks dating from the eighteenth century. John Hawkesworth intended to pursue a career as an artist but moved into film design and is now remembered as the writer and producer of television series such as Upstairs, Downstairs, `e Duchess of Duke Street and `e Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

david gentleman-b.1930 orford castle

1970 / lithograph / 654 x 508 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

orford Castle was one of my earliest lithographs. It stands on a grassy knoll overlooking the shingle wilderness of orford Ness. Looking up at it from close to, its simple triangular keep seems bleak and impregnable, but the two contrasting kinds of stone it was built with enliven its appearance.

David Gentleman

John charles moody (1884–1962) barnard castle

drypoint / 277 x 403 mm Stuart Southall collection `e position of Barnard Castle was clearly chosen for the steep clifs above the River Tees and its command of a strategic crossing point. A timber castle was built here by Guy de Baliol in the twelfth century. His son and grandson, both Bernard (hence ‘Bernard’s Castle’), rebuilt the castle in stone after 1125. It was besieged in 1216 by revolting Northumbrian barons: Hugh de Baliol had remained loyal to King John. It changed hands a number of times during the Wars of the Roses and was once again assaulted in 1569 by rebel barons who planned to oust Elizabeth i in favour of Mary Queen of Scots. A mutiny by some of the defenders forced the garrison to surrender, but the rebellion was soon foiled.

Moody’s etching provides a rather fanciful view of the castle using foreshortening to pull some elements together while exaggerating others to balance the composition. `e remains of the tall Mortham Tower loom over the river, also visible is the ruined Constable Tower that once guarded the main entrance to the castle. Moody began etching in the early 1920s and became President of the Society of Graphic Artists. Among his other castle subjects are two etchings of Ludlow and one of Corfe. He also produced posters for LNER and British Railways.

Augustus william enness (1876–1948) ludlow castle

oil on canvas / 637 x 767 mm Southampton City Art Gallery `e feudal hierarchy of Norman England was established soon after the conquest. When William i gave lands on the Welsh border to his supporter William fitz osbern and asked him to defend them, it was natural for osbern to delegate some of those powers to his supporters. `e de Lacey family thus took control of southern Shropshire and built the first stone fortifications at Ludlow around 1075. Initially the castle took the form of a simple ringwork with four towers and a gatehouse. After 1139 a great tower was built over an existing gateway (as at Richmond) and around 1180 an outer bailey was added.

`e castle has a colourful history. It was captured by King Stephen in 1139 and by Simon de Montfort in 1264 during his rebellion against Henry iii. It later passed into the hands of the notorious Roger Mortimer who took part in a rebellion against Edward ii, became the lover of Queen Isabella and was efectively the ruler of England before he was executed by Edward iii. Ludlow was also an important base for Richard, Duke of york during the Wars of the Roses. In the Civil War the Royalist garrison surrendered after a brief siege in 1646. Enness’s painting shows the castle bathed in autumnal sunshine, the great tower standing proud in the centre, to the right is the round Mortimer Tower.

norman Ackroyd-b.1938 January sunrise, ludlow, dinham weir

2003 / etching / 375 x 600 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Ludlow Castle in Shropshire occupies a crag high above the river Teme and was the main garrison of the Marcher Lords overseeing the then important borders between England and Wales.

Norman Ackroyd

mary Anne Aytoun-ellis-b.1966 prayer (inside lewes castle)

2016 / egg tempera and watercolour on paper mounted on gessoed board 290 x 230 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

`e idea for ‘Prayer’ came from a month spent painting in the magnificent fourteenth-century barbican as a temporary studio with spectacular views of the water meadows. `e summer light filtering through the window at very early morning never failed to impress me.

Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis

Ffiona lewis-b.1964 motte-and-bailey, Framlingham mere

2016 / oil on board / 925 x 1025 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Framlingham Castle sits above its market town in gentle Sufolk farmland. After Henry ii destroyed the original castle in the late 1170s, it was rebuilt in stone, becoming a luxurious home with extensive pleasure gardens, boating meres, and parkland for hunting. Unusually, there was no keep, but a curtain wall housing a grand hall, extensive buildings, and gardens.

In 2009, Framlingham became my local town, and its castle ramparts a prominent feature of my daily routine - for the shops and car parks, markets and allotments. Sitting above an otherwise quite flat landscape, it can be seen from miles around; an iconic image in local literature. It rises directly from field and mere, strips of colour across the landscape. Earthwork and flint and sandstone sandwiched between mere and sky; book ended by reduced wooded copses – a shining Naples yellow and titanium white curtain emanating in a twilight sombre strip of umber and ochre land.

nick schlee-b.1931 dinefwr castle, llandeilo, carmarthenshire

2016 / oil on board / 800 x 1020 mm artist’s collection / © the artist you can see the castle’s ruined towers from a great distance, emerging from the surrounding woods at the top of the hill. It is pleasantly romantic, tamed by the park setting below. But to get to it you have to dive into the woods and lose all sight of it as the trees close in over the winding road to the top. Suddenly it is there. Quite a diferent proposition. Suddenly it towers above you a menacing prospect in spite of its drawn teeth, the result of the dilapidations caused in the centuries since it was built in about 1150.

I looked up and felt its powerful nature even now. It deserved to be painted in a merciless way, revealing its innate strength and threatening character. No softening trees, no dreamy mists. It stands stark in the bright revealing sunlight. `is was painted in the studio from oil pastels done on the spot.

Nick Schlee

charles tunstall small (1888–1959) kidwelly castle

1920s/30s / linocut / 225 x 299 mm UK Government Art Collection Kidwelly Castle was originally constructed around 1106 by Roger, Bishop of Salisbury, a keen builder who is also associated with castles at old Sarum, Sherborne, Malmesbury and Devizes. `e original fortification was probably a simple wooden ringwork with a timber palisade built on an earthen bank. `is castle may well have been captured and burnt by the Welsh around 1159 and again in 1215.

Small’s linocut shows the impressive gateway completed in 1422. Above the entrance, between the towers, are machicolations that allowed the defenders to target those attacking the doorway below. Small produced a number of linocuts of abbeys and castles including Richmond, Farleigh, Denbigh and Harlech. He also depicted Framlingham Castle on a railway poster for LNER. Small was known as an expert in wrought ironwork and Tudor architecture.

edward bouverie hoyton (1900–88) kidwelly castle

1920s / etching / 201 x 304 mm Stuart Southall collection / © Norma Blewett Kidwelly seems to have had a stone curtain wall by early thirteenth century but its surviving stonework and the construction of the inner bailey date from around 1280. `e new towers and walls of the inner bailey were squeezed into the existing outer wall to give a concentric design that provided a second layer of defence, giving defenders a field of fire across the outer ward and curtain wall. `is reflected the latest thinking in castle design, also seen at Caerphilly and Beaumaris. `e improvements seem to have worked as Kidwelly’s small garrison successfully resisted a siege in 1403 during owain Glyn Dwˆr’s rebellion.

Bouverie Hoyton’s view is almost identical to Small’s: a favoured angle also used by Turner in a watercolour of 1835. It shows the gatehouse with two of the inner bailey towers clearly visible to the right. Further right, in deep shadow, is the Chapel Tower and on the extreme left one of the towers added to the curtain wall around 1280. Bouverie Hoyton was one of the etchers who studied at Goldsmiths’ College and were much influenced by Samuel Palmer (1805–81). `e style of detailed hatching in the lower portion of the print is shared by fellow student William Larkins (1901–74) and probably owes a debt to Palmer’s visionary late etchings.

celia de serra-b.1973 keep wall

2016–17 / charcoal on paper / 760 x 1050 mm artist’s collection / © the artist It was Wigmore Castle’s undisturbed appearance that first struck me, unlike many of the more preserved ruins with their clipped lawns and shiny noticeboards. Part buried and overgrown, it is a ‘wrecked castle gone to earth’ (Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins), a romantic ruin – from a distance only just distinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

Built by the Normans in 1067 as part of a chain of castles designed to protect the English border with Wales, Wigmore was a major centre of power for around 500 years. In 1601, after conflicts and political upheaval, the castle fell into the hands of the Harley Family who partly demolished it during the civil war to prevent seizure by the Royalists. When English Heritage undertook to conserve the site in the 1990s it was largely overgrown, having remained undisturbed for centuries; earth and accumulated debris had built up around many of the walls and trees and shrubs had taken hold. `e site had also become the habitat for species of rare animals and plants including the lesser horseshoe bat and ploughman’s spikenard.

When drawing I look for images that might resonate in some way and Wigmore Castle seemed to do that; it has a sense of place, of deep time, bearing the scars of past conflicts. `e keep wall’s strong physical presence and tonal variations of the stone and undergrowth has enabled me to build up layers and depth in charcoal to give a sense, I hope, of the castle’s impact and history.

leonard squirrell (1893–1979) Alnwick castle, northumberland

etching and aquatint / 198 x 338 mm Stuart Southall collection / © Estate of Leonard R Squirrell rws re All Rights Reserved, DACS 2017 Alnwick’s position near the Scottish border provided for an action-packed history. In 1093 the castle was besieged by King Malcolm iii of Scotland and again by King William the Lion in 1174. From 1309 the Percy family developed it into one of the key border strongholds: a motte, topped with a shell keep, flanked by two baileys. `e Percys strengthened the curtain walls and built seven new mural towers, they also added octagonal towers at the entrance to the keep and built an immensely strong gatehouse and barbican. `e castle changed hands a number of times during the Wars of the Roses, apparently without bloodshed.

Leonard Squirrell shows the castle rising above the Lion Bridge designed by Robert Adam during the 1770s around the same time that he was carrying out major renovations to turn the castle into a luxurious residence for the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland. Squirrell was an East Anglian artist who worked mainly as a printmaker, watercolourist and pastellist. Castles were a favourite subject and here he captures Alnwick’s romantic atmosphere with delicate shifts in tone that are typical of his aquatint prints.

david gentleman-b.1930 dunstanburgh castle

1973 / lithograph / 572 x 775 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Dunstanburgh, built in the fourteenth century, is Northumberland’s largest castle. As a subject, it’s prettier: isolated and lonely but beautiful. Here, the foreground details of the rocky shore at low tide – boulders, rock pools, limpets – seemed as much part of the scene as the distant castle.

David Gentleman

Joseph webb (1908–62) pembroke or the great keep

1929 / etching / 248 x 349 mm Stuart Southall collection / © Beryl Gascoigne & Jane Furst Anyone who has visited Pembroke will realise that Webb’s view of the castle is largely a work of imagination. Although the castle does sit on a rocky outcrop in the curve of a tidal inlet there is no towering hill or bridge like those shown here. In fact this etching owes much more to etcher Frederick Griggs’s (1876–1938) fantastical Arthurian city of Sarras (1926–28) (see page 39).`e artist later burnished out the castle and hill entirely to create a new print `e Great Bridge (1929). Webb was certainly original, his works veering between Palmer-like pastoralism and imaginary buildings of Gormenghastian proportions.

As the title suggests, the etching does show Pembroke’s distinctive cylindrical keep. `e castle was founded in 1093 but from 1189, under the control of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, it was transformed into a mighty stone fortress comprising an inner bailey and the four-storey keep with its domed stone roof and double tier of battlements. An outer bailey surrounded by a curtain wall with round towers was added around 1250. Among Pembroke’s claims to fame are its record of never having fallen to the Welsh, being the birthplace of Henry Tudor (Henry vii) and being attacked by both sides during the Civil War.

buIldIng the perFect cAstle

By THE BEGINNING oF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURy THE vARIoUS components of castle design were well established. `e inclusion of a mighty tower keep was no longer considered essential, instead the key elements were now the walls lined with flanking towers and strongly defended gatehouses. What marks out the castles of the thirteenth century, particularly those built by Edward i in Wales, is how these ingredients were combined with scientific planning to create some of the greatest fortresses in the whole of Europe. In most cases existing castles were developed and improved but others were begun afresh informed by the latest defensive strategies.

New castles were still sited to make use of natural features such as a rocky platform that hindered attackers and made undermining impossible. Edward i’s castles at Conwy and Caernarfon are good examples of this, their long and narrow pattern dictated by the lie of the land. `is layout precluded a separate inner bailey as a second line of defence, instead the huge mural towers provided formidable protection for the outer wall and gates, allowing archers and crossbowmen to target attackers outside and inside the castle. `ey were also so large and strong that they efectively acted as a series of keep towers that could be individually defended if the walls were breached.

Where the site allowed, the builders of the thirteenth century strove for perfectly designed defences in the form of concentric castles. Among the most impressive are those built by Edward i at Rhuddlan, Harlech and Beaumaris as he strove to impose English rule over a discontented Welsh population. `e concentric ‘castle within a castle’ consisted of a walled outer ward within which were the mighty walls and towers of the inner ward, tall enough and close enough for the defenders to fire over the heads of their compatriots on the outer wall below.

`ese magnificent constructions were also an expression of English power, symbols of imperial conquest by a king determined to rule over the whole of the British Isles. `ey demonstrated an economic might that could support such monstrously expensive creations, dwarfing anything previously built by the Welsh. At Caernarfon Edward’s imperial pretensions were physically embodied in banded stonework, polygonal towers and Roman eagles that recalled Emperor Constantine’s walls at Constantinople.

valerie thornton (1931–91) the tower of london

1979 / etching and aquatint / 370 x 580 mm Julian Francis collection / © estate of the artist `e Tower of London is a fine example of an existing castle being developed over an extended period, in this case by the Kings of England. William the Conqueror built his great tower within an enclosure first set out around 1067. `is was significantly expanded by Henry iii taking the castle walls out to the line of the present inner wall and surrounding them with a moat. It was perhaps inevitably Edward i who went further, turning it into a truly concentric castle, filling in his father’s moat, building the existing outer wall and a wider moat (now dry) beyond. `ese formidable defences only required minor adjustments in the centuries that followed.

`ornton’s view from the west shows the concentric lines of defence rising up towards the White Tower: the outer wall first with the wall of the inner ward emerging above. on the far left is the Beauchamp Tower built by Edward i. `e turrets of the White Tower are just visible above the roofs of the Queen’s House.

valerie `ornton was a painter and printmaker who was particularly drawn to architectural subjects but also made occasional forays into abstraction. She trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Regent Street Polytechnic before travelling to Paris to study etching and engraving at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 studio.

david cox (1783–1859)

dover castle

watercolour / 164 x 248 mm British Museum / © `e Trustees of the British Museum Cox’s watercolour shows the magnificent castle at Dover laid out on the hillside above the harbour. `is would have been one of the first sights to greet visitors arriving in England and was an impressive statement of royal power. Henry ii spent vast sums building the great tower and inner curtain wall and probably started the outer wall too. In 1204 King John lost Normandy to the French and suddenly a hostile power lurked just a few miles across the Channel. As a result over £1,000 was spent on improving the castle. `e work was completed just in time to withstand an attack in July 1216 by French forces supporting a barons’ rebellion sparked by John’s rejection of Magna Carta. `e siege lasted until october and although the French successfully undermined the gatehouse the garrison fought of the assault and patched up the breach.

In Cox’s painting the great tower still dominates. To the left and below is the Constable’s Gate built by Henry iii to remove the weak point exploited by the French attackers. on the far right is the Roman lighthouse and the tower of St Mary in Castro’s Church. `is watercolour is representative of Cox’s interest in capturing atmospheric and lighting efects in preference to recording the levels of detail common in many of his contemporaries’ work.

Alan sorrell (1904–74) goodrich castle

1959 / watercolour / 445 x 625 mm Historic England Archive Goodrich Castle occupies a strategically important crossing point on the River Wye, one of the gateways between England and Wales. ‘Godric’s Castle’ was in existence by 1101 but the castle we see today is the result of major rebuilding by the de valence family in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries using the latest ideas in castle design. Sorrell’s painting shows what the castle may have looked like in the fifteenth century. on the far right is the D-shaped barbican that defended the entrance to the castle, probably based on one built for Edward i at the Tower of London around 1275. A causeway leads to the unusually asymmetrical main gatehouse. `is entrance was protected by a drawbridge, two gates, two portcullises, murder holes and arrow loops.

Directly ahead is the massive south-east tower with its high spur buttresses exuding an aura of power, a feature shared by the slightly later south-west tower. In between rises the keep, a twelfth century feature incorporated into the later building work. Goodrich had a largely peaceful history and survived intact until the Civil War. Such was the castle’s strength that the besieging Parliamentarian force had to resort to undermining and building a giant mortar ‘Roaring Meg’ that brought down the north-west tower, precipitating the Royalist surrender.

Isabel Florrie saul (1895–1982) corfe castle in the beauteous Isle of purbeck

1940 / tempera on panel / 565 x 605 mm Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth Corfe Castle’s great keep was probably built by Henry i and completed around 1105. At that time it was encircled by a single curtain wall and was not expanded to its current layout until the thirteenth century. Corfe became a favourite castle for King John and he added the curtain wall and towers of the west bailey (the triangular enclosure on the left of the painting) as well as a Gloriette of luxurious royal apartments within the inner ward (seen to the right of the keep). `e layout was completed by Henry iii and Edward i who replaced the wooden palisades of the outer bailey with stone walls and built the twin-towered gatehouse.

Isabel Saul studied at Bournemouth Municipal School of Art and worked as a painter, printmaker, illustrator, ceramicist and designer. She had a fascination with medieval and Renaissance art that informed her preference for historical subjects, such as this slightly fanciful recreation of Corfe in Tudor times. It does remind us of the castle’s original magnificence which, with its whitewashed walls, would have been visible for miles around.

rena gardiner (1929–99) corfe castle

1991 / linocut / 229 x 305 mm Julian Francis collection / © estate of the artist Rena Gardiner’s linocut shows Corfe’s famous profile silhouetted against the sky. `e scrubby bushes in the foreground and the choice of black as the colour for the castle give it a menacing air, in keeping with some of the more unsavoury aspects of the castle’s history. `e powerful keep was an awesome defensive structure but also housed royal apartments and served as a secure treasury and prison. Henry i had his brother Robert, a rival for the throne, imprisoned there between 1106 and 1107. King John kept his niece Eleanor locked up in relative comfort in the Gloriette but her knights were thrown into a dungeon and left to starve to death. He also imprisoned and executed various enemies at Corfe.

Rena Gardiner settled in Wareham around 1954, setting up a printing workshop in her garage. She began producing a series of lovingly crafted artist’s books, many reflecting her love of the Dorset landscape. Corfe Castle became one of her favourite places and in 1963 she published a thoroughly researched and beautifully illustrated guide to the castle that prompted a string of commissions for guidebooks to historic buildings.

david gentleman-b.1930 rhuddlan castle

1987 / lithograph / 511 x 635 mm artist’s collection / © the artist As you approach Rhuddlan Castle, built by Edward i in the thirteenth century, the first things you see are the two towers of the twin gatehouse, still solid enough despite their shakylooking foundations. For the stone textures on this print I diluted the lithographic ink into a watery tusche, rather like watercolour, and let it dry slowly on the zinc plates, and then overprinted them in several diferent stone colours – greys and yellows.

David Gentleman

dominique charles Fouqueray (1869–1956) harlech castle, wales

1925 / poster / 760 x 1140 mm Shell Heritage Art Collection / © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2017 `e castles built in Wales by Edward i were statements of imperial power created to reinforce military and political authority over the native population. `e castles at Harlech, Conwy and Caernarfon were all begun in 1283. Harlech boasts a spectacular location at the top of a rocky crag once lapped by the sea: all three castles could be supplied by ship in the event of a siege. Harlech’s concentric defences consist of an outer wall and ward surrounding the massive walls of the inner ward: rectangular in shape with a huge drum tower at each corner and a gatehouse of intimidating proportions to meet the only practical direction of attack.

Fouqueray’s poster shows the castle viewed from the south. Looming over the town are the huge walls and corner towers of the inner ward, those at the back each topped with a turret. `e tops of two cylindrical staircase turrets at the rear of the gatehouse can also be seen. Fouqueray was a French painter, engraver and illustrator who created all the artwork for Shell’s first poster campaign in 1925, which encouraged motorists to explore Britain’s landmarks using Shell fuels.

david gentleman-b.1930 harlech castle

1970 / screenprint / 686 x 686 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Harlech Castle stands in a commanding position overlooking town and coast, one of Edward i’s eight castles built to subdue the rebellious Welsh. Caerphilly Castle, built in the thirteenth century by Gilbert de Clare, is by contrast on low-lying flat land, surrounded by water-filled moats which formed its concentric layers of defence. `ese screen-printed images are diferent in approach from my castle lithographs, for instead of being seen as part of a landscape, the castles are presented here as isolated structures made up of solid blocks and cylinders, three-dimensional and geometric like sandcastles or architects’ models. Surface details and colours are omitted and the castles are simplified down to the basic elements out of which they must have originally been conceived.

David Gentleman

david gentleman-b.1930 caerphilly castle

1971 / screenprint / 686 x 686 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Castles make good subjects. `ey were built to impress and they’re fun to wander round looking for striking points of view. Now, despite their oppressive military origins, they have mostly grown comfortably picturesque, romantic and old. `ey’re often isolated and distant – on a hill, like orford, Rhuddlan or Harlech, or like Dunstanburgh on a clif by the sea. Seemingly static and unchanging, they change in diferent lights: sunlight can dramatise the angles of their keeps and the curving surfaces of their round towers; grey days can emphasise the striking silhouettes of their ruins on the skyline. Tramping round them helps one to understand how and why they were built.

David Gentleman

John piper (1903–92) caernarfon castle i

1971 / screenprint / 492 x 746 mm UK Government Art Collection © UK Government Art Collection and `e Piper Estate/DACS 2017 `e defeat of a Welsh rebellion in 1282 was swiftly followed by the building of the three new castles at Caernarfon, Harlech and Conwy. `e work was supervised by Master James of St George, a mason and military engineer from the Savoy region of France. `e development at Caernarfon consisted of the castle and a new town (an English enclave) enclosed by stone walls. `is massive building project was carried out by hundreds of workers brought from England. However, in 1294 before the castle was finished, a new uprising saw the castle attacked, the town walls thrown down and the interior put to the torch. `e rebellion was crushed and work resumed but it was not until 1330 that the castle was completed to the extent we see today.

John Piper’s view from the south-west gives a sense of the castle’s magnificent scale, showing the coloured banding and polygonal towers intended to emulate the imperial Roman splendour of Constantinople. Piper had always been drawn to architectural subjects, but usually preferred to seek out the more obscure churches, country houses, castles and follies. He viewed the watercolourists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as reliable guides to what was worth painting. `is approach made him the perfect recruit for the Recording Britain Scheme in 1940 and when invited to make drawings of Windsor in 1941 he first revisited watercolours of the castle made by Paul Sandby nearly two hundred years earlier. Castles proved a renewed source of inspiration for the prints Piper made in the 1970s and 1980s which also included lithographs of Clytha, Kidwelly and Laugharne and screenprints of Framlingham, Ludlow, Stokesay, Carew and Eastnor.

windsor

1930 / poster / 1016 x 635 mm London Transport Museum / © TfL

A motte-and-bailey castle was established at Windsor shortly after the Norman conquest, indeed the Conqueror’s motte, flanked by two baileys, remains at the heart of the castle today. Henry ii added a new shell keep and royal lodgings and also enclosed the upper and lower baileys with new towered stone walls. Edward iii spent lavishly on buildings of unprecedented splendour to provide a suitably majestic home for the King of both England and France and his new chivalric order of the Garter. `e emphasis was on grandeur and comfort rather than defence: the castle had efectively become a fortified palace.

Walter Spradbery’s view from the `ames is dominated by the Round Tower. Although this sits on William i’s motte and is a development of the shell keep originally built by Henry ii, it is largely the work of George iv who added some thirty feet to its height. Ironically he wanted Windsor to look more like a castle again to reflect his power as ruler of a world-spanning empire. Spradbery was a teacher, watercolourist and printmaker, but is best known as a prolific poster designer for London Transport. His first design was accepted in 1911 and he established himself two years later with a series of arresting posters in bold, flat colours including Burnham Beeches and another view of Windsor. `is later poster is typical of his warm, idyllic treatments of landscape subjects on the outskirts of London.

declIne And chAnge oF stAtus

FRoM THE ELEvENTH To THE THIRTEENTH CENTURIES, THE vital military chess pieces were the knight and the castle. Whoever held the castles controlled the kingdom: a medieval scholar lyrically describes castles as being the bones of England. Castles were the cornerstone of feudal society and their military decline from the fourteenth century is related to a change in society, rather than, as is popularly believed, the advent of gunpowder. Early cannon were inefective, very expensive and di2cult to move though castles were quick to add gunports (oilettes) to their defences.

With the country becoming safer, new castles began to let their guard down. New design features, such as at Nunney and Donnington, imported from France by knights returning from the campaigns of the Hundred years War, heralded a change of emphasis. `e castle now became a status symbol, exemplified by the opulent palace built by Edward iii at Windsor Castle to honour his new and chivalrous order of `e Garter. As at beautiful Bodiam Castle, all the usual features might remain such as gatehouses, battlements, towers, moats and machicolations. Castles still looked the part but they were all mouth and no trousers; the walls were thinner and the windows larger and lower down. Moats were now employed primarily for aesthetic purposes, the reflections of the magnificent architecture in the wide shimmering waters greatly enhanced the visual spectacle and thus potency of the castle for any visitor.

Neglect and decay during the fifteenth century also contributed to the decline of the castle, as the crown’s resources were inadequate for their proper maintenance. `e last great medieval castle to be built in Britain was at Raglan during the 1430s.

`e development of efective siege cannon would soon render the medieval castle all but obsolete as a safe haven: hitherto impregnable stone walls and towers could be reduced to rubble in short order. Many castles saw military action and withstood siege warfare during the Wars of the Roses. Bamburgh was the first castle in Britain to be defeated by artillery after the Earl of Warwick’s nine-month siege in 1464. But when near-lasting peace was established with the advent of the Tudor dynasty in 1485 the need for dependable defences appeared to be superseded.

`e old castles were draughty, uncomfortable dwellings and the Tudor court hankered after the mod-cons, comfort and sophistication of the European Renaissance. Priorities were now clearly on the domestic front tipping the balance of the castle’s original dual role as fortress and residence. By the late fifteenth century, quadrangular castles like Farleigh Hungerford were developing into the Tudor country mansion complete with the new long gallery and fashionable large glass windows. Some still incorporated moats as a gesture to security and crenellation as a decorative motif and a nod to tradition and status.

In the sixteenth century the only form of castles built or developed were those intended for coastal defence and were specifically designed to mount artillery. `ese Device or Henrican forts were exclusively military buildings for national defence built in large numbers along the south coasts to ward of attacks from France and Spain. `ese were superseded by the sleek and functional Martello Towers of the Napoleonic era.

Tim Craven

edward mcknight kauffer (1890–1954) bodiam castle

1932 / poster / 760 x 1140 mm Shell Heritage Art Collection / © Simon Rendall Although Bodiam Castle, begun in 1385, looks every bit the medieval super fortress with its symmetrical design, mural towers, gatehouse and moat, it is in fact something of a fraud. `e walls are thin, the moat is held in by a bank that could easily be broken and drained, the chapel has a large window on the outer wall – an easy point of entry for a determined attacker, and the postern has no gatehouse to defend it. So it has been argued that the exterior is largely for show, a suitably imposing enclosure for the comfortable apartments arranged between the walls and the inner courtyard. Bodiam is an expression of its upwardly mobile owner Sir Edward Dallingridge’s wish to secure his place among the aristocracy as a wealthy knight and loyal supporter of the king, but perhaps most importantly as the owner of a castle.

McKnight Kaufer is one of the most celebrated poster designers of the 1920s and 1930s. He worked for a number of organizations but created 140 posters for London Transport. Here he depicts the southern wall of Bodiam with the postern projecting from the central tower. He produced several Shell posters in this dark and forbidding style, including `e New Forest and Stonehenge. `ey seem unlikely to encourage motorists to explore the subjects but reflect the enlightened view of publicity manager Jack Beddington (1893–1959) in allowing his artists to freely express themselves.

Alan rankle-b.1952 untitled painting xxii (bodiam)

2016–17 / oils and pigmented ink jet on canvas 1350 x 1500 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Since the nineteenth century many castles, large and small, have raised funds as tourist attractions, selling postcards and tea towels. Bodiam Castle was built on the spoils of mercenary souvenir hunting in France during the Hundred years War between England and France in the fourteenth century. Sir Edward Dallingridge, former Knight of King Edward iii, used the cash he raised from pillage and plunder in France to build Bodiam in 1385 in Sussex, ostensibly as defence against invasion by the belligerent French. Dallingridge’s real motives can only be guessed at since Bodiam is landlocked, surrounded by trees, over 10 miles from the coast, as Rankle suggests in this painting. `is self-serving knight built Bodiam Castle not only to make a grander statement than the Dallingridge manor house it replaced, but he made every efort to suppress the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which erupted not least in opposition to the high taxes levied to pay for the war from which Dallingridge had handsomely profited.

Judy Parkinson

g.m. rolls view of raglan castle

watercolour / 248 x 351 mm Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth Raglan was one of the last castles built in England or Wales. Sir William ap `omas bought the manor of Raglan 1432 and probably began work on the castle soon after. His work is seen today in the south gate and hexagonal great tower, surrounded by its own moat. His son Sir William Herbert continued the project from about 1460 on an altogether grander scale adding a magnificent gateway, courts on either side of the great hall and an apron wall around the great tower.

As the kingdom entered more stable and peaceful times many aristocrats were abandoning their castles for fashionable new houses. However, at Raglan a succession of owners were able to develop the castle to keep pace with the latest expectations of comfort, space and light while retaining the spectacular appearance of their ancestral home. Sadly an artillery duel during the Civil War siege in 1646 and the subsequent plundering of the castle for stone and timber left Raglan as the ivy-clad ruin that appears in Rolls’s painting.

peter Jarvis-b.1953 old wardour castle

2016 / watercolour over pencil with body colour highlights 437 x 596 mm artist’s collection / © the artist on visiting Wardour Castle in September 2015 I was instantly captivated by its magnificence. Sitting proudly on a gentle mound that slopes down to a large lake beyond, it dates back to the late fourteenth century. At this time it would have been lightly fortified with a wide ditch, drawbridge and portcullis defending the main entrance. `e midday sunshine helped define the partially ruined stonework and I tried to capture this with pencil and watercolours in my sketchbook. `is, together with several photographs, was su2cient reference to create this watercolour study. My passion is combining suggested detail with atmospheric lighting and how light falls across a surface. As this view is very square-on, the cast shadows are instrumental in describing shape and form giving a sense of depth within the structure.

Peter Jarvis

wilfred stephens the bee hives, stokesay castle, ludlow

1933 / etching / 176 x 121 mm Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth

`e fortified manor house at Stokesay is another expression of upward social mobility. It was built from 1285 by Laurence of Ludlow, a town-dwelling wool merchant seeking the status given by land-ownership and an impressive country residence. `e seal was set on these ambitions when the king granted a licence to crenellate or fortify his new home in 1291. `e original building consisted of a tower and curtain wall enclosing a courtyard, hall, solar, kitchen and storerooms. While by no means an impregnable stronghold Stokesay nevertheless ofered the owner some security from raiders, bandits and thieves. Later owners would ensure it became known as Stokesay Castle to further their social aspirations. In the seventeenth century the already questionable defences were further weakened by the replacement of the original stone gatehouse with an elaborately carved timber-framed building.

`is etching shows the medieval north tower with its overhanging ‘jettied’ second floor. Beyond are the hall and solar block with the south tower rising behind. Wilfred Stephens seems to have been based in Bournemouth, producing a number of landscape and architectural etchings during the 1920s and 1930s. He was a member of the Bournemouth Arts Club and a contemporary of fellow etcher Leslie Mofat Ward.

will vaughan-b.1943 nunney castle

2011 / etching / 200 x 250 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Nunney Castle is about ten miles away from where I live. I have enjoyed visiting it frequently over thirty years, in diferent seasons and at diferent times of day. `is view was inspired by a nocturnal visit, though the detailed drawing for the castle was made in the daytime. I viewed it from the north east, looking at quite close quarters across the moat. `e two east towers predominate and you can also see inside the castle where the north wall has collapsed. I chose a moonlit view partly to explore the dramatic efects that can be achieved when you add aquatint to etching. But I was also moved by the plight of the castle. It must have been such an exquisite structure when it was first built, like something out of the Tres Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry. Now it is an evocative reminder of times past.

Will Vaughan

kenneth steel (1906–70) durham

1935 / line engraving and drypoint / 303 x 352 mm Stuart Southall collection If castles are seen as being in decline during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, their importance did not diminish along the border with Scotland where warfare and raiding was an almost constant feature after Edward i’s failure to conquer his northern neighbour. Durham Castle needed to be defensible and in a state of readiness until well into the sixteenth century. yet even here the Bishops of Durham were increasingly spending their funds on hall, kitchen and chapel rather than new defences. In 1836 the castle was handed over to the university and major rebuilding works followed, the castle’s shell keep being redeveloped as student accommodation by Anthony Salvin who also carried out restorations and refurbishments on the castles at Windsor, Norwich, Newark, Carisbrooke and Alnwick.

Kenneth Steel’s engraving shows the castle rising above the River Wear with the city below and the cathedral beyond, an echo of the castle’s form. Steel dissects the development of this print in his students’ guidebook Line Engraving (1938), commenting ‘Durham is one of the happiest hunting-grounds for the artist … `e city itself seems to possess an atmosphere which is unique. Everything in its precincts seems to have that touch of fantasy which marks it with a romantic element’.

Alan sorrell (1904–74) deal castle

1959 / mixed media / 400 x 570 mm Historic England Archive During Henry viii’s reign fears of invasion by French or Spanish foes prompted the building of a series of coastal forts intended to guard potential landing points. `e structures were designed as artillery forts, strong and squat, with curved walls to withstand fire from enemy ships and armed with cannon that could fire in all directions. Although usually named as castles these forts were purely military structures and did not combine defence with residential accommodation as had their medieval forebears.

Sorrell’s reconstruction painting shows Deal Castle as it might have looked when completed in 1540. `e fort is surrounded by a dry moat that could be covered by musketeers or archers in the lower bastions. Another tier of six bastions or lunettes rises above topped by a central tower that controlled access to all the levels. `e compact, tiered design was intended to allow the garrison to concentrate their fire and required fewer men to defend it.

barbara Jones (1912–78) pendennis castle, Falmouth

1943 / watercolour / 385 x 560 mm Victoria & Albert Museum / given by the Pilgrim Trust Pendennis Castle was built between 1539 and 1545 and with St Mawes Castle was designed to cover the entrance and anchorage of the Fal estuary. It consisted of a cylindrical tower surrounded by a circular gun platform and could be garrisoned by one hundred men. In 1597 a Spanish invasion attempt here was only prevented by bad weather and doubts about the fort’s efectiveness saw the addition of an outer ring of earthworks, embrasures and bastions. In the event the only action Pendennis saw was during the Civil War in 1646 when it was besieged by Parliamentarian forces. `e defending force of around 1,000 men held out for three months before they ran out of food and were granted an honourable surrender.

Barbara Jones was a painter, designer, illustrator and muralist whose career was launched by her work for the Recording Britain project. Jones was interested in quirky buildings, relics and popular art so Recording Britain proved to be an inspiring and rewarding way to supplement her wartime income. She was the most prolific contributor and one of the most accomplished artists involved. `is view of Pendennis from the west shows the tower and its forebuilding rendered in Jones’s distinctive watercolour style, reminiscent of the work of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden.

thomas rowlandson (1756–1827) hurst castle

c.1791 / watercolour / 124 x 235 mm Isle of Wight Council Heritage Service / Rowlandson collection purchased with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund Hurst Castle was built between 1541 and 1544 at the end of a long shingle spit, sited to defend the western entrance to the Solent. It consisted of a central tower flanked by three bastions. Although it could accommodate over seventy guns, in 1547 it had just twenty-six manned by a garrison of twenty-four men. `e building and defending of Henry viii’s coastal forts was an expensive business conveniently funded by income raised from the dissolution of the monasteries and in Hurst’s case also helped by stone and lead taken during the forced demolition of Beaulieu Abbey.

`omas Rowlandson was a prolific watercolour painter and caricaturist known for humorous and sometimes ribald observations of Georgian life. He made several sketching tours to the Isle of Wight, most notably that of 1784 published as A Tour in a Post Chaise. A later visit, made in 1791, inspired two views of Hurst Castle. `is one shows the entrance to the fort guarded by a rather insubstantial outer gate and bridge. To the left is one of the bastions while in the foreground soldiers are lounging on captured French guns.

thomas rowlandson (1756–1827) hurst castle

c.1791 / watercolour / 124 x 235 mm Isle of Wight Council Heritage Service / Rowlandson collection purchased with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund Rowlandson’s interior view shows members of the garrison relaxing with their families, some of whom lived nearby on Hurst spit. By the time the French Revolutionary War broke out Hurst Castle was little changed from the fort built by Henry viii. However, from 1861 fresh invasion fears led to a complete remodelling to help protect the Solent and access to the Portsmouth naval base. Two huge wing batteries were added on either side of the original fort to house a new generation of rifled muzzle-loading guns. `e fort was later re-armed and garrisoned in both world wars.

samuel howitt (1756–1822) Yarmouth castle

c.1791 / watercolour / 230 x 330 mm Isle of Wight Council Heritage Service / Rowlandson collection purchased with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Art Fund Another of Henry viii’s artillery forts, yarmouth Castle was built in 1547 to protect yarmouth harbour on the Isle of Wight. It was armed with fifteen guns manned by a garrison of twenty men. Its square design was quite diferent to the circular forts built previously and it also boasted an Italian-style arrowhead bastion on its landward side, the first to be introduced in this country. In common with many of Henry’s forts yarmouth Castle was repaired and refortified at various times in its history. In Elizabeth i’s reign the threat from Spain saw half the courtyard filled in to provide a more efective gun platform. Howitt’s drawing shows the angled buttresses and additional battery built on the neighbouring quay during the course of the seventeenth century.

Howitt was married to Rowlandson’s sister Elizabeth and accompanied his brother-in-law on the tour to the Isle of Wight in 1791. His watercolour style is very similar to Rowlandson’s but he was a fine practitioner of the art in his own right. He is best known today for a wealth of watercolours and etchings of sporting and natural history subjects.

henry rushbury (1889–1968) lindisfarne

1924 / drypoint, pencil and ink / 304 x 365 mm Stuart Southall collection / © estate of the artist During the Tudor period England’s northern border was threatened by Scotland’s alliance with France; the resulting conflicts led to a review of the north’s fortifications. When the military engineer and surveyor Sir Richard Lee visited Lindisfarne in 1565 he found just the remains of a platform and rampart. `e fort that survives today was largely developed for Elizabeth i, although an upper storey was added in seventeenth century. It was briefly occupied by Jacobite rebels in 1715 and was garrisoned until the early nineteenth century.

Perched at the top of Beblowe Craig, Lindisfarne Castle is an undeniably romantic sight. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was converted by Sir Edwin Lutyens into a holiday home for the owner of Country Life magazine. Henry Rushbury was invited to paint at the castle by new owner oswald Falk in September 1923. `e visit also resulted in a drypoint for which this was a working proof, marked by ink lines, wash and scrapings indicating additional work to be performed on the plate. It is dedicated to the print expert Harold Wright, perhaps in thanks for the catalogue of Rushbury’s prints he wrote for Print Collector’s Quarterly in December 1923.

Alan rankle-b.1952 untitled painting xxiii (lindisfarne)

2016–17 / oils and pigmented ink jet on canvas 1500 x 1350 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

Castles summon up the stuf of fairy tales, fortifications and fabrications, standing tall in their designated aims to be both ofensive and defensive at the same time. `ey are symbols of power from where raids are launched and they exist as secure depositories of stratagems and secrets. `e word ‘castle’ comes from the Latin castellum, a diminutive of castrum meaning ‘fortified place’. `e word entered the English language, with somewhat unfortunate timing for the English, just before the Norman Conquest.

Lindisfarne embodies themes of border control and religious bans both of which galvanise us today, and Rankle alludes to these contemporary fears in this work. Lindisfarne Castle rises out of Holy Island in the North Sea close to where England and Scotland meet. In 635 St Aidan founded a monastery on Holy Island and it would remain a holy site through viking invasions and the Norman Conquest. In the mid-sixteenth century the English, under King Henry viii, protected the border against the hated Scots, and when the King took against Catholics the site was fortified using stones from the dismantled priory.

‘`ese paintings are part of an ongoing series of works about castles and their iconic relevance to modern times,’ states Alan Rankle. ‘I first addressed this theme working in a studio at St Quentin la Tour, a twelfth century maison forte in the region of the Cathars in South West France in 1986. `ese recent subjects Bodiam and Lindisfarne are, like many castles, built to dominate stunningly beautiful landscapes, which to contemporary observers provide a reassuringly picturesque context to the barbarism enacted within and without their walls.’

Judy Parkinson

Annabel gault-b.1932 martello tower

2016 / charcoal on paper / 640 x 1080 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Martello Towers were built to defend the east and south coasts of Britain against the French during the Napoleonic wars. No invader tested their strength but later their presence was efective in controlling smuggling. `ey are beautiful and simple structures; no show-of turrets or drawbridges. `e Tower walls are tapered to help deflect cannonballs. `e walls are much thicker on the sea side, sometimes up to 13 feet deep. `e Towers are oval despite appearing round. Some are built right up against the waves and others in open marshland.

I love the remote stretch of coastline from Shingle Street to Bawdsey. `ere are four Martello Towers within view of each other here. Martello W sits on the edge of a rapidly eroding clif. Grasses and wild flowers surround it in the summer. When winter comes the sea will hammer at the clif base. How much longer will it survive?

Annabel Gault

THE CASTLE AS STRoNGHoLD WAS DUE oNE LAST HURRAH. `e religious and political turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century duly led to a tragic civil war between Charles i and Parliament in 1642. In a land where dangers proliferated whether from local rival forces, clubmen, or the marauding field armies of the `ames valley, north and south west, the castle once again became a valuable military asset and many were garrisoned by both sides as strategic bases. However they were no longer the impregnable strongholds of the past as modern siege cannon could quickly reduce their high walls to rubble.

Most medieval castles in England have a Civil War story to tell; the extraordinary efects of a massive explosion at old Wardour Castle near yeovil for instance can still be seen today. `e thin-walled and glamorous fourteenth and fifteenth century castles proved how poor they were in defence and soon surrendered when their walls came crashing down to cannon fire as at Nunney near Frome in 1645.

When the war turned against the king after 1643 many castles became the last refuge of desperate Royalist enclaves. Castle and town walls were often back-filled with soil and rubble to dissipate the efects of canon and new low, star-shaped earth fortifications were added around perimeters such as at Newark. At Pontefract, the Royalist garrison in an extraordinary display of bravado and determination held the whip hand for months and repeatedly sallied out and beat up the wretched besiegers who deserted in droves. But even they succumbed when all hope of relief was extinguished and starvation set in. Seemingly impregnable, remote Harlech Castle was the last Royalist stronghold to surrender to Parliament in the First Civil War, in March 1647.

Cromwell has much to answer for with regard to the state of many English and Welsh castles. `ey had become rallying centres for repeated Royalist uprisings and through their destruction, Parliament was determined to keep a lid on any potential rebellion. `e locals though were ordered to pay for the gunpowder to blow them up, which caused dissent. Pontefract proved so well built that it proved almost impossible to destroy and far too expensive. Numerous castles thus sufered the fate of slighting, the knocking down of just one wall to make the place indefensible; though some including Corfe Castle were tragically wrecked almost beyond recognition.

Tim Craven

leslie moffat ward (1888–1978) corfe castle from the west hill

watercolour / 605 x 738 mm Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Bournemouth / © estate of the artist In common with several great British castles the Civil War saw Corfe’s transformation from an intimidating fortress to a picturesque ruin. When war broke out in 1642 command of the Royalist garrison was taken up by Mary, Lady Bankes. Parliamentarian forces began a rather half-hearted siege in June 1643 but the castle’s strength was proved as around eighty soldiers plus Mary, her family and their servants held out for six weeks until their attackers withdrew. A second attempt to capture the castle was made in December 1645 and even then it was only through treachery that the Parliamentarians finally gained entry in February 1646. Determined that the castle would not be used again, Parliament ordered it to be slighted: some parts were undermined, others blown up with gunpowder.

`e great beneficiaries of this destruction were Britain’s artists for whom the noble ruins remain a compelling subject to this day. Bournemouth-born Leslie Ward was a great lover of relics from the past, whether dilapidated buildings, outmoded sailing craft or ancient landscape features. Purbeck was a favourite subject for his prints and watercolours and Corfe features in a number of these. Here the ruins take pride of place within a sunny panorama celebrating the beauty of the castle and the Purbeck hills.

robert Amesbury brooks-b.1964 corfe castle (close to)

2015 / oil / 770 x 1020 mm artist’s collection / © the artist After completing my studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London I moved back down south to my birthplace, to paint the Dorset landscape. For over twenty years I have painted Corfe Castle from every conceivable angle, never growing weary of it.

Attacked by oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads, the walls and battlements were besieged and bombarded with cannon fire. Today only remnants survive, these ruins having acquired a beautiful, elegant structure, the two main columns imposing a strong authority. `e destruction of the castle has sculpted the stone walls and towers producing more organic shapes that have settled in their habitat, lying where they fell. Jagged stone made smooth through centuries of English weather.

Robert Amesbury Brooks

robert Amesbury brooks-b.1964 corfe and village (side view)

2015–16 / oil / 1120 x 1420 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

Corfe Castle to me is worthy of celebration not just because of its historical presence but also its significant monumental order within the landscape of surrounding village and hillsides. From all observational points you are struck with awe and wonderment. An idea I have aimed to convey from greater distances: incorporating the enfolding Purbeck landscape of rolling hills and trees, to closer more personal compositions.

Colour too plays a huge role, especially combinations of warm and cool colour relationships playing of one another. `e greyish local Purbeck stone set harmoniously against a back drop of vibrant greens and cool blues. A palette as varied and changeable as the seasons, this poses a challenge which I feel is part of the beauty of painting.

Is there any clear way of seeing or understanding fully anything we look at? I have battled with this idea for so long. `ere is so much to think about when painting, but having a clear idea with positive aims always inspires and bring positive results. To me Corfe Castle has always been this source of inspiration.

Robert Amesbury Brooks

tim craven-b.1953 donnington castle

2016 / casein on canvas / 610 x 914 mm artist’s collection / © the artist High above and to the north of Newbury in Berkshire, Donnington Castle commands a major central crossroads in southern England. It was built in 1386 by Sir Richard Abberbury the Elder, who had received a licence to crenellate from Richard ii and its design was influenced by the latest French fashions. `e castle was purchased by Geofrey Chaucer’s son `omas in 1398 as a home for his daughter Alice.

Donnington Castle saw considerable action during the English Civil War and was held for King Charles. Star-shaped earthen defences were built around the base of the castle to enhance its defensive capabilities and provide gun-emplacements, and these are still evident today. At the Second Battle of Newbury in october 1644, the castle’s cannon commanded by Sir John Boys, subdued oliver Cromwell’s famous Ironsides cavalry in the valley below. `e three Parliamentary field armies present at the battle failed to defeat the smaller, surrounded Royalist force led by the King. `is debacle was formative in the eventual re-organisation of the Parliamentarian armies into one elite professional force in 1645, the New Model Army. `e castle was later besieged, rather half-heartedly, by local Roundhead units. Boys managed to hold out with a tiny garrison for 18 months before being allowed to withdraw to oxford. In 1646, Parliament demolished the castle to prevent it becoming a focus for a royalist revolt and so sadly only the magnificent twin-towered gatehouse remains standing today.

Tim Craven

graham Arnold-b.1932 the woman of hopton castle

1992 / oil on board / 914 x 1219 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Hopton Castle stands on a small mound in a secluded valley in the Welsh Marches. Built, probably, in the thirteenth century it is more a fortified tower than a true castle. `e castle is said to be haunted by the ghosts of Parliamentarians ofered safe passage by Royalists after a long siege only to be brutally slaughtered when they surrendered.

I first saw Hopton Castle on a stormy moonlit night. one moment lost in darkness, the next flooded with moonlight. A few days later I returned and resolved to make a detailed drawing of this magnificent ruin and then complete a large painting. As I was beginning my drawing a woman appeared, standing beside the empty doorway. When I looked again she had gone. I continued drawing for an hour or so when she suddenly appeared again – this time I tried to speak to her but she withdrew into the castle. I ran up the mound into the ruined castle but found no sight of her. She had seemed to be wearing clothes of no particular style or date.

I had planned to paint a woman living as many years before the castle was built as was I after, about 750 ad. To understand the extraordinary appearance of this woman I wondered if my imagination had completed the scene as I had intended. She did not reappear but I was able to use my memory (or dream) to paint her in the clothes she was wearing when she stood before me, wanting, so clearly, to be part of the picture.

Joseph webb (1908–62) chepstow from the cliff

1928 / etching / 300 x 400 mm Stuart Southall collection / © Beryl Gascoigne & Jane Furst `e castle at Chepstow developed from a great tower flanked by two baileys originally built in the eleventh century. William Marshal added an innovative new gatehouse with two round flanking towers and a barbican in the lower bailey. Later owners developed the great hall, built an upper barbican and the formidable Marten’s Tower. However, none of this would save the castle from Parliamentarian guns during the Civil War. In 1645 it took just three days for artillery to breach the walls forcing the garrison to surrender. In 1648 Chepstow’s Royalist governor took refuge in the castle once again. Four cannons destroyed battlements and guns and breached the wall, while mortar shells rained on the interior. With their defences shattered the Royalists surrendered once more.

Webb’s etching emphasises the ruinous state of the castle, taking an oblique view from the west looking past the upper barbican towards the great hall and the buildings of the lower bailey beyond. `e distinction between the natural lines of the rock and the ravaged buildings of the castle becomes blurred, adding to the rather forbidding Gothic atmosphere. Joseph Webb began etching in 1927 and was influenced by the work of Frederick Griggs; they shared an interest in fantastical buildings both real and imagined.

manorbier castle

1924 / etching / 100 x 104 mm Stuart Southall collection

William de Barri began building the stone walls, hall and tower at Manorbier in the twelfth century. His elder sons added a gatehouse, new towers and also improved the walls and living quarters, while his youngest son Gerald is acclaimed as one of the greatest writers of the times. Gerald of Wales, as he became known, described Manorbier as a fortified manor house rather than a castle but was unashamedly proud of his birthplace: ‘in all the broad lands of Wales, Manorbier is the most pleasant place by far’. `e castle only saw action twice, once during a family inheritance dispute in 1327 and then in 1645 during the Civil War. `e castle was garrisoned by Royalists who dug ditches across the entrance and prepared musket loops. However, when faced by the prospect of an attack by Parliamentarian cannon the garrison surrendered without a fight.

Larkins shows the curtain wall, hall and watergate viewed from the valley that leads down to the sea. He has chosen not to include the crenellations but depicts a watermill and pond mentioned in Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-century description.

Larkins studied at Goldsmiths’ College with fellow etchers Graham Sutherland, Paul Drury and Edward Bouverie Hoyton. Although he introduced the group to Samuel Palmer’s pastoral etchings his primary subject matter was London’s East End. At the end of the etchings boom he worked as a film maker, designer and commercial art director.

pauline bullard-b.1940 nunney castle, somerset

2015 / mixed media on paper / 570 x 670 mm artist’s collection / © the artist I am a resident of Nunney for many years, and there is a stunning view of the castle’s east side from my garden. I have made a series of sketches and paintings of the castle from diferent viewpoints at diferent times of the day, throughout the year and in diferent atmospheric weather conditions: the sombre efect of rain, delicate traces of snow blurring its outlines, sunrise and sunset, shadows, night fall and stars. `e ruined northwest side of the castle evokes an historic query demanding to be visualised, imagined whole again. `e broken elements, shadows and dark spaces provide in my painting a structure on which I can attempt to make visible past events, the history and uniqueness of the castle. `e surface of the painting is marked to suggest a sense of longing to find the historical known but also the eerie unease of the ruin, the gaps and absence constitute, in the words of James Riley, ‘more actively by what is missing than by what is present’. I am particularly interested in the surface quality of the finished painting with which to capture the organic, ruined structure of the castle. `is dramatic ruin of a castle is a fascinating, revealing subject.

henry rushbury (1889–1968) Amberley castle, sussex

1916 / drypoint and engraving / 191 x 301 mm Stuart Southall collection / © estate of the artist Amberley was originally a hunting lodge for the Bishop of Chichester. In the twelfth century the original timber building was replaced by a stone hall. It was further developed in the fourteenth century becoming known as the Bishop’s summer palace. In 1377 Bishop Reede successfully applied for a licence to crenellate and the palace was enclosed by stone walls with square corner-towers and a gateway flanked by semicircular towers. During the Civil War Amberley was one of a number of Royalist strongholds in the south that were attacked and dismantled by Parliamentarian troops under the orders of Sir William Waller.

Rushbury depicts the north wall with a degree of artistic licence that exaggerates its height and some architectural features. `is is the third and final state of the print but in the previous versions the wall extends further towards the farm on the right: Rushbury was not about to let such details get in the way of an atmospheric composition. He emphasises an austere, haunted quality that belies the luxurious aristocratic home on the other side of the wall.

george percival gaskell (1868–1934) harlech castle

etching / 175 x 250 mm Stuart Southall collection `e strength of Edward i’s castle at Harlech was tested on many occasions including two sieges by opposing forces during owain Glyn Dwˆr’s uprising and an attack on its Lancastrian defenders during the Wars of the Roses in 1468. During the Civil War the castle was defended for the king by Colonel William owen. A siege by Parliamentarian forces began in June 1646 and was to last until March 1647 when the surviving garrison of thirty-four men surrendered. Harlech was the last of the Royalist strongholds to fall, its defeat marking the end of the Civil War. Parliament’s forces were ordered to make the castle untenable but an instruction to demolish it was fortunately not carried out.

Gaskell was fond of castles and was adept at capturing their romantic potential using aquatint and mezzotint to achieve dramatic lighting efects. For this view of Harlech, probably dating from the early 1920s, he turned to etching. `e viewpoint and composition is almost identical to that chosen by Paul Sandby for a watercolour of 1776. Sandby’s painting shows the sea still lapping at the castle’s base but by the time of Gaskell’s visit it had retreated, providing an extended view of houses and roads dwindling towards the mountains of Snowdonia.

kate cochrane-b.1957 castle courtyard

2016 / mixed media / 250 x 200 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

`e original castle at Laugharne was established by 1116. A peace treaty was agreed there in 1171-72 between Henry ii and Rhys ap Grufudd, but on Henry’s death in 1189 Rhys seized the castle and probably burnt it down. It was captured again by Llywelyn the Great in 1215 and in 1257 taken and burnt by Llywelyn ap Grufudd. After this latest disaster the de Brian family set about strengthening the castle, creating the basic structure known today. In Tudor times Sir John Perrot made alterations that focused on improving the castle’s appearance and accommodation rather than its defences. In 1644 Laugharne was briefly captured by Royalists who surrendered after a short siege that left the castle much damaged by cannon and then slighting. `e castle then fell into decay, leaving a romantic ruin. During the Second World War Dylan `omas worked in the garden’s gazebo, writing elements of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.

`e castle for me is a wonderful dramatic subject with its setting against the estuary. `e tower afords an opportunity for a fascinating perspective of looking over to the punctuation of light coming through the broken windows on the opposite walls.

Kate Cochrane

Julius caesar Ibbetson (1759–1817) carisbrooke castle

c.1790 / oil on canvas / 420 x 525 mm Carisbrooke Castle Museum At the beginning of the Civil War the Royalist garrison surrendered Carisbrooke without a fight. It then became a prison for important Royalist captives, the most famous being the king himself. Charles had escaped from Hampton Court in November 1647 and sought sanctuary from the governor of the Isle of Wight. However, instead of the hoped-for support, Charles found himself imprisoned. Initially he was kept in comfort in the Constable’s lodging and the hall, the eastern outwork was even converted into a bowling green for his amusement. once it became clear that negotiations with Parliament were going nowhere the regime was tightened up, particularly after two escape attempts, one of which left the king stuck between the bars on his bedroom window.

Ibbetson shows the castle’s gatehouse, a thirteenth-century tower flanked by two drum towers added in 1335-36 when the castle was threatened by French raids. During the eighteenth century the castle was sometimes used as a residence for the island’s governor so the accommodation was maintained but other parts of the castle were allowed to fall into decay. When Ibbetson visited at the end of the eighteenth century the blank-windowed, ivied gateway made a rather grim prospect, a picturesque ruin imbued with a sublime frightfulness.

Jeremy gardiner-b.1957 August mist, corfe castle

2003 / acrylic, jesmonite and wood attached to birch panel 450 x 850 mm artist’s collection / © the artist After England’s Civil War oliver Cromwell decided Corfe Castle was a Royalist stronghold that had to be eliminated, so nearly a year was spent in mining the foundations and packing them with gunpowder; and in 1645 when the roar that echoed through the valleys of Purbeck subsided, the castle emerged from the smoke and dust exactly as we see it today.

I have been walking the purbeck monocline, the ridge of chalk that runs from old Harry rocks to Bats Head, for over fifty years and the Corfe gap is a punctuation mark in that journey, I always stop and stare down at the ruins coming from east or west. `e first impression of the ruins of the castle is di2cult to describe. After ten centuries they still possess all the features that went into the making of a medieval fortress. `e large conical hill on which the castle is perched is a natural formation of hard chalk. on either side of the castle are hills which form even better view points, and from which the castle itself looks like some old fortress of faery lore.

While the silhouette of Corfe Castle is identifiable in August Mist the visual language of the painting includes richly worked surfaces. I have tried to create a strong sense of light, suggested not only by contrasts of value and hue, but also by the use of surface efects, such as rubbing pigment into gessso, and layering translucent washes in such a way that light seems to come both from a source external to the picture space and from within the surface of the picture itself.

Jeremy Gardiner

the cAstle redIscovered

DURING THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURy GRoWING CURIoSITy about Britain’s past was combined with a scientific approach in keeping with the philosophies of the Enlightenment then taking hold in Europe. Samuel Buck’s systematic recording of England’s ruins, begun in the 1720s, was a pioneering catalogue of the country’s ancient monuments. With the aid of his brother Nathaniel and various artists and engravers a survey of England was completed in 1738 and one for Wales in 1742. `ey published 428 views of monasteries, abbeys, castles and other ruins to create a uniquely valuable historic record.

For much of the century Britain was at war with France, making continental travel perilous. `is added to the attraction of the British landscape for artists and travellers alike. Paul Sandby was one of the first artists to explore Wales and the publication of his watercolours as aquatints in the 1770s helped define the itinerary for future tours of the country. Naturally castles loomed large among his subjects, notably Chepstow, Manorbier, Harlech and Caernarfon.

By this time a diferent kind of tourist was discovering the joys of the landscape. In 1768 William Gilpin had defined the picturesque as ‘that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture’. He published a series of tours that instructed the ‘traveller with pencil’ in capturing and adapting what nature provided to create picturesque compositions. Such pictures needed a point of focus and Gilpin’s declaration ‘is there a greater ornament of landscape, than the ruins of a castle?’ explains the frequency with which ruined towers and battlements adorn his work.

`e tours made by Gilpin, Sandby and their contemporaries also changed perceptions of the type of landscape that was suitable for a painting. once the rugged, mountainous vistas of Wales would have been considered abhorrent, now they were hailed as romantic and picturesque. `e castle’s acceptance as appropriate subject matter was sealed by the theory of the sublime which held that feelings of terror inspired by raging elements, ominous mountains and eerie ruins actually provided a frisson of pleasure when the source of fear was not real. `e castle also found itself centre stage in the Romantic watercolours of Girtin and Turner.

An unlikely late flowering of the English topographical watercolour tradition is found in the Recording Britain project (1940–43) which aimed to give artists employment during wartime and to capture ‘views, places and sites likely to be spoiled or destroyed in the near future by building encroachments or other causes’. Recording Britain largely focused on marginal, local and vernacular subjects that were particularly at risk but nevertheless included over thirty depictions of castles.

samuel buck (1696–79) and nathaniel buck (fl.1724–59) the north view of carisbrooke castle, in the Isle of wight

1733 / engraving / 230 x 405 mm Carisbrooke Castle Museum Samuel Buck had accompanied William Stukeley, secretary of the Society of Antiquaries, on two of his tours and was encouraged by the Society to publish twenty-four views of yorkshire’s antiquities in 1726. `ose of Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire followed in 1727 by which time Buck had decided on an altogether more ambitious project – a national record of castles, monasteries and ruins. His intention was to capture these historic monuments before they were obliterated by ‘the inexorable jaws of time’.

`e southern counties were tackled between 1732 and 1736. `is view of Carisbrooke from the north was published in 1733 and shows the Norman motte and its shell keep, the medieval gatehouse on the far right and the Elizabethan artillery bastions below. `e scale of the project was such that Buck enlisted the help of his brother Nathaniel and employed engravers and specialist artists to improve their drawings and add features such as figures and boats.

paul sandby (1730–1809) the eagle tower, caernarfon

gouache / 640 x 962 mm Southampton City Art Gallery Paul Sandby began his career as a military draughtsman and for a while worked in oils before a change of medium that would later see him hailed as the ‘father of English watercolour’. During the 1760s he produced an acclaimed series of drawings of Windsor marked by meticulous draughtsmanship and delicate use of colour. In 1771 and 1773 he made sketching tours to Wales. `ese were published as a series of aquatints in 1775 and 1776, a pioneering project in terms of the new print medium but also in terms of the subject matter, which few artists had then tackled.

`e Eagle Tower at Caernarfon was a favourite subject and appears in several of Sandby’s aquatints, a similar composition to this painting can be seen in Twelve Views in North and South Wales published in 1786. His view of the castle from across the water disguises the extent of Edward i’s stronghold but allows the inclusion of the curving river and the mountains of Snowdonia beyond. `e tower was named after the stone eagles that adorned its turrets, believed to be part of Edward’s attempts to use a local legend to link his castle with Imperial Roman rule and strengthen his claim to Wales.

thomas hearne (1744–1817) newark castle

1777 / watercolour / 203 x 253 mm British Museum / © `e Trustees of the British Museum In 1777 Hearne and the engraver William Byrne began their own project recording Britain’s historic monuments entitled `e Antiquities of Great Britain, published between 1778 and 1806. `eir survey of monasteries, castles and churches helped to confirm that Britain’s monuments were as worthy of attention as those from the classical world.

Hearne visited Newark in 1777, making at least three watercolours of this composition. It is thought that this is the version that was engraved for `e Antiquities of Great Britain in 1796. It demonstrates Hearne’s fine draughtsmanship but also shows that he was interested in more than simple topography: his depiction of gentle sunlight and cloud shadows creates an atmosphere of tranquil decay. `e stone castle at Newark was built by Bishop Alexander of Lincoln in the twelfth century. A Royalist garrison was besieged three times during the Civil War, eventually surrendering in 1646 after which the castle was partially slighted. Its greatest claim to fame is that King John died of dysentery there in october 1216.

william gilpin (1724–1804) landscape with castle

1796 / ink and wash / 185 x 270 mm Hampshire Cultural Trust William Gilpin was the great promoter of the picturesque, a term that he had defined in his Essay on Prints in 1768. He elaborated on the theme in a series of books, published between 1782 and 1809, which took the form of tours to various parts of the country. Gilpin’s observations on the landscape would help travellers to develop what they saw into suitably picturesque compositions. Although Gilpin was keen to praise nature, he drew a distinction between what looked good in situ and what looked good in a painting. To find the picturesque the artist would need to be selective and willing to add or subtract various components to achieve the desired efect.

A logical step from this was to create works entirely of the imagination, inspired by elements seen on tour and organised in pleasing arrangements. `is ink and wash drawing is an example of Gilpin’s imaginative work, where the castle often plays a key role. As he explains in `ree Essays on Picturesque Beauty (1794): ‘among all the objects of art, the picturesque eye is perhaps most inquisitive after the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles, and abbeys. `ese are the richest legacies of art. `ey are consecrated by time; and almost deserve the veneration we pay to the works of nature itself’.

william gilpin (1724–1804) landscape with ruined castle

1798 / etching and aquatint / 225 x 294 mm Hampshire Cultural Trust `is aquatint was published in Six Landscapes from Drawings by the Reverend Mr Gilpin in 1799. While it has some similarities with illustrations in Observations on the River Wye (1782) the scene is again of Gilpin’s construction. `e ruins of a castle appear in the foreground, framing a view towards distant towers and walls that may represent another decayed fortification, a mountain looms beyond. As he explained in `ree Essays on Picturesque Beauty ‘`e imagination can plant hills; can form rivers, and lakes in valleys; can build castles, and abbeys’.

Gilpin’s writings helped to create a craze for picturesque tourism. `is fashion is alluded to in several of Jane Austen’s novels and inspired William Combe and `omas Rowlandson’s satirical character ‘Dr Syntax’. Gilpin worried that his fame as a man of the picturesque was to the detriment of his reputation as a churchman: he had become vicar of Boldre, near Lymington in 1777. However, his picturesque ‘amusements’ did help to fund the school he founded for the poor children of his parish in 1791.

Joseph mallord william turner (1775–1851) norham castle, on the river tweed

1822–23 / watercolour / 156 x 216 mm Tate Collection / accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856 © Tate, London, 2017 Turner first drew Norham Castle during a tour of 1797 and returned to the subject on several occasions, the most famous being Norham Castle, Sunrise (c.1845) an impressionistic masterpiece showing the sun rising over a mist-shrouded castle. `is watercolour was prepared for reproduction as a mezzotint for the series `e Rivers of England (published 1823–27). Turner was involved in several series of topographical prints in which castles regularly appeared: of the ninety-six subjects in Picturesque Views in England and Wales (published 1827–38) over a third featured a castle.

Norham Castle was established in the twelfth century by the Bishops of Durham, to defend a crossing on the River Tweed at a point where it marked the border between England and Scotland. A turbulent history saw it captured by the Scots four times and unsuccessfully besieged on five more occasions. It was also at Norham in 1291 that Edward i exploited the arbitration of rival claimants to the Scottish throne to stake his own claim as overlord of Scotland. Turner shows the castle dramatically silhouetted against a fiery sky as day breaks, a starkly powerful ruin that dominates the landscape.

thomas girtin (1775–1802) bamburgh castle

c.1797–99 / watercolour, gouache and graphite on paper / 549 x 451 mm Tate Collection / presented by A.E. Anderson in memory of his brother Frank through the Art Fund 1928 / © Tate, London, 2017

Together with Turner, Girtin was the leading exponent of the Romantic watercolour. `ey took a medium mainly associated with politely drawn and colour-washed topography and developed it into a dramatic means of expression. Rather than concentrating on architectural detail their portrayals of ancient buildings instead emphasised landscape settings brought to life by arresting weather and lighting efects. Girtin initially worked for various patrons, developing paintings from their sketches or copying works by other artists. However, by 1796 he was able to make an independent tour of the north and border country before returning to his studio to work up finished watercolours. Further tours to North Wales, Devon, yorkshire and Northumberland followed.

Girtin’s dynamic watercolour technique was particularly suited to the aesthetics of the sublime that suggested a vicarious thrill was to be had in witnessing fearful imagery when the viewer was actually in no danger. `is view at Bamburgh combines haunting ruins, a precipitous drop and the onset of a storm to create an intimidating view of the castle, which discards a more traditional topographical treatment in favour of a romantic, imaginative vision.

John sell cotman (1782–1842) powis castle

watercolour / 193 x 257 mm British Museum / © `e Trustees of the British Museum Norwich-born Cotman received little notice during his lifetime but is now viewed as one of the most original watercolourists of the early nineteenth century. He had no formal training and seems to have learned his trade copying drawings in the collection of Dr `omas Munro, who had also encouraged Girtin and Turner. In 1800 he made a tour to north Wales in search of picturesque subject matter. Having grown up in the flat landscape of Norfolk, the mountains, lakes and ruined castles of north Wales had a significant impact on Cotman and it seems likely that as a result he made another visit to the area in 1802.

`is view of Powis Castle would have been developed from sketches made on one of these early tours. It is marked by Cotman’s distinctive use of flat washes of colour arranged in almost abstracted blocks, making the watercolours of his contemporaries seem almost overwrought in comparison. Powis Castle was originally built by the Welsh lord of Powys in the thirteenth century. Drum towers were added on either side of the gateway in the fourteenth century. Cotman’s castle is almost unrecognisable from today’s heavily restored and redeveloped stately home.

Julian perry-b.1960 hadleigh castle

2016 / oil on panel / 410 x 320 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

My subject is the north-east tower of Hadleigh Castle in south Essex. `e tower can be seen on the left of Constable’s 1829 painting of the castle. However, since his visit what remains of the tower has slipped to its current 40-degree angle.

Constable’s images of Hadleigh Castle are often interpreted as expressing a personal crisis following the death of his wife: a bereft artist’s studies in existential isolation, anger and loss. My painting is likewise a monument to uncertain times. Created after the ‘Brexit’ vote, the election of Donald Trump and the oxford Dictionaries choosing ‘post-truth’ as its word of the year. A castle tower for a president who denies climate change. In fact I toyed with the title ‘Trump Tower’.

Julian Perry

donald h. edwards manorbier castle, pembrokeshire

1942 / watercolour / 318 x 425 mm Victoria and Albert Museum / given by the Pilgrim Trust ‘`e Scheme for Recording the Changing Face of Britain’ was initiated in 1940 to help artists struggling for income during wartime but was also seen as a golden opportunity to capture vulnerable landscapes and buildings before they disappeared. `e Recording Britain committee preferred watercolour to photography as it was more likely to capture the intangible genius loci of a given subject and also placed the project in the context of a two-hundred-year-old tradition of British painting.

`e emphasis was placed on vernacular buildings, churches and country houses but nevertheless castles still made an appearance. True to the project’s championing of the obscure, the subjects were largely remote and unheralded structures such as Pennard, Laugharne, oystermouth, Sherrif Hutton or Middleham. While some of the paintings are rather pedestrian there are fine castle portraits by Michael Rothenstein, Mona Moore, Martin Hardie and Kenneth Rowntree. We know nothing of artist Donald Edwards but Gerald of Wales would surely have approved of this warm, sunlit panorama of Manorbier.

peter davies-b.1953 the corfe cloud

2015 / linocut / 305 x 406 mm artist’s collection / © the artist I drew the subject on site as it appealed to me as a dramatic spectacle from my journeys by bus from Poole, where I make all my linocut prints, to Swanage. `e Corfe Castle site has been a defensive position since Roman times. During the late eleventh century the castle was built for William the Conqueror and is, therefore, part of the defensive castle boom under the Normans. For the next six hundred years, it was a royal fortress. It was fought over during the English Civil War and Parliamentarians partially destroyed it after a long siege. Sir John Bankes acquired the castle indirectly from Elizabeth i. His family bequeathed the castle’s remains to the National Trust in 1982. It is a significant landmark in a strategically important position and is a much loved Dorset landmark of great historical significance. I was artistically drawn to the drama of the crumbling castle contrejour against the sky with its strong white cloud tucked behind the stone structure. It was a perfect subject for reduction linocut.

Peter Davies

oNCE THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURy RoMANTIC IMAGINATIoN was enthralled by the age of Chivalry, castles began to spring up across the land. `e broken picturesque silhouette of Horace Walpole’s (1717–93) ‘little Gothic castle’, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (1749–76), prepared the visitor for the ‘gloomth’ within. `is setting allegedly inspired Walpole’s melancholy interiors of `e Castle of Otranto (1764), lauded as the first ‘Gothic’ novel. William Beckford (1760–1844) drew inspiration from gloomy abbeys as well as castles; the central tower of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire (1796–1813) soared upwards for 300 feet. It collapsed several times, finally in 1825. Although Strawberry Hill and Fonthill may be deemed ‘follies’, the desire to revive Gothic architectural forms embodies an outburst of patriot sentiment. As Christian Gothic, rather than Pagan Classical, was lauded as the true British style, antiquaries began to record ancient remains; picturesque ruins, whether castles or abbeys became tourist attractions. After the French Revolution of 1789 made travel on the continent hazardous, many turned to the decaying Welsh castles to satisfy their craving for the sublime. J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) undertook six tours (1792–99 and 1808) painting Beaumaris and Harlech. Such images helped to change people’s perceptions: castles were no longer ugly piles or ready-made quarries, they were our cultural heritage.

Being proud of one’s ancestry certainly contributed to the fashion for castle restoring and building; even modest country houses could be upgraded to castles. During the 1820s Lord Durham turned Lambton Hall, County Durham into Lambton Castle, Lord Brougham castellated and Gothicised Brougham Hall, Cumbria and Colonel `omas Wildman remodelled Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of Lord Byron, Nottinghamshire. `e Great Hall at Newstead, complete with screens, minstrels’ gallery and open-timber roof, is said to be the first convincingly recreated great hall of the nineteenth century. `e embodiment of feudal authority, where all classes of society came together for feasting and entertainments, the Great Hall lay at the heart of ‘Merry olde England’.

It seemed natural to build a new castle in Scotland, Wales or Ireland. Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd, North Wales, inevitably takes the form of a Norman keep. Robert Adam (1728–92) was responsible for quite a few Scottish castles: Wedderburn (1771–75), Culzean (1772–90) Seton (1789) and Dalquharran (1789–92). Walter Scott’s Abbotsford Castle (1811–24), near Melrose, was one of a large group of castles conceived by William Atkinson between 1803 and 1824. Abbotsford shaped the taste of the nation, ‘a microcosm of its age as well as of Scott’.

A spurt of castle building coincided with the onset of prolonged hostilities with France: Luscombe Castle, Devon (1799–1800), Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire (1799–1816), Ashridge House, Hertfordshire (1806–17), and Eastnor Castle, Herefordshire (1812 –20) reflect ‘the very height of masquerading’. But by mid-century authenticity was demanded: Sir George Gilbert Scott praised Peckforton Castle, Cheshire (1844–50) as the ‘most carefully and learnedly executed Gothic mansion of the present’. However, although Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–52) and Eugène Emmanuel viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) chastised their precursors, their Gothic palaces are still highly theatrical with silhouettes brimming with towers and turrets.

Anne Anderson

clarence edward blackburn (1914–84) windsor

etching and drypoint / 240 x 320 mm Stuart Southall collection George iii employed the architect James Wyatt to create a Gothic exterior to the state apartments at Windsor. George iv also made substantial alterations, emphasising its status as an historic royal stronghold while creating an opulent residence in keeping with his rather catholic tastes in art and architecture. Jefry Wyatville created new state rooms, including the Gothic St George’s Hall. Keen to develop the castle’s picturesque attributes, Wyatville added towers, machicolations and crenellations and heightened the Round Tower. In honour of these eforts he was later buried in St George’s Chapel.

Blackburn’s etching shows crowds thronging to a fair, dwarfed by the huge Curfew Tower. `is is one of the oldest surviving parts of the castle, dating from the thirteenth century, but takes its name from the bells installed there in 1478. `e Carcassonne-inspired roof was later added by the architect Anthony Salvin. Behind and to the left is St George’s Chapel. Blackburn was an etcher, designer, ceramicist and painter who exhibited with the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers during the 1950s. His paintings of harbour and dockside scenes are held in several public collections.

simon dorrell-b.1961 castell coch: climbing the drive

2016 / ink and gouache / 204 x 274 mm artist’s collection / © the artist In 1872 the architect, designer and mediaeval scholar William Burges (1827–81) presented John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, third marquess of Bute, with a report on the ruins of Castell Coch, an outlying property on Lord Bute’s Cardif estates. `e archaeological treatise concluded: ‘`ere are two courses open with regard to the ruins; one is to leave them as they are and the other to restore them so as to make a Country residence for your occasional occupation in the summer’. Burges’ argument in support of the latter was accompanied by exquisite, detailed drawings illustrating the possibilities. Lord Bute was seduced.

Work began in 1875 and coincided with the planting of a vineyard on a south-facing slope south-east of the site, which added considerably to Burges and Lord Bute’s vision of a medieval castle rising dramatically above the deep valley of the River Taf. `e main structure was completed in 1879 but, following Burges’ untimely death in 1881, the elaborate interior decoration and fitting-out was not finished until 1891. `e ‘restoration’ of a castle was an attractive proposition for Burges but what he created in the nineteenth century must have scant resemblance to the ‘Red Castle’ of the fourteenth century: the precision of the dressed stonework, the height of the towers, their variety of form and, not least, their striking steeply-pitched conical roofs all suggest that Burges may have been more interested in creating a picturesque composition than in historical veracity.

simon dorrell-b.1961 castell coch: winter sunlight in the kitchen

2016 / ink and gouache / 204 x 147 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

Internally, all the rooms are dark, sometimes very dark; the walls are thick and the windows small. However, many of them are richly and enchantingly decorated, though not as exuberantly as the fantastical interiors that Lord Bute and Burges devised for nearby Cardif Castle.

In a lecture entitled ‘`e Modern Developments of Medieval Art’ given to students at the Architectural Association in 1864, Burges stated ‘Study the great broad masses, the strong unchamfered angles’. Together with G.E. Street, his pursuit of ‘Muscularity’ in architecture made him a champion of the early Gothic School. As one approaches Castell Coch via the drive that winds as it climbs steeply through beech woods, it is the massing of the three easternmost towers and the interaction of crisp geometric forms that lend the castle an unforgettable monumental quality, despite its apparently small scale. Although a paean to the romantic medievalism so popular in the late nineteenth century, Castell Coch is no mere picturesque folly, no mere High victorian Gothic fantasy; it exudes a sense of unassailable solidity, strength and power: it is a castle in its own right.

`is iconic building celebrates the essence of the genius of William Burges. It represents architecture at its most potent and most perfect. Today, perched high above a valley somewhat trampled by the vagaries of the twentieth century and set amongst the unmanaged and rather unkempt woodland that surrounds it, the incongruity of its very existence is arresting, and worthy, surely, of a response.

Simon Dorrell

norman Ackroyd-b.1938 balmoral castle

2002 / etching / 150 x 230 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Balmoral is in fact a country house, one of the many built in early victorian times in the then fashionable form of a castle. Most were well-built and extremely comfortable.

Norman Ackroyd

cAstles oF the ImAgInAtIon

CASTLES HAvE ALWAyS FIRED THE IMAGINATIoN; THEy TAKE us back to ‘days of yore’ when knights fought dragons, saved maidens and rode in triumph to their castles to celebrate in style. Sir `omas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, first published in 1485 by William Caxton, gave us the stuf of legend. Mallory did not invent the stories of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; he merely collected tales in French and English that were already in circulation. Ever since, we have been trying to determine if Arthur really lived. `is hardly matters, as Camelot lives in our imaginations. When Le Morte d’Arthur was reprinted in 1816, the timing was prescient; with the Industrial Revolution at full tilt, romantic heroes were needed. Walter Scott gave us Ivanhoe (1820), while Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1855–85) retold the legends in elegiac form. William Morris (1834–96) had read Scott’s novel by the age of seven; in his infancy, he rode through Epping Forest in a ‘toy suit of armour’. As for many children, his games centred on ‘knights, barons and fairies’. Morris is said to have purchased a copy of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur while an undergraduate at oxford (1853–55). Where would the later Pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), Edward Burne-Jones (1833–98) and Morris have been without King Arthur and his Knights to fire their imagination?

‘Rediscovered’ in the 1960s the Pre-Raphaelites rekindled a passion for medieval romance. Alan Lee (b.1947), who acknowledges his debt to Arthur Rackham (1867–1939), illustrated `e Mabinogion (1882) and David Larkin’s Castles (1984) before tackling Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1987). As lead concept artist, alongside David Howe, Lee transformed his vision to the ‘big screen’ in `e Lord of the Rings (2001–03) and `e Hobbit (2012–14) trilogies. `e Lord of the Rings remains the highest-grossing film trilon, even outgunning Star Wars. Ian Miller (b.1946) is also noted for his Tolkien-inspired imagery; he contributed to the lavishly illustrated A Tolkien Bestiary (1995) and Characters from Tolkien – A Bestiary (2001). Paul Kidby’s (b.1964) breakthrough came in 1995 when he started working exclusively for Terry Pratchett’s (1948–2015) Discworld, a comic fantasy book series.

`e success of the television series Game of `rones (2011–), shows the public’s appetite for castles and dragons has not diminished. It seems that entering ‘other worlds’ ofers respite from modern life. Escapism is no longer a ‘crime’ but a psychological necessity; we respond to works that conjure, in Burne-Jones’s words, ‘a romantic dream of something that never was and never will be’. `is ‘other place of being’ allows us to explore all the emotions that make us human.

Although Fantasy commands such popular appeal, as an artistic genre it receives scant attention. Admittedly it is hard to define; it cannot be classified per a distinctive style or a specific group of artists. Perhaps Fantasy is just a state of mind, drawing on the sub-conscious or dreams. Like its predecessors, it relies on mystical, mythical or folkloric themes. Directly linked to the literary world, books, pulp fiction journals and graphic novels, as well as film and television, all easily available media, it is seen to be a popular, even low-brow, art form. yet as a good illustration should, it compliments and expands the text leading the reader more deeply into the author’s invented work. Miller provides us with a succinct characterization of fantasy art: ‘My images are the stuf of dreams and apparitions, the tremors that touch the skirt of day. Unspoken thoughts, stored memories, drawn up to be aired and then twisted by fancy’.

Anne Anderson

Frederick landseer griggs (1876–1938) the Quay

1915–16 / etching / 170 x 207 mm Stuart Southall collection As a young man Griggs had studied architectural draughtsmanship and spent two years working in an architect’s o2ce. After publishing drawings of buildings around his home in Hitchin, Hertfordshire he was commissioned to provide illustrations for Macmillan’s Highways and Byways guide to the county. Although he was a slow worker the publishers were delighted with the results and further commissions followed. All of this experience laid the groundwork for his own personal vision of England’s monuments when he turned to etching in 1912.

Around the same time Griggs converted to Catholicism and embarked on a project to conjure up vistas of an England where the dissolution of the monasteries had never occurred. Griggs focused on religious buildings, but his love of medieval architecture naturally led to the inclusion of castles and fortifications in his etchings. `e Quay shows a lovingly-constructed fictional city surrounded by a stout wall. Rising high on the hill above a castle stands sentinel, its massive walls strengthened with towers and buttresses. `is is one of Griggs’s sunnier works but even here the encroaching shadows and rain clouds hint at unsettled times ahead.

leslie ward (1888–1978) the dark château

1919 / etching and aquatint 275 x 201 mm Stuart Southall collection © estate of the artist

Leslie Ward taught at Bournemouth Municipal College of Art between 1911 and 1953 and exhibited regularly with the Bournemouth Arts Club and at the Royal Academy. He spent his weekends and summers travelling into Purbeck and further across the country in search of his favourite subject matter: sweeping landscapes, ruins, quirky architecture and bustling harbours. He produced a number of atmospheric night scenes where artificial light sources pull the features of ancient buildings from the surrounding shadows.

For `e Dark Château Ward moved into explicitly Gothic territory, creating the type of brooding castle that might be encountered in the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Horace Walpole or Edgar Allen Poe. He invokes the sublime through the exaggerated height of the towers, the obscurity provided by darkness and surrounding trees and the prospect of supernatural terrors lurking within. `e single light, subtly reflected in the moat below, adds to the air of mysterious anticipation.

william martin larkins (1901–74) roadmen (work)

1925 / etching / 127 x 253 mm Stuart Southall collection Larkins was part of a coterie of Goldsmiths’ College students who, inspired by the work of Samuel Palmer, found success during the last years of the etching revival. Larkins was born in Bow, East London, the son of a steeplejack whose work included cleaning Nelson’s Column. He produced most of his etchings by the time he was twenty-five and gave up printmaking for commercial art after the crash. In the early 1920s Larkins travelled to Europe and to Wales where he was inspired to make an etching of Manorbier Castle (see page 125). `e trip may also have been the inspiration for this imaginative etching that features a castle reminiscent of nearby Kidwelly.

Roadmen is an intriguing work marked by a diagonal division between the encroaching city and the unspoilt country beyond. `e urban landscape of terraced houses and industrial buildings is heavily worked while the countryside is suggested by a few lines to emphasise its wide open spaces. `e message seems to be that despite its guardian castle the natural world will be soon be swallowed up by development. Anxiety about threats to Britain’s countryside was expressed by a number of artists and writers at this time and was to be the major impetus behind the Recording Britain project.

christopher le brun b.1951 the barricades

2008 / watercolour on paper / 558 x 770 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

christopher le brun b.1951 the tower in the woods

2002–07 / oil on canvas / 2700 x 2200 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

Whether as fortress, palace, or prison, the castle is an enduring symbol as secure and familiar as any in the native imagination. `e castle evokes a thicket of associations just as dense as the forest that (to satisfy the fable) must always surround it.

A philosopher has it that meaning exists or arises where the interpretations lie thickest. `e word will elicit a quite diferent response in Wales or Scotland, France or Germany. See how the expression ‘Castles in Spain’ already suggests an extreme of fantasy and wish fulfilment.

`e briar-tangled wood of cliches and conventional images so guard the approach that finding any path seems hardly worth the journey. But to me as a painter, the idea of the castle is irresistible: how compelling, how vivid, what force it has!

Christopher Le Brun

christopher le brun b.1951 untoward

2006 / watercolour on paper / 495 x 765 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

Alan lee b.1947 stork’s nest

1986 / etching / 230 x 190 mm artist’s collection / © the artist

I have been fascinated by castles since childhood – those most ravaged by time, neglect and old battles having the strongest efect on my imagination – and have been drawing them ever since. `ere isn’t much to say about this particular invented castle, other than that it has a least two inhabitants – a Stork, and whoever is in that illuminated room in the tower.

Alan Lee

Alan lee b.1947 brokedown palace

1986 / watercolour / 370 x 530 mm illustration for ‘Brokedown Palace’ by Steven Brust Cover artwork for the book by US author, Steven Brust, telling of a fratricidal struggle for power between the heirs of the kingdom of Fenario amongst the crumbling ruins of the citadel. `e story was inspired by the song ‘Brokedown Palace’ by the rock group the Grateful Dead.

Alan Lee

Alan lee b.1947 helm’s deep

1992 / watercolour / 570 x 360 mm illustration for ‘`e Lord of the Rings’ by J.R.R. Tolkien

An illustration for ‘`e Two Towers’, first published in the centenary edition of `e Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, depicting a moment in the epic battle between the defenders of the Rohan fortress of Helm’s Deep, and the army of orcs raised by the wizard Saruman. `is picture was also used as a starting point for the design and art direction of the scenes in Peter Jackson’s film version, premiered in 2002.

Alan Lee

Ian miller b.1946 gormenghast castle

1985 / ink and watercolour / 140 x 245 mm artist’s collection / © the artist `ough in one sense Gormenghast stands as a grey, unyielding preponderance of stone fixed in a timeless decay, there is for me, and I am ever conscious of it when trying to draw some fragmentary aspect of the castle, a more telling dimension where all is in a state of flux.

I see Gormenghast as something organic that might, for perversity’s sake, be likened to a grubbed apple inside of which the characters, no less startling than the domain they inhabit, idiosyncratic and isolationist in manner, all squirm and pirouette in their own little pools of dust and candlelight.

No matter how many times I attempt some aspect of the castle I am conscious of a short-fall, some missed nuance or understated shadow. It is a mound of moods linked umbilically to the characters and if I let go of that idea for a moment I always lose the drawing.

`e teaser is, just how does one take hold of that airless quiet or the arcing light left in Steerpike’s troubled wake? Is a caught breath, an encapsulated sigh as near as one can ever hope to get with a still image? Gormenghast is a painter’s obsession, a draughtsman’s dream and then something more besides.

Ian Miller

paul kidby b.1964 lancre castle

2009 / pencil on paper / 420 x 297 mm illustration for ‘Wyrd Sisters’ by Terry Pratchett

Lancre Castle was built on an outcrop of rock by an architect who had heard about Gormenghast but hadn’t got the budget. He’d done his best, though, with a tiny confection of cut-price turrets, bargain basements, buttresses, crenellations, gargoyles, towers, courtyards, keeps and dungeons; in fact, just about everything a castle needs except maybe reasonable foundations and the kind of mortar that doesn’t wash away in a light shower. `e castle leaned vertiginously over the racing white water of the Lancre river, which boomed darkly a thousand feet below. Every now and again a few bits fell in. from ‘Wyrd Sisters’ *

My illustration depicts the castle from a bird’s eye view to include the steep clifs and ravines it perches above. I took inspiration from the Gothic Revival Lichtenstein Castle in Germany, which is built in fairy-tale style and, like Lancre, sited atop a rocky outcrop high above a river. My drawing shows a crenellated medieval gateway, the crumbled remains of outer curtain walls and round corner towers that have mostly fallen into the gorges below. `e interior buildings are an architectural mixture spanning the centuries and include a Norman-style keep with observation turrets, timberframed domestic buildings and stone halls. `e steep-pitched towers are influenced by the French castle, Carcassonne. I also included dangerous stairways that end abruptly above perilous drops and bridges spanning chasms in the rock to accentuate the precarious nature of this castle.

Paul Kidby

paul kidby b.1964 the tower of Art

2004 / pencil on board / 520 x 257 mm illustration for ‘`e Art of Discworld’

Looming high over the University was the grim and ancient Tower of Art, said to be the oldest building on the Disc, with its famous spiral staircase of eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty eight steps. From its crenellated roof, the haunt of ravens and disconcertingly alert gargoyles, a wizard might see to the very edge of the Disc. from ‘`e Light Fantastic’ *

When designing this building, I looked at the painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder of `e Tower of Babel (1563), and gave my illustration a similar architectural structure with numerous arches reminiscent of the Roman Colosseum. I drew the natural rock as a strong, broad foundation that tapers upward to a great height, a small door at the base leads into the famous spiral staircase. I wanted the tower to look as if the ancient geolon of the Disc had been pulled and spun skywards, (800 feet), into a marvel of engineering, as old and mysterious as the Discworld itself. Its appearance is largely organic and natural as if the architectural additions of crenellations and turrets are wizardly afterthoughts.

Paul Kidby

AS IN ENGLAND, THE FIRST CASTLES To APPEAR IN SCoTLAND were wooden motte-and-bailey structures introduced by Anglo-Norman colonists during the twelfth century. `e rugged Scottish landscape also provided ample opportunity to build on natural features such as the peaks of volcanic rock at Edinburgh, Stirling and Dumbarton. At this time Shetland, orkney, Caithness, the Hebrides and Arnll, were still controlled by Norsemen who built their own defences in stone probably because it was more abundant than timber. Scotland’s earliest documented stone castle is Cubbie Roo built on orkney by the Norwegian Kolbein Hruga around 1150.

A treaty between Alexander ii and Henry iii of England in 1217 ushered in a spell of relative peace along the southern border and the thirteenth century saw the building of many impressive castles including Dirleton in East Lothian, Bothwell on the River Clyde and Caerlaverock near Dumfries. `e first two are marked by a huge round tower and lofty curtain wall with lesser towers surrounding a courtyard, a design inspired by Château de Coucy in Picardy. Caerlaverock was built on a triangular plan, surrounded by a moat with a powerful gatehouse at one corner and smaller round towers at the others. `e imposing castles at Edinburgh and Stirling became potent symbols of royal power and played a critical role in Scotland’s turbulent history. over the centuries they evolved from intimidating strongholds to elaborate palaces, but in terms of Scottish castle building their scale and complexity is exceptional.

`e model for many Scottish castles was the tower house that proliferated across the country, particularly from the middle of the fourteenth century. Tower houses were stone-built, often with barrel-vaulted ceilings, and contained all the elements usually housed in the inner ward of an English castle: sleeping quarters for the lord, a hall and the stores and kitchen to serve them. `e imposing height and strength of such towers made for a doughty defensive retreat in times of trouble. Compact castles of this kind were also far less expensive to build and maintain for Scottish nobles who might lack the economic muscle of their English counterparts.

As well as troublesome neighbours to the south the Scottish crown had to deal with hostility from the Lords of the Isles. At the close of the fifteenth century James iv worked with his nobles to bring them to heel and castles were vital in controlling disputed territory. `e king’s policy was demonstrated on the shores of Loch Ness in 1509 when he gifted Castle Urquhart to John Grant on condition that he constructed a tower house and outer rampart to defend the area from raiders. James vi’s accession to the English throne in 1603 brought renewed peace and another rash of tower house building; however, this time defence was secondary to spectacle epitomised by the lofty walls and corbelled turrets of Castles Fraser, Craigievar and Crathes.

leonard squirrell (1893–1979) edinburgh from calton hill

etching and aquatint / 235 x 355 mm Stuart Southall collection / © estate of the artist All Rights Reserved, DACS 2017 As a seat of royal power in Scotland, Edinburgh Castle had an eventful history and holds the record for the greatest number of sieges of any site in Britain. `e naturally defensible Castle Rock had been inhabited for centuries by the time the first documented castle was built by King David i in the twelfth century. With the exception of St Margaret’s Chapel this early castle was destroyed in 1314 by Robert Bruce to keep it out of English hands. David ii began rebuilding in 1357 and elements of his tower survive beneath the Half Moon Battery. David’s Tower was witness to one of the castle’s grimmer episodes, the ‘Black Dinner’, which saw the summary execution of the sixteen-year-old Earl of Douglas and his younger brother. `e tower was a casualty of an English artillery bombardment in 1573, the last chapter of the ‘Lang Siege’ when the castle was held for Mary Queen of Scots.

Leonard Squirrell shows the castle’s commanding position, rising over the city on the remains of an extinct volcano. Squirrell was a great admirer of John Sell Cotman and his watercolour style was an evolution of his hero’s propensity for flat blocks of colour and a restricted palette. `is was a technique that was easily transposed to the tonal variations of aquatint.

kenneth steel (1906–70) edinburgh castle from the vennell

1937 / line engraving and drypoint 363 x 258 mm Stuart Southall collection

Today almost nothing remains of Edinburgh’s medieval castle, its current appearance reflecting the priorities of later centuries. `is is neatly illustrated by Kenneth Steel’s view from the south. on the far left are barracks built in the eighteenth century when the castle was home to a British army garrison and used as a prison. In the centre is the great hall and royal palace, first built for David ii but completely redeveloped by James iv and James vi. on the right is the curving wall of the Half Moon Battery built in the late sixteenth century when artillery defences had become all important.

`e contrast between the deep shadows of the foreground, rendered in dense hatching and drypoint, and the delicate lines of the castle gives a real sense of depth to Steel’s print, even so it is the castle that dominates the scene. When engraving, Steel would work from dark to light, from the foreground backward, carefully controlling tone to allow fine detail without unbalancing the composition.

henry rushbury (1889–1968) stirling castle

1945 / drypoint / 200 x 298 mm Stuart Southall collection / © estate of the artist Stirling was an obvious place for a fortification, its rocky outcrop situated in the centre of the kingdom where it controlled a major route from the lowlands to the highlands. A castle certainly existed there by the early twelfth century and it was to become an important royal residence and stronghold. During the Scottish Wars of Independence Stirling changed hands on an almost annual basis: the English occupied it in 1296 only to lose it the following year to William Wallace after the disastrous Battle of Stirling Bridge. `e invaders occupied and strengthened the castle in 1298 but it soon fell to a Scottish siege.

In 1304 Edward i himself commanded the English forces as Stirling was battered for twelve weeks by the latest in siege weapon technolon. It seems that the sight of the newly built ‘Warwolf’, Edward’s giant trebuchet, finally persuaded the garrison to surrender; however Edward was not going to miss out on using his new toy and sent them back inside while he loosed of a few more devastating shots. Henry Rushbury enjoyed the dramatic spectacle of buildings appearing as extensions of the living rock and here he shows how Stirling, placed above sheer clifs, must have appeared virtually impregnable.

the gargoyles, stirling castle

1898 / etching / 292 x 175 mm Stuart Southall collection

As at Edinburgh, Stirling’s role and architecture changed with the times. Under a succession of Stewart monarchs it was reinvented as a sophisticated royal palace. James iv built a new gatehouse or forework, primarily for show rather than as an adequate defence against artillery attack. He added a new great hall and residential apartments known as the King’s old Building. His son James v grew up at the castle and was responsible for the Royal Palace begun in the 1530s and inspired by the architecture and ornamentation of Renaissance France and Germany. When James vi became king of England Stirling’s importance as a royal residence declined and it was primarily used as a military garrison and prison. It was briefly occupied by Jacobite rebels in 1746.

Cameron’s etching focuses on the carvings of the Palace’s south face. `e wall alternates between projecting windows and recessed sections housing carved figures raised on fluted columns. `e carvings include human figures, angels, devils and various grotesques. Cameron made four etchings of Stirling Castle during the 1890s by which time he was established as one of the most successful and sought-after artists of the etching revival. From the early 1900s the Scottish landscape became his main subject, often depicted in drypoint with dramatic contrasts of light and darkness.

leonard squirrell (1893–1979) the dovecote, dirleton castle

1959 / watercolour / 208 x 327 mm Stuart Southall collection / © Estate of Leonard R Squirrell rws re All Rights Reserved, DACS 2017 `e first castle at Dirleton was begun in the 1220s by John de vaux. In 1239 he was made steward of King Alexander iii’s new wife Marie de Coucy whose father had built Château de Coucy in Picardy and this was to be the inspiration for a magnificent new construction. of this castle only the keep survives, consisting of a large round tower and a smaller one to the west connected by square tower. In 1298 the castle fell to the English after several months of siege. It was lost and then retaken in 1306 before the Scots captured and slighted it. During the fifteenth century the towers were heightened, outworks added and a new hall and tower house built. In the Civil War the castle was besieged by English Parliamentarian forces and slighted once again.

In the seventeenth century John Nisbet bought the Dirleton estate and built a new house nearby, the castle became a feature in their newly landscaped gardens. Leonard Squirrell’s view shows the sixteenth century beehive-shaped dovecote, which is over seven metres tall and could accommodate a thousand birds. Beyond is the end wall of the east range, built in the fifteenth century to house cellars and the lord’s hall and bedchamber.

Fiona mcIntyre b.1963 castle tioram

2012 / charcoal / 560 x 760 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Castle Tioram is a remote and romantically beautiful ruin that stands on a rocky tidal island Eilean Tioram where the waters of Loch Moidart and the river Shiel meet. `e contrast of ruined building against dark brooding sky and water inspired me to make a charcoal drawing that could express this emotional intensity. `e castle stands as a monument to a dark and violent history when once it was a centre of power to the medieval Lordship of the Isles, and later of the MacDonalds of Clanranald. It was built as a medieval fortification on natural rock without foundations and constructed mainly of local moine schist with smaller stones embedded in lime mortar. `e curtain wall with the arched barrel-vaulted entrance is typical of others built along the west coast in the thirteenth century. In 1715 the castle was burnt down on the orders of the last chief of the direct line of MacDonalds as he set of to join the doomed Jacobite rising.

Fiona McIntyre

leonard squirrell (1893–1979) urquhart castle, loch ness

drypoint / 245 x 300 mm Stuart Southall collection / © Estate of Leonard R Squirrell rws re All Rights Reserved, DACS 2017 Urquhart’s position by the shores of Loch Ness makes for one of the most romantic, or perhaps sinister, locations in Britain. `e first castle at Urquhart was probably built in the early thirteenth century based around a motte and shell keep. It changed hands several times during the Wars of Independence. Afterwards it was owned by the Scottish crown but the area was subject to almost continual raiding by the MacDonald Lords of the Isles. In 1509 it was given to John Grant on the condition that he repaired and improved the castle. `is did not deter the MacDonalds whose eforts culminated in the ‘Great Raid’ of 1545 when they captured the castle and made of with its furniture, guns and gates. Urquhart saw action at the end of the seventeenth century when it was attacked by Jacobite rebels. `e garrison prevailed but blew up the gatehouse to prevent the castle being used again.

Squirrell’s view shows the nether bailey with the gatehouse on the left, the hall on the right and the Grant Tower in the centre. As well as defending the castle from attack Grant was also expected to use it as a bastion of law and order. Trials would have been heard in the great hall and prisoners held in grim conditions in the gatehouse.

norman Ackroyd b.1938 mcneil’s castle

2016 / etching / 173 x 295 mm artist’s collection / © the artist Ancient castles are invariably built on strategic, defensible and usually prominent positions in the landscape. McNeil’s Castle, home of the McNeil clan, in the South Hebrides occupies an island in the middle of the important safe harbour of Castlebay in Barra.

Norman Ackroyd

James mcIntosh patrick (1907–98) dudhope castle

1933 / etching / 107 x 207 mm Stuart Southall collection Dudhope Castle in Dundee was first built in the thirteenth century, a fairly typical Scottish tower house. It was rebuilt around 1460 before a major redevelopment created the current L-shaped plan and round towers. `e castle was granted by the crown as the residence of the Constable of Dundee. In some ways Dudhope exemplifies the problem of what to do with a castle or stately home when its purpose is no longer relevant and the money runs out. In the 1790s an attempt was made to convert it into a woollen mill but instead it was turned into a barracks, a use it was returned to in both world wars. In the 1950s it was threatened with demolition but was re-developed for use as o2ces by the Dundee City Council and is now leased to Abertay University.

James McIntosh Patrick was something of a prodin, beginning to etch at the age of fourteen. He enrolled at Glasgow College of art in 1924 and two years later his etchings of Provence established him as a major new talent. Sadly the etching phenomenon went from boom to bust shortly afterwards and Patrick began teaching at Dundee College of Art. He made his name as a painter of panoramic Scottish landscapes, creating highly detailed and atmospheric scenes, often collated from diferent elements seen while sketching. His etching of Dudhope shows the castle on a wintry day with rain threatening. However the mood is bright with visitors taking the air in the gardens that by this time had been acquired by the council and opened as a public park.