The World's Most Mysterious Castles

2005

Introduction

Since the first troglodyte had the idea of rolling a boulder defensively across the mouth of his cave or piling up earth to give him the advantage of high ground when attacked, human beings have built castles and fortifications of every description.

As these structures developed with the passing centuries, gloomy dungeons and subterranean torture chambers were added. Secret passages provided escape routes in emergencies or a means by which a small party of determined defenders could sneak out silently and get into the besieger’s camp to wreak havoc under cover of darkness.

Many of these ancient castles and fortresses are filled with mystery. Ghosts and spectres are reported by numerous sensible and reliable witnesses. Others, like the castles of Vlad the Impaler and the Frankenstein fortress, have left their toll of horror. In some, like Glamis in Scotland, there are legends of monsters incarcerated in secret rooms and subterranean chambers.

The heroes of the Alamo fortress in San Antonio, Texas, are said to haunt a neighbouring bookshop built over the site where their bodies were cremated. Castle Chinon in France is closely associated with the mysteries of Joan of Arc, the strange voices that guided and inspired her, and the riddle of her reappearance at Metz — five years after her supposed death in the flames at Rouen.

The elusive Camelot of King Arthur and his knights might well have been Tintagel in Cornwall, England, and the symbolic stories told of his heroes could have been an ingenious code created by the Knights Templar.

Each castle that we have visited, researched, and photographed has had its share of history and mystery, heroism and horror to impart.

But what has intrigued us most is the way in which the typical castle seems to be a projection of what goes on inside the human mind. No matter how fortunate a person is, no matter how many mental and physical advantages she, or he, might have, life is a battle — and as John Bunyan would readily have agreed after writing The Holy War, the defence of the castle in the mind is our first priority.

Chapter 1

An Outline History of Fortifications from Stone Age Earthworks to Bombproof Bunkers

The first Neanderthal humanoids may have dated from two hundred thousand years ago — perhaps more. They had powerful bodies, heavy jaws, and prominent eyebrow ridges. Traces of them have been found all over Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. They made and used tools and had also mastered fire. They almost certainly had more intelligence than we tend to think they had. When your technology is as primitive as theirs, you have to make up for it with extra ingenuity and versatility. Their social norms and mores included making and wearing clothes, caring for the sick and injured, and cooking some items of their food. Their religious beliefs incorporated an afterlife where tools and weapons would be needed: they buried their dead with equipment that they thought would be useful in the hereafter.

As distinct from the primitive-looking Neanderthals, the Cro-Magnon people looked remarkably like modern human beings. They first appeared some forty thousand years ago and died out roughly twelve thousand years ago. They had high foreheads and eyebrow ridges and jaws like ours. They seem to have been mainly cave dwellers from Spain and southern France. Their technology was ahead of that of their Neanderthal contemporaries, and they made better and more extensive use of the animals they hunted and killed. Skins became clothes; antlers were transformed into hooks, needles, and handles for tools. Cro-Magnons became farmers and stockbreeders. They also drew and painted, probably for religious or magical, rather than aesthetic, reasons, and had also developed the ability to weave and build.

Archaeologists and anthropologists tend to categorize the Cro-Magnons as early versions of Homo sapiens sapiens — our own subspecies. They were a little bigger and stronger than most modern human beings, and their brains were about 5 percent larger. Their capacity for abstract thought and rudimentary mathematics seems to have enabled them to produce one of the earliest calendars about thirty-five thousand years ago.

Other very early species of humanity included such groups as Homo erectus, those who were able to walk upright, and Homo habilis, those who were able to make simple stone tools and implements. One group after another appeared and then gradually faded out again, leaving behind the mystery of where they had gone and why.

One possible solution turned up in 1998 in a Portuguese cave dwelling in the Lapedo Valley, less than 160 kilometres north of Lisbon. The twenty-five-thousand-year-old remains of a four-year-old boy were discovered there and analyzed: it transpired that he was almost certainly a Neanderthal–Cro-Magnon hybrid. If interbreeding between the different humanoid groups had led to new and more effectively survival-oriented offspring, then perhaps it was superior fertility on the part of the Cro-Magnons, rather than inferior fighting skills on the part of the Neanderthals, that removed the Neanderthals as a separate species.

Nevertheless, the remains of ancient hill-fortresses, defensive ramparts, and earthworks provide clear evidence of the hostile and aggressive relationships that existed between rival species, subspecies, groups, and clans.

Hostile relationships with their neighbours and rivals must have prompted these first humanoids to build the earliest known fortifications. It would have occurred to these primordial military strategists — probably from their knowledge of hunting — that high ground was a decided advantage. An attacker moved more slowly when trying to climb a steep slope. A boulder or spear did a lot more damage when it was hurtling downwards. The higher the hill, the greater advantage the defenders had at the summit.

There are many of these early fortifications in Canada and the United States. The excavations at Port au Choix, for example, suggest that the earliest inhabitants of that part of Canada were concerned with defence mounds and burial mounds as well as other mounds with some type of religious significance.

The Maritime Archaic Indians were apparently the earliest visitors to Port au Choix, arriving about eight thousand years ago. They were referred to as Archaic because they were hunter-gatherers rather than farmers, and Maritime because they derived almost all they needed from the sea. Their predecessors were known to archaeologists as Paleoindians and were in the region as much as ten thousand years ago. Found in Labrador and as far south as Maine, they were a highly intelligent and resourceful people, with a degree of craftsmanship that also applied itself to their weaponry. Their fatally sharp, polished slate spearheads and bayonets were works of military art. Warriors who created weapons like that were also capable of creating defensive positions and secure sanctuaries. They also used their daring maritime skills as a defence against land-based enemies. Perhaps for the Maritime Archaic Indians, the ice-cold seas were their ultimate ramparts.

The mysterious ancient fortresses and castles from Central and South America pose a controversial question: were they the centre from which primeval knowledge and culture spread both east and west? Theories abound to the effect that such early cultures first moved eastwards across the Pacific and were enjoyed by the peoples of Central America, who, in turn, sent their ideas both northwards and westwards again to Britain and Europe. Contradictory theories talk of an early culture that spread westwards from Europe.

The old chicken-and-egg argument remains unresolved. Who came first? One clear fact emerges: the earliest Central Americans followed the watercourses. Mounds that may have been defensive as well as religious have been found along the trail of such watercourses containing the burnt remains of animal and human skeletons. Some human corpses had been interred inside stone sarcophagi. These wise and skilful ancient peoples knew how to make cement involving ground-up seashells — ideally strong for defensive structures. They also made very effective stone axes, knives, spearheads, and tools.

Another group of very early American and Canadian peoples are referred to by archaeologists as Mound Builders. These peoples left their traces all along the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio. It was characteristic of them never to move far from the great rivers and lakes.

What some archaeologists refer to as a chain of prehistoric forts can be found running from New York to the Wabash River. Another line connects Madison County with central Ohio. Yet more of them connect Tennessee with Kentucky. Were these ancient but able inhabitants trying to defend their river valleys against dangerous invaders? If so, who were these invaders and where had they come from?

The wider question of who took the concept of hill-forts and defensive earthworks not only along natural watercourses in the Americas but from one point of the globe to its antipodes remains a controversial one that involves theories ranging from Atlantis and Lemuria, through starting points in the Middle East, the Far East, the Pacific Islands, Europe, and Scandinavia. The Maori people of New Zealand built hill-fortresses known in their language as pa. They frequently took advantage of extinct volcanoes as sites for these high-level defences. Archaeological evidence abounds that Sweden alone had well over one thousand early fortifications of this type, many dating from the Iron Age — some probably much earlier.

Britain and Ireland have an abundance of hill-forts and other early defence works. Silbury Hill, near Avebury, Wiltshire, England, is one of the most impressive of these. It is generally accepted by archaeologists that Silbury Hill is the largest human-constructed mound in the whole of Europe. Supposing that one thousand workers could have accessed the site simultaneously, it would have taken them eight years to raise Silbury Hill. There are three distinct stages in the huge structure: the innermost hill is about six metres high and covered with broken chalk, the outermost structure rises to a height of forty metres, and its base covers almost six acres. Theories of its real purpose range from a tomb (although no evidence of either a burial chamber or a corpse has ever been found inside it) to a religious site, from a vast sundial or shadow calendar to a hill-fortress. It remains an enigma.

Silbury Hill near Avebury.

Not far from Silbury Hill lie the Avebury Rings. These huge stone circles have much in common with the world-famous Stone Henge, and, as with Silbury Hill, their purpose remains a mystery.

There are theories of intersecting ley lines below the henges. There are ideas about ground zodiacs. Henges may have been religious venues — or they may have been defence works. It has often been surmised that the huge monoliths were raised along sloping banks of earth, which were then removed, but what if they weren’t? The vast henge stones reinforcing their earthen ramps would have provided formidable defences.

Dorset has an awe-inspiring hill-fort known as Maiden Castle, near the village of Winterborne Monkton. It covered over forty acres, and in its heyday the outer ramparts were nearly three kilometres long. The oldest part of the fortifications dates back at least five thousand years, and some twenty-five hundred years ago, during the late Neolithic era, it was extended and developed considerably. Double and triple ramparts and complex defensive entrances were added later. It was no match for the Romans, however, and under Vespasian they conquered it in AD 43. Among the exhibits in Dorchester Museum is the spine of one of the unfortunate Maiden Castle defenders — with a Roman arrowhead still lodged in it.

France is famous for Mont Beuvray and the excavated Gallic city of Bibracte. Beuvray is roughly fifteen kilometres southwest of Autun, about three thousand metres above sea level, and six hundred metres higher than Autun itself. The ancient city of Bibracte was famous for its ironworks, which brought the Phoenician traders there along with Greeks and Romans. There are traditions in the area to the effect that the Phoenicians brought house-building skills as well as trade. Prosperity is a great temptation to rival groups: Bibracte and Beuvray had to defend themselves.

Another very old French hill fortification exists at Mont Sainte-Odile near Altitona in Alsace. This has legendary connections with the mysteries of the zodiac and is said to represent the water vessel that Aquarius carries. It is argued by some researchers that the name Sainte-Odile may be a corruption of the Arabian Al-Dalw, meaning Aquarius.

Perhaps the most famous of all the ancient French hill-fortresses is Mont Alesia, not far from what is now the pleasant and peaceful town of Alise-Sainte-Reine, within fifty kilometres of Dijon. Over two thousand years ago the great hero Vercingetorix, an Avernian chieftain, fought there against Julius Caesar. The Roman Emperor described the fortress of Mont Alesia in his Gallic Wars, VII, 69: Alesia is impregnable except by blockade. It commands a high position at the top of a hill below which rivers flow both north and south.

The indomitable Roman leader was right: although outnumbered six to one, the Romans achieved a historic victory over Vercingetorix’s fearless attackers. The strategic advantages of the hill-fortress were put to the test at Alesia — and they passed with flying colours.

The Saxons were noted for their sturdy round towers — a thousand years before the almost impregnable Martello towers took advantage of the same principle. Harry Orford Mansfield, the great Norfolk teacher, writer, and historian, who was a close friend of the authors’ in the 1960s, commented sagely: The round towers of Norfolk and Suffolk are, in the majority of cases, to be found close to rivers which, in late Saxon times, were navigable for moderately flat-bottomed boats. It is therefore reasonable to assume that their primary purpose was for defence.

As with most human activities, progress in castle and fortification design was accelerated by experience and observation: over the centuries, people learnt from their mistakes. Gateways could be stormed by superior numbers with better weaponry or fiercer motivation. Walls could be scaled — especially earthen ramparts. High ground gave positive advantages but not necessarily decisive advantages. A large enough force could eventually bring down a garrison by blockades and starvation. The next significant advance in constructing fortifications was the motte-and-bailey castle associated with eleventh-century European warfare, and especially with Normans like William the Conqueror.

The Norsemen — strong and adventurous enough to fight their way across the Atlantic to Canada’s eastern seaboard centuries before Columbus — had made a habit of sailing south to invade France, and French kings and nobles had responded by building castles, known as castellums. The common denominators of these simple, early, defensible places were a mound (the motte) with a fortification on top of it and a fenced-in area (the bailey) that offered some degree of safety. Over the years, Norsemen settled in France and eventually became the Normans. When Duke William of Normandy led his men to England in 1066 and overcame the Anglo-Saxons under King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, William was already a very effective and experienced soldier with shrewd ideas about what optimized the safety of a castle. There was a large territory to be subdued and ruled, and William’s Norman lieutenants needed to erect castles as quickly as they could. The motte-and-bailey design was their answer.

In the eleventh century, people, oxen, and horses provided the power that got things done. With no steam power, diesel engines, or electricity, it was oxen, horses, and human hands that created the mottes — some of which were composed of an estimated twenty thousand tonnes of earth.

For the first two or three years after his success at Hastings, William did everything he could think of to subdue his newly conquered land by tact and diplomacy. He even allowed the Saxon nobles to retain their estates — but this softly-softly approach met with a deluge of rebellions and uprisings. William’s response to these insurrections was to ride to the site of the trouble and subdue it by force of arms. He then gave the lands concerned to one of his own Norman aristocrats and insisted that a castle be built there to quell the restless local Anglo-Saxons.

When William’s castle at York was sacked and burned by Saxon rebels from the north, he responded ruthlessly, and Norman overlordship was reinforced by his policy of devastating the north of England as a grim example to any other potential rebels. When William’s loyal and effective ally, Roger of Montgomery, was made Earl of Shropshire, he had to erect seventy or more motte-and-bailey castles along the dangerous border territory that he governed for William. Historians have estimated that during William’s reign as many as six hundred motte-and-bailey castles were erected in England. Once their work of subduing the English had been more or less accomplished — and one great asset of the motte-and-bailey design was that given enough forced labour from the subject peoples the structure could be put up very quickly — the Normans began building the sturdy stone castles that form such an integral part of medieval military culture.

Motte-and-bailey castles were frequently wooden buildings. The bailey was particularly vulnerable, and once it was taken or breached there was little to prevent the attackers from reaching the motte. Wooden buildings were, of course, highly susceptible to fire. Castle walls — whether of wood or stone — could easily be undermined. Stone walls were an improvement, and they were very fire-resistant compared to wooden walls, but they could still be undermined, and the weight of the stone made collapse resulting from undermining even more of a hazard. A big enough battering ram, wielded with enough muscle and determination, could also bring stone walls crashing down.

Castle builders, military architects, and designers worked on these problems. As new forms of attack were devised, so new forms of defence were developed to neutralize them. Moats and water defences made undermining and battering ram attacks extremely difficult if not totally impossible. One of the most significant developments was the concentric castle, like the magnificent Beaumaris Castle in Anglesey, Wales, U.K. It was the last of the castles that King Edward I raised in Wales, and it was also the biggest. Its Anglesey site was not influenced or restricted by any previous structure, and this gave its architect, Master James of St. George, freedom to exercise his genius to the full.

Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey, Wales, U.K., was the brilliant work of Master James of St. George.

The concentric structure of Beaumaris made the interior deadly for invaders. This tower commanded the inner courtyard.

James seems to have been the genius behind at least a dozen of the Welsh castles that Edward either built or reconstructed and improved during the closing decades of the thirteenth century. Concentricity was the hallmark of James’s plans and designs. His characteristic walls-within-walls structures meant that the defenders could unleash lethal storms of arrows, spears, stones, and boiling oil on any attackers who were foolhardy enough to pass the outer curtain walls and make an attempt on the inner strongholds.

But James was by no means a solitary genius: more accurately, he was the leader and inspirer of teams of highly skilled artificers. There was Giles of St. George, who appeared in some ancient records as Gilet and was known to have worked on Harlech Castle in 1286. In the same year, there are records of Albert de Menz working there. He seems to have been a chimney specialist — perhaps a thirteenth-century version of a modern steeplejack. Another of the experts who served at the same time as James was Bertram, a veteran military engineer from Gascony (or Gascogne). His birthplace was associated with the proudly independent Basque people from earliest times. It was under Roman influence from 27 BC until 418, and then Visigoths and Franks exercised as much control over it as they could until the establishment of the Carolingian Empire in 719. The last Carolingian Duke of Gascony was Arnold, who was replaced by King Sancho I in 872 when Gascony became a kingdom for the next two centuries. The tides of war that flowed over Gascony for so many years carried within them a culture of courage and military experience. Bertram was an inventor, designer, and builder of siege engines, and his practical knowledge of attack and defence must have contributed significantly to the work done on the efficient Welsh castles in the closing decades of the thirteenth century.

Just as the records show that there were chimney specialists like Albert de Menz, so there were craftsmen who were expert well-diggers, such as Manasser, who came from Vaucouleurs in the Champagne district of France. Albert was on James’s payroll from time to time and seems to have been responsible for carrying out about twenty metres of work at Hope Castle before undertaking his later responsibilities at Caernarfon. Philip the Carpenter was another senior craftsman in the Welsh building team, and like many of the others he had acquired his skills doing similar work for the Counts of Savoy. To understand the intricacies and complexities of castle-building during its thirteenth-century heyday is to understand the division of labour and closely guarded trade secrets of the diverse experts who put the great military edifices together.

Castles possessed beauty and decoration as well as strength and military ingenuity. Stephen the Painter was another of James’s team, and this same Stephen had also been responsible for the artwork in Westminster Hall for Edward I’s coronation and for equally exquisite designs in Count Philip of Savoy’s castle at St-Laurent-du-Pont.

When the great days of gigantic castles like Beaumaris had faded, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the compromise designs of the crenellated manor houses. The addition of battlements or other fortifications to a manor house required a royal licence. The Duke of Buckingham, Edward Stafford, began building the fortified manor known as Thornbury Castle during the early part of the sixteenth century — without royal permission. As many other prominent politicians in the sixteenth century discovered to their cost, it was never advisable to annoy Henry VIII. Buckingham was a descendant of Edward III and as such might have been seen as a rival claimant for the throne. Stafford did himself no good by promoting the cause of a group of aristocrats who were out of office and by getting on the wrong side of Henry’s confidant and influential counsellor, Cardinal Wolsey. Strange charges of treason were levelled against Buckingham — including listening to weird prophecies of Henry’s death and his own succession. He was also accused of trying to fulfil them by assassinating Henry, who took a personal interest in the case and interrogated witnesses himself. Not surprisingly, Buckingham was found guilty and duly executed on May 17, 1521. The fortifications at Thornbury were never completed: Henry took it over as a palace instead.

As gunpowder, cannon, and grenades became increasingly widespread and effective, so castles that had once withstood siege engines and battering rams diminished in importance. The Martello tower, however, was a very effective descendant of the traditional medieval castle that proved itself time and again. The idea reached British military strategists after two heavily gunned, state-of-the-art British warships (HMS Fortitude and HMS Juno) failed to overcome the defenders of a tower at Mortella Point in Corsica in 1794.

The basic principle of the Martello tower was that its rounded shape would tend to deflect cannon shot rather than take the worst of the impact full on. The walls were also very thick and strong so that it could withstand bombardment. It was a squat, two-storey building with a piece of heavy artillery on its flat, reinforced roof, designed to fire in any direction around the full 360-degree range. Some Martello towers had the additional protection of a moat.

With a slight change of name from the original Corsican location of Mortella — a change that was almost certainly accidental rather than deliberate — the British Martello towers were based on this very successful Corsican pattern. For the first decade of the nineteenth century, the British built Martello towers all around their southeast coasts and defended Ireland and Guernsey in the same way. Before the end of the Napoleonic Wars, England alone had over one hundred of them. The success of this rapid building program was largely due to the skilful planning of General Twiss and the energy of his trusty assistant Captain Ford: they were the early nineteenth-century equivalents of Master James of St. George and Albert de Menz.

To be seen to be well-prepared is an essential ingredient of an effective defence, and it was perhaps for this reason that the British Martello towers were never put to the test against a full-scale Napoleonic invasion. After the threat of such an attack had safely passed, the Martello towers met very different fates: some were demolished so that their stone