I recently took time out for a quick weekend away in South Wales. The itinerary involved, as is only right, castles[1]. I was struck by the geometric shapes of the keeps - particularly one with a circular cross-section at Tretower castle, and a larger one with a hexagonal base that forms part of Raglan castle.
|
The Circular Keep at Tretower
© 2025 by
T. Briggs is
licensed under
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0   
|
The decision as to what shape a castle's keep should be would have been made according to a number of considerations at the time, some aesthetic and some functional, but either way many of the reasons relate directly to the geometric properties of those shapes, and the way those properties impose themselves on real-world objects.
|
|
Raglan's Hexagonal Keep
© 2025 by
T. Briggs is
licensed under
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
|
What is it about circles that made this a good shape for Tretower's keep? What were Raglan's designers exploiting in terms of the properties of hexagons that made them choose this shape instead? Even if a possible answer is "they just thought they looked nice", this still begs the question "yes, but why do these shapes look nice?"
Modern architecture is subject to such questions too, but one of the reasons I love castles is that their ancient architecture is free of a lot of the bells and whistles that go into designing twenty-first century buildings, so it's easier to focus on individual shapes and consider why that one in particular?
Footnotes
- And other things: I'm not obsessed. But to be in South Wales and not find out which castles are nearby - because there almost certainly will be at least one within half an hour or so's drive - seems like a wasted opportunity, and possibly actively rude. [back]
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi, thanks for commenting. If you feel passionately about anything I've posted, please feel free to make your views known but please take the time to make sure that your comments are rational, considered and suitable for any audience.
Thanks for reading!