Studying the Kenilworth Castle

Studying the Kenilworth Castle

"The castle today is a ruin, it is therefore of very little use to any

historian studying castles."

After having visited Kenilworth castle and through my general readings

and investigative studies I do not agree with the hypothesis above and

I will attempt to argue against this statement. Although the castle is

a ruin there is a great deal of structural evidence which historians

find relevant in determining the usefulness of castles and how they

were used before they became a ruin. Therefore, throughout my project

I'm going to explain why I don't agree with this hypothesis.

In this section, I will be analysing the different buildings within

the castle explaining what is left of the building, what is missing

from the building and what the building was used for during the

medieval period.

The Keep at Kenilworth Castle was the main means of defence. It is

known as the Norman keep as it was the Normans who built it. The keep

contained three large floors with the top floor being a fighting

gallery, which is the area that has a lot of arrow slits. The top

floor was used as the fighting gallery as you could see for miles

around and you could spot your enemy early. The keep is large and

oblong in shape and is made out of stone. At Kenilworth you can still

see the basic structure of the building. All around the keep the

thickness of the walls is impressive this was another feature of its

impeccable defence. The keep rises from a plinth and slopes around the

back to a considerable height this was to make it difficult to attack.

When at the castle I realised that there were several things missing

...

... middle of paper ...

... if you was drawing a picture from birds eye view.

5. Guess work- Finally a certain amount of guess work goes into an

interpretation of a site. Ivan Lapper used trees and grass to fill

out his images to make them look more convincing, these fill out

the image and makes the image look less plain.

When concluding Ivan Lappers work I feel that it was extremely

reliable and his interpretation is probably true of the times. The

present castle in it's state would have been a great help to Ivan when

he was creating his images, ruins can give us a good indication of how

things were like in the past as you could get a feel of how a big a

room is, you can get an obvious view of the layout and where things

were and you could probably even make out how well built the buildings

were and what they were made out of.