Canterbury – Castle Studies Trust Blog

Kicking Off ‘Visualising Canterbury Castle’

Canterbury Christ Church University was thrilled to receive funding from the Castle Studies Trust for a nine-month project that will produce a new digital reconstruction of Canterbury Castle’s Norman keep in the first century of its construction. The project’s ambition is to then use this new digital asset to create a pop-up exhibition and develop a curriculum resource for schools.

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**Screenshot of initial ‘whitebox’ of Canterbury Castle’s Norman keep and surrounding structures (courtesy of Mike Farrant)**

Canterbury Castle is one of 104 national examples of a tower keep castles (Scheduled Monument Number 1005194 (lin k)), and one of 20 Norman Castles built in Kent. It is part of a series of royal castles on the route from Dover to London and identified as being one of the earlier examples of the period, usually dated to between 1085-1125, with archaeological evidence suggesting a date c.1100-1125. It has been comparatively overlooked in the research of royal castles of the area, and the role that the castle has played in shaping the city has been overshadowed by other historic monuments, namely Canterbury Cathedral.

Screenshot of whitebox interior of Norman keep (courtesy of Mike Farrant)

The digital model is being made in Unreal Engine 5, a games engine that enables the development of detailed and immersive digital environments, and draws on existing excavation data. Using a games engine to create the reconstruction facilitates an enhanced user experience; people will be able to walk around the keep’s grounds, and up through the floors of the castle giving them an enhanced sense of place and scale. Additionally, environmental conditions can be included to simulate seasons, weather patterns and even the night time constellations that would have been visible on a given date in the 12^th century.

Visualising Canterbury Castle aims to interrogate the potential of multidisciplinary expertise in developing digital heritage projects. To support this, the project’s methodology includes an iterative design process where subject-specialists* will take part in a series of four co-design sessions.

The first co-design session was held on May 22^nd, and participants were able to explore a ‘whitebox’ version of the Norman keep and surroundings. ‘Whitebox’ refers to an early stage of a digital reconstruction where a structure’s overall form is created without surface textures, furnishings, or other fixtures. Participants explored the model using large touchscreens and were able to evaluate how the excavation information had been interpreted to date, provide feedback on the current user experience, and make suggestions for how the experience could be developed. The session demonstrated to both the project team and participants the benefits of simultaneously considering the historical data and the audience experience. As Dr Jeremy Ashbee, Head Properties Curator, English Heritage, explained:

I am very interested in how digital media combined with scholarship can be used to improve public access and comprehension of these sites, which even to people like me who have become obsessive about them for decades, still are beguilingly mysterious.

Screenshot demonstrating the development of the underlying user experience functionality including the camera rail system for climbing the staircases and the green travel nodes for touchscreen navigation. (Courtesy of Mike Farrant)

The next milestone for the project will be a public engagement event at this year’s Medieval Pageant and Trail (link) on July 5th where visitors of all ages will be able to explore the reconstruction on screens and provide feedback. Following that, the second co-design session will take place on July 16^th.

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The project team comprises Dr Katie McGown (Principal Investigator), Mike Farrant (Lead 3D artist), and co-investigators Dr Catriona Cooper, Prof Leonie Hicks, Sam Holdstock, and Prof Alan Meades whose combined expertise range from Norman History, Education, Digital Heritage, Exhibitions, to Games Design. To date, the project has recruited participants from organisations including English Heritage, Canterbury Museums, Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury Council and Canterbury Business Improvement District.

Castle Studies Trust Awards a Record Amount in Grants

The Castle Studies Trust is delighted to announce the award of five grants, totalling a record amount of £42,000, to a wide range of projects with different types of research. The amount means that since our foundation we will have given over £300,000 to castle research projects – a landmark to celebrate.

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The five projects we will be funding are:

Canterbury Castle Keep copyright geograph.co.uk

Canterbury, Kent: To create an interactive digital model of the castle’s keep. The keep is one of the largest surviving from early Norman England dating to the late eleventh / early twelfth century. Now much ruined and inaccessible to visitors due to instability, the project will use the findings of previous archaeological research to create an interactive model. Work will start in March and be completed within ten months.

Clavering Castle platform copyright Simon Coxall

Clavering, Essex: To fund an excavation to help understand the development of the site which was occupied for over 600 years and which could be one of the very few pre-conquest castles in the UK. The excavation will build on the extensive survey work carried out by the local group of the site. They are planning to do the excavations in June.

Crookston Castle copyright Friends of Crookston

Crookston, Glasgow: A community-led geophysical survey, using multiple techniques, through which the Friends of Crookston Castle in conjunction with HES hope to learn more about Glasgow’s only castle. While the standing remains are believed to date from the early fifteenth century, it is believed that the castle dates back to the twelfth century. The group hopes to discover evidence of that earlier history and whether it was based on an earlier Iron Age hillfort. They plan to do the survey in early August.

Knepp, West Sussex: An excavation building on a geophysical survey to better understand the site’s development and its relationship to the local area of this important baronial centre thought to be built by the de Braose family. The first documentary evidence is from 1210 when it was under royal control, documenting repairs, while the geophysical survey shows activity that pre-dates the extant stone tower. Excavations are planned for late July/ early August 2025.

Image of Transcript copyright Esther van Raamsdonk

Transcription and translation of C17 Dutch Engineer’s Survey of English castles and fortifications: A joint project between Dutch academic Dr Esther van Raamsdonk and English Heritage to transcribe and translate part of an early seventeenth-century manuscript of a Dutch surveyor’s examination of castles and forts in England. The sample covers five of the 22 castles and fortifications in the document, which is called SP 9/99, held by the National Archives in Kew. The sample will include Dover, Walmer and Deal. The document is filled with detailed drawings and maps of these fortifications with often lengthy descriptions of their condition. Esther has already started work on it.

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Fragile symbols: gunpowder and castle walls

Dr Peter Purton, FSA, Castle Studies Trust trustee and author of recent works on medieval sieges and medieval military engineers looks at his latest area of research, later medieval fortifications and the impact of the introduction of gunpowder.

Castle studies were once ruled (in England at least) by wealthy amateurs, mostly male (Ella Armitage a stand-out exception) and many with military backgrounds. Every aspect of a castle, for them, was determined by military thinking. The late twentieth century counter-attack turned this on its head, stressing the symbolic role of castle-building as expressions of status and power. Some people challenged any suggestion that changes were driven by the need to upgrade defensive capability; and the same argument has been applied when guns arrived on the scene.

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Those keen to argue the superiority of the English can always point to the first adoption (in Europe – the Chinese were centuries ahead) of gunpowder, and its first use for war. It’s also true that the English were the first to adapt fortifications to use guns, from the mid-fourteenth century, a little ahead of the Low Countries followed by the French, all places affected by the devastating impact of the struggles we bundle up in the title of the Hundred Years war (1337-1453).

Gun loop at the west gate of Canterbury, Kent

Were loops created for guns also symbolic? If you take account of the historical reality of the time, this argument surely evaporates in a puff of (gun)smoke. I’m working on a new history of changes in fortification in the age of gunpowder with Dr. Christof Krauskopf and we delivered a paper at the (virtual) Leeds IMC in July 2020 addressing this question. We can’t answer the question without knowing the context, and what the builder wanted. The first is usually evident, the second is irretrievable. Across southern England from the earliest days of the war there were frequent seaborne raids by the French and their allies that caused local devastation and serious embarrassment (and loss) to the English crown. People could not know when and where the next attack would come. The response was the preparation of defences designed to use guns (at the time, they were not powerful enough to harm stone walls) from East Anglia (the Cow Tower of Norwich, for example) to Devon (Hawley’s Fortalice at Dartmouth), usually adapting existing defences but often building anew. The royal ‘architect’ (an anachronistic shorthand) Henry Yevele was directly involved in the erection of the Westgate and the reconstruction of the city walls at Canterbury and at private castles in Kent (Cooling, for example). Southampton, having been burnt to the ground by the French, underwent extensive reconstruction of its defences, including (early in the fifteenth century) one of the first gun-towers (the God’s House tower).

Amidst all this very expensive work, in 1385, the castle at Bodiam (Sussex) was put up for Sir Edward Dallingridge, set in a lake and pierced with gun loops and now a picture-postcard National Trust attraction. It has been the centre of a battle lasting longer even than the hundred years war. Forty years ago, the late Charles Coulson famously demolished its military pretensions by pointing out its many flaws from a defensive viewpoint. Bodiam became the peaceful retirement home for a military veteran.

Sometimes you only see what you want to see. Actually, Dallingridge wasn’t retired: he was commissioned to review the defences of the coast, for the king, and was actually wounded in a French attack. His gun loops may not have worked very well and his lake could have been drained – but a French raiding party was unlikely to hang around long enough to find out. In the context, the most that can be said is: we don’t know what he intended.

England swiftly lost its leading position in the race to build fortifications adapted for and against artillery as it became significantly more powerful during the course of the next century, a time when the gap between what princes and their subjects could afford expanded greatly. But many nobles did make provision for guns, and kings still put comfort first (Edward III’s work at Windsor). Between the two extremes of fortresses with evident military purpose and castles designed as palatial homes, others tried to provide for both functions, with numerous examples across the continent.

Perhaps that was what the medieval castle had always been?

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