Old Yorkshire (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TICKHILL, rOAMP AND CASTLE. Tickhill Castle is an excellent example of a pre-Norman or English earthwork, composed of mound, fosse, and lower ward, converted into a Norman castle. It exemplifies exactly the manner in which the Norman engineers treated earthworks of this description, and how such works gave rise to one of the two great types of a Norman castle, that with the shell-keep. Tickhill is Laughton on a larger scale, the only difference being that the ditch of the mound is not carried wholly round it, but is wanting towards the attached area. Either it was never formed, or, what is not improbable, was filled up when the Norman works were constructed, or, as at Cardiff, at a much later period. Something analogous to this seems to have taken place at Kenilworth. In the original construction of this fortress advantage was taken of a knoll of soft sandstone rock to form the base of the mound. This was scarped, the ditch dug, and the material employed in forming the upper two-thirds of the mound. A modern cave in the side shows this natural base. The castle is composed of the mound, and a court or ward appended to its western side, the whole included within a ditch. The mound is conical, about 60 ft. diameter at its table top, and about 60 ft. high, above the ward. The ward is a rounded and more or less circular area, save where it touches the mound, and includes about one- quarter of its circumference. The exterior ditch follows the figure of this ward, and of the uncovered three-quarters of the mound: hence in plan it resembles somewhat a figure of 8, and it is this notch in the out line that makes it probable that the mound ditch was once complete, and the two parts of the fortress were, as at Barwick, distinct. The domestic buildings stood in the lower ward, on i...