Military Architecture

As a special treat on my eighth birthday my parents took me with my sisters to Pickering Castle in Yorkshire. I was familiar with Clifford's Tower and the walls of York - including the Roman walls - and had seen other castles in Yorkshire, but Pickering had always been a ruin we passed on the way to the Yorkshire coast. Years later I was inspired by my class-mate Mark Headley to read more about castles and this led to me hauling my sister and a school friend around the Welsh castles in 1965. That same year we had holidayed on the Black Isle in Scotland and I had been puzzled by what looked like dock walls on the other shore of the Moray Firth, but could not understand why they remained well above sea level at high tide. What I was looking at was Fort George, one of the finest artillery forts of the mid-18th century, but it was not until I had worked with Andrew Saunders on his excavations at Launceston Castle a few years later that I discovered how much military architecture had been affected by the development of gunpowder weapons, nor how basic the walls of York were in contrast to those built by Renaissance architects and those who came after them. Although I have worked on excavations at Roman fortified sites and at Scarborough and Berkhamsted Castles, so far I have only ever really been a sight-seer, albeit one with certain goals and targets. The photographs included here give a flavour to some of the many fortifications that I have visited over the past six decades or so.