Why is Caernarfon Castle's entrance like this? - Full Castle Showcase

And then

this

internal passage you can probably go around and get to many parts of the

castle

through here and it's like a hidden passage inside the

castle

. Greetings from the shadows. I'm Shad and I'm still living one of my all-time dreams by visiting real life. castles and I am in a very special one for me, Canavan. I've referenced and watched Canavan many times in the past because he's one of the greats, he's doing well, and he's got some really amazing things that we're going to explore. In person, Canavan is a great example of one of the subtypes of the three main castle styles, so the three main styles of castles are the closed castle, the linked castle, and the unwalled castle.

This is a subcategory of linked castle where the main fortified building is located or the keep is attached to the outer wall, but

this

goes even further, this is a tower linked castle where it has multiple towers that are large enough to to be individual towers. I have a dedicated video that talks about that, which is the size of all these towers. It's basically seven castles in one and those large towers are all connected by the outer wall that encloses an inner Bailey, making it the type of castle linked with towers and there are some other really amazing things about this castle that we're going to explore.

I'll already point out that you can see some outside, so we're getting right into the meat of this exploration of Canavan. There are many castles that actually have bare stone and Canavan is exactly one. From those examples, how do we know? I mentioned the Stone dress, but what you'll also see if you look closely, lines of different colored stone that split up and form a pattern on the outside, so if you look up, you'll see I see like a darker gray and then there's a brighter masonry line and then a darker gray than another line and all that was actually done intentionally as a kind of patent decoration on the outside, you wouldn't really see it if you plastered it and whitewashed it and of course when they were done these stones, although now worn, would have fit very well together to look immaculate, probably also very smooth on top and still look great today, they are pretty well worn all things considered. with how old it is but when it was made it was much smoother and would have looked amazing so you absolutely can have bare stone castle walls, that's not why you wash them or sconces them, they look amazing and by all means There would usually be reasons for this. couldn't afford it or they did it intentionally because the stone itself was the feature, so behind me is the Queen's Gate and this was one of the main

entrance

s to Canavan Castle.

There are two main doors, the Queen's door was specifically opened or given access. to the castle from the outside, which means that you don't need to go through the town, the city that it is attached to to enter the castle, which is where the other gate, the other gate, the king's gate, opens towards the town and this one that you can enter basically from the outside of all the fortifications. There are some really interesting things to note about this already, but before we get there I'll just mention that Canavan is also classified or is classified as a citadel, a citadel is concerned. to a castle that is attached to the wall of a city, essentially Citadel, it can also be translated as small city or small castle, something like mini castle, but that is the actual definition of that term, so canavan is yes a royal citadel because it is attached to the wall that surrounded the town or city, something else that I really love to see is do you see how high that

entrance

is from the ground?

You can see the walkway extending from there. We can also see what appears to be a Mur slot. The holes now, the farthest one, wouldn't really qualify as a slot mulation because it doesn't extend any further from the wall line, but rather the entrance sinks into the Gat house, so it's kind of a mulation that this it's a little. from a gray area I will admit it and leave, but once we get closer I will be able to see and confirm if there really is a defensive slot there, yes in fact it is a murder hole again because it does not extend further outside the line. of the wall yeah I would call this a murder hole if you can see the actual fact that it looks like there are three that's amazing so this is a very fortified tower so I'm trying to show you the size of this. so take a look at the size of the people below compared to this front door, this thing is a monster, so this wall originally ran along and was attached to the castle right here and now we are standing inside the walls of the old town or city and what's really interesting looking into the city are these larger windows that actually extend along most of this side of the castle.

I have seen these windows here at the king's gate, but I never realized that there were several windows along it. Most of this side now, of course, conforms to the standard Castillo type of design philosophy, the windows, the largest ones, which can be a defensive weakness, are much higher off the ground, so it is very difficult access them and technically they are oriented towards the Inside a Bailey it is simply not the Bailey castle, it is the closed and fortified city and here we are at the king's gate and it is simply beautiful, how can you imagine this when all these stones were not eroded and now they are completely smooth with those beautiful and beautiful.

Gothic windows above, where there is a statue right in the middle, a large arch in the door, this castle is absolutely beautiful and there is an interesting feature here: we see the battlements at the top and there are no blotches, although they do have a border. Well, where are they? sitting a little bit on the edge, not much at all, but they still added a division just for some sort of architectural flourishes, so I don't know if Canavan had a moat around it, I actually suspect not. but what it does have is what I guess you could call a half pit or mini pit, since the ground drops off quite steeply here, why do they do this well?

It is right in front of the main entrance door and therefore having it. a very deep slope here, uh, in the past, it would most likely have been some kind of drawbridge or, if not, a drawbridge just means that people wouldn't be able to have easier access to the front door and so on throughout. the other parts of the castle. I see very steep walls and therefore still very difficult to storm, but one of the important features of a good castle design is to have the entrance elevated off the ground. We saw this in front of the queen's tower, where the entrance is very very high and here. the entrance is closer to the ground where I am standing and therefore to make the entrance higher off the ground they dug up the ground in front of it and added a moat inside the main Bailey at this time and again look at this . towers along now, what's also interesting is that you can see that, I guess, there's some rough stone sticking out on some of the towers here, especially the Queen's Gate, which really shows that some structures are missing internal here, especially here, like this.

The wall definitely came out, it had an internal hallway that was built as part AP and probably came out all the way here creating an adjoining room, uh, there's still a lot left standing, but it's interesting, I mean, look, there's an Al Cove, right? there with a wind that's probably an Al Cove window actually not even a door uh so there's definitely a room structure attached to that wall there and not so much here because you can actually see the loops of arrows facing towards outside, so there were buildings there and Look, you can even see the corals from the next level here, so it's very likely that these internal rooms are quite comfortable and the most habitable sections, although there are also bedrooms in these towers, actually , uh, but what the Great Hall actually hugged one of these adjoining walls. here is an interesting feature.

I'm standing on one of the ALs that leads, as you can see, to a main Arrow Loop, but as we get closer, there are actually two additional slots or Arrow Loops attached to it, so you have the main shot here. but if you can't get a sharp enough angle, you have one that you can shoot over there and over here and it's just interesting because I always like to pay attention to head height on these things because you can see. Mind you, you could put an actual longbow inside this thing, although it depends on the type of longbow.

I have some that are pretty. I think you would end up hitting part of the ceiling, so you may have to do that. You actually have to lower it a little bit to make sure you don't hit it, even though there's a lot of room, it's just that if you raise it up too high you'd actually hit the top and another thing that I think you would, you wouldn't. I want to be too close I don't think you would shoot here I think you would be shooting closer to here and here to get the shooting angle uh in case you go back you know the arrows are coming through this opening these windows are also starting to be some of my Favorite parts, I guess the internal features of a castle look, there's a big window here that would let in a bunch of light, comfortable little seats to sit next to and, uh, just beautiful, so I'm standing on one. of the Tower walls and therefore canavan made up of multiple Towers, this is an actual internal corridor within one of the walls of those Towers, which shows how thick those Tower walls are to fit in one corridor complete and a staircase that is in the parts of the ramp now of Canavan Castle, looking towards the Bailey, we can see some of these beautiful turrets, let me see here, so see these smaller towers joining the larger ones, they are authentic Medieval turrets, mostly for surveillance purposes, but also with a larger firing angle if necessary.

Canavan is exceptional because it has so many of them and right now I'm standing in one of those castle turrets, not the ones we're looking at, it's actually one of the ones close to us, right above us and you can see through of them. There are four more turrets here on the other side and I tell you that being in one of them you really get an idea of ​​the greater field of vision they offer if we take a look over here looking through one of the battlements of this turret. the field of view that they offer, look how far you can see from up here and look at that view, what a beautiful view, so these turrets provide such a huge field of view, absolutely stunning.

Now, these turrets were not just for surveillance purposes, they were absolutely impressive. for defensive purposes, but they were high above the ground line below the arrow. The loops are so angled down and look, you can look, you can shoot right at the part of the ram below us and then, and if you were standing still. Next to these is a very steep angle here, you can shoot straight down the street through these high arrow loops on these turrets, so that's the turret we were standing on and right now I'm on top of the tower adjoining and It is very interesting and cleverly designed, so the staircase that takes you through this Tower is the same staircase that is directly in line and goes up to the turret, so there are no breaks, just straight up to the turrets and above this.

Tower here, a great looking tower, you have Arrow Loops on the battlements that overlook the Field of Fire towards Bailey and of course in front of the city and from this vantage point we can see something interesting in the city and look across the canal here , which is the ancient city wall and this was the ancient city that Canavan was attached to to be their Citadel, so this is really cool, something I wasn't really aware of is that on a lot of the outer walls of the Canavan Castle has internal corridors that run around the interior and lead to Arrow Loops that face inwards, as well as very large defensive Arrow Loops that face outwards, so this allows Canavan to have multiple Arrow Loop defenses, Not only do you know where people would defend and shoot from the crenellated battlement, but so do you. it has a complete defensive type interior that leads to more areas where you can defend the castle from layers of defense even within this type of internal stone corridor that is within the external walls of Canavan castle.

Something interesting, there is no vaulted ceiling here, that's okay because it's narrow enough. which can just close the gap with stone slabs essentially, but they have almost a coral side that just goes in to hold these stones, so the kind of internal passageway inside the walls that follows the wall ends here, well, That's how it went. Originally it doesn't end, you can actually see the foundation line of the additional wall that this would have gone into and most likely continued along the old walls that framed furtherinternal structures of the courtyard, the Bailey, uh, and therefore this internal hallway.

You can probably go around and get to a lot of parts of the castle through here and it's like a hidden passageway inside the castle, it's cool, so that's the exit that we were standing on before that originally would have led to an extra wall that would have came out and followed the line of the foundations around there, most likely it would have been at a T intersection which would have led to another one there and that one probably comes out right there, we are standing in front of Queen's Gate at the moment. and there's something I want to point out: I'm standing on ground level here, but if you remember the door entrance was about 15m off the ground, maybe more than 20 to the right, and what? that means that great part of this exterior wall here is doing something I've done on Castle design in the past, in fact I did it with my Winterfell Castle design and it's really cool to see this done, you can't really tell.

When you look at the castle 3 pictures, but in person what is really happening is that the outer wall works as a type of retaining wall towards the internal ground level because we are actually standing at a higher elevation than the ground level. outside the castle and you can even see how it increases in levels as we go up the Bailey courtyard and when we get to this point here it feels like we're on ground level, but no, this is a big hold. wall that we're standing on and when we come out here we'll see how high we really are from the ground level outside, so look how high we are here, this is pretty high, right?

What an entrance and this is the most fortified entrance to the castle because to get to the King's gate you have to go through the city to go through a wall that is already facing outwards and as a result it is a very fortified supervision for Ports of murder holes and look when we come back here, look at this, there are four four areas, so if you take a look here, these are not actually kill holes, but slots that provide access to kill holes, so your regular kill holes are inside of the slots. here and there are four layers of them, which is epic, so this is a very fortified gate, here it would have been absolutely huge and look, there are additional Arrow Loops that look inwards, how glorious is this huge gatehouse, like this that the reason why having an outer wall function as a retaining wall makes sense is because, well, for the outside, the attackers want the castle to be as high as possible and they want them to have to basically climb to get to the top. top of the walls if they ever try to do so.

Storm the castle, but for the Defenders, the people inside, you don't want it to be so high that it's so hard to reach, so by raising the ground level inside the castle, it's suddenly a lot easier for them to reach. inside. people inside the castle to have access to the walls, uh, which is a logical and functional thing to add to a castle, of course, there are other niches and arrow loops that have more than enough head height that you need to fit a

full

s siiz Longbow this one is particularly large and what is also interesting is that it is actually connected to an internal tunnel actually inside one of the outer walls and this is much larger than the one we were going through before.

We are not prepared for how thick some of these walls are in the towers of Canavan Castle, we found an Al Cove below where we were able to get out and it is up to 5m thick, so these tower walls are really very thick, thicker . than I expected and one of the reasons to explain it is that surrounding almost all the levels of the towers is actually like an internal walkway or tunnel that runs all the way, which means that the internal rooms are actually isolated from the wall external now. Usually if you did something like that, the inner room would not have any light and we saw some rooms that actually indicated that there were no windows into these inner rooms that have been surrounded by an external walkway or tunnel, so the question would be how do it?

They then let light into these surrounded rooms. Well, we see that the room we are in now is most likely a bedroom. There's a fireplace here, a high ceiling, very comfortable, so what they've done to let in the light. that have internal windows that are each aligned with an external window, so between us, outside this window, here is that tunnel that is inside the wall of this Tower and there is one that goes all the way around and coincides with each window external. an internal window that lets in light from the external which is really cool, something I wasn't expecting at all and then to let in as much light as possible we have a very large and tall window that is above the sitting area the chapel or I guess it could be a chapel, there is a floor here and right through there is another big window, a very big window and right in front of it there is another big window to let in the light and make this room more habitable and also , actually there would have been an adjoining room attached to this one so this is not just one room, whoever had this room probably had two other private chambers right through this door here window here there would be a floor here and you can see it from the corals and the fact that right through this entrance hall there is a wall with a door connecting it, so that door is there, so this is a private room adjoining through this door and we can see it even clearly, so here's this window that opens directly in line with the actual window on the outside wall and then that door here to the floor above what appeared to be some sort of chapel adjoining the rooms in this room here that it's really cool and there's another interesting little feat and I hope you can see that we have If we look up, we can see the Corall, okay, holding up another floor above, but just below that Coral is another one.

You see this Coral just below. I wonder what that was for. If we look at the other side wall, here we can see. See there's another contiguous B core right there on the other side, indicating a large beam that was actually spanning this on an intermediate level before we got to the top floor and I was assuming this was just a room with a roof very high, there is most likely a middle floor in this room and this is interesting because sometimes we assume that it is just a room that someone lived in in many cases, but if the person if there was someone living here maybe even a family.

Not only would they have this room, they would have an adjoining room here and here and another floor completely above us that probably had like a wooden staircase or something that was connected or on this beam that supported that middle floor that would give you up to four rooms for your own private comfort, which is very cool and quite extravagant for a whole medieval family, even honestly, right now this part of the ramp, what you would assume is a part of the ramp, is because it's open, but no, this wall It is actually being cut, you can see by the missing stone.

There, this would have gone all the way up and closed off the top just like the tunnels we've been walking through and would have been an internal tunnel inside the walls of Canavan, so these tunnels basically go around it. most of the walls are a little lower there, but there we walked through the ones on the other side here, bringing it all the way up here. I didn't even know that was a feature of the castle that you can't. Seeing it or recognizing it from the outside and it's really cool, just a feature that you discover when you get here in person, so now we're in one of the tunnels that actually wraps around one of the outside walls and there's a room behind us.

Here, but in contrast to the room we were exploring, there are no lined windows, so any room behind here would need windows facing the real Bailey or it would be completely dark and one of the towers we passed that looked like not have windows. it wasn't called The Granary Tower at all and that makes sense, you don't need Windows in a granary where you store food, but it completely wraps around those tunnels and this one again wraps around one of those outside towers. and once again we see the main defensive element of the Arrow Loop, but it also lets light in and therefore reflects it to let light into the internal room, another window right here, it's a design feature that has never been there before. seen before, but it makes sense and it's really cool, so here we have the big open space of the Great Hall right here would have been pretty impressive.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind. You see corals running along the side of the wall here, which would lead to a mezzanine or intermediate floor and I believe. It would have been maybe maybe I don't know a hallway, these windows would have been now to look down into the hallway below and then these pothole holes above, I guess they would have been how the roof would have been attached to this side. build each hole probably for individual confidence or support and who knows, it could have been another intermediate floor going up even further, but a very large open space right here for the Great Hall.

This is actually a great visualization to really show you the tunnel. which are inside the walls, even the walls of the Tower, so we are a tunnel and this is the inner room of one of the outer Towers. The interesting thing about this one is that we actually have Arrow Loops that go all the way around the outside, uh, without the tunnel going behind on that end, but there are other things to note about this tower, of course, see how the floor has a lip where the wall line enters and that is where the floor rests.

It has an opening for a fireplace. going up another edge there for another story and this tower is one, two, three, four stories high, so what we have here with this big slope at the top is the internal well of the castle, which would have been well filled with several ways to get the river just out of the rainwater, but I wonder if I can't, it really could be open, but there is certainly water down there and of course it is very important for a castle, especially in Siege, to have a supply regular water and it's actually inside one of the castle towers are very well protected and also something interesting to note, right over here, so this is actually looking towards the outside of the castle.

We see Arrow Loops looking towards the pit, but right inside, here are the kitchens and a very convenient place for the well right near the kitchens where they want to wash and cook and all the other things that you may need water for or get water for as well. boil it, maybe purify it or whatever you want to do and then supply the rest of the castle, so this image here shows something quite interesting. We were right at the well that you can see here and what they have represented are buckets on a system of pulleys, pores that lower the water, which is connected to pipes or drains, it comes out here to a trough right in the kitchen, so yeah, It is located near the kitchen, not only to get the water there, but they are actually representing it.

I hope they have confirmation like that, that it could actually be a pipe job that brings the water directly from the well to the kitchen. being very convenient and useful, that's how they're depicting where I was standing, kind of big, huge cauldrons sitting on those fires, um too, right there or ovens, and they're also showing a middle wall here with a big fireplace and a spit and so. The middle wall would have been right here and you can actually see that there was a wall that came off right here, so a big open cooking fireplace here and to have access behind this wall is actually through this alve right here walking and then you.

We're here to have access to the well, I guess the cold or the ovens are a pretty functional kitchen all things considered because remember it also has that trough for water to come in to get a constant supply of water and there we go, which has been the castle of Canavan and it's been absolutely Awesome and there are things that I honestly had no idea about, like you can even see it, see these Arrow Loops that lead to internal walkways or tunnels inside the walls and go around everything. I had no idea it had features like that. which alters your layout with how you align the windows with the internal rooms and the towers and this thing is just a beast it's so cool it's up there this could be oh like it's hard to say which one is my favorite of all The castle I've been looking at, but this one is certainly close to the best castle in Canavan, it's been great, thanks for joining us.

I hope you'll all join me in the many other castle videos we've made while traveling. all over Britain so go check them out um like the video I made sharing that Canavan Castle is almost like seven eight castles in one if you want to know how and why you can watch the videothere, as well as other videos that are available here. in Shadow Verity so I hope to see you there and until then goodbye