Description
Deal Castle is built of Kentish ragstone brick, and Caen stone taken from nearby religious houses after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Whether by design or coincidence, the fortress is shaped like a Tudor rose. At the centre is a three-storeyed circular citadel, with six semicircular, slightly lower towers projecting from it. Separated by a narrow ward, a further series of six low semicircular bastions form the curtain wall. The top level of the bastions served as a platform for the heaviest guns. The whole fortress is protected by a stone revetted dry moat, 20m wide and 5m deep. Around the basement level of the bastions, runs a continuous gallery called "the rounds", which is pierced by 53 hand-gun ports or loopholes to allow the defenders to fire into the bottom of the moat. A sally port connects the rounds to the moat floor for counter-attacks. The citadel and outer bastions were originally capped by rounded parapets pierced by embrasures for guns; some of these survive on two bastions on the western side, but most were replaced by ornamental battlements in 1732. The walls originally incorporated up to 145 gun ports on five levels.
The westernmost bastion is taller than the others and serves as a gatehouse. Originally, the moat was crossed by a wooden drawbridge; although this has now been replaced by a stone causeway, the slots for the raising gear are still visible. Once inside the gatehouse, any attacker would have to get past a portcullis, five murder holes set in the ceiling of the large entrance passage, an internal gunport in the back wall opposite the doorway and a staggered approach to the ward. The citadel provided accommodation for the peacetime garrison, originally a captain, deputy, porter and 16 gunners, with the officers living on the upper floor. The ground floor served as a kitchen and bakery; the ovens and fireplace survive. In the centre of the vaulted basement is a large well and was also used to store ammunition and supplies.
Read more about this topic: Deal Castle
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“God damnit, why must all those journalists be such sticklers for detail? Why, they’d hold you to an accurate description of the first time you ever made love, expecting you to remember the color of the room and the shape of the windows.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)