DoneThat
Raglan Castle, Monmouthshire
The Gatehouse was intended to both impress and intimidate visitors to the castle and it continues to impress visitors today. The notable feature of the gatehouse towers are the machicolations. They are floor openings between the supporting corbels of a battlement through which stones or other material, such as boiling water or boiling cooking oil, could be dropped on attackers at the base of a defensive wall.
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This shows the Great Tower surrounded by the moat with the Gatehouse beyond. The Great Tower is hexagonal but two of the walls were destroyed during the civil war.
| Comment | More of the moat |
The view from the Great Tower looking across Fountain Court, the large grassed area, with the Grand Staircase across the corner in the centre of the picture.
That part of the building on the right encompasses the Chapel and the Long Gallery.
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In the west corner of Fountain Court is the Grand Staircase.
The Grand Staircase divides the apartments and would originally have had a substantial porch, similar to the one that survives in the Pitched Stone Court. Although examples of such straight-flight staircases can be found in other late-medieval buildings, the architectural historian John Newman considers that the Grand Staircase had "a grandeur hard to parallel in 15th century England".
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