Why does COCH CASTLE have this tiny TOWER? | The most INCREDIBLE castle you've never heard of

this one blew me [Music] away shadow greetings I'm shad and I'm here at Castle C it's spelled c c h and so you would think it's pronounced coot but I've heard people I think Co or even just Co is closer in pronunciation it actually means red and so this has also been known as the red Castle because the stone that has been used build it has a red Hue and when you're looking at it you can see a little bit of a red Hue here and there on the uh on the stones of the castle but what we're going to be focusing on in this video is the exterior of Castle cop because there are so many things to comment on and then in another video we're going to be looking at the interior the exterior of the castle is actually far more historically accurate than the interior and there are beautiful things to just appreciate and we're going to be taking a close look at those but what's really fascinating about this castle and it really jumps out at you when you're here in person is how imposing and grind it looks and this is in pretty close to pristine condition and so in a lot of the castles of course they they are in some level of disrepair this thing look at it it is stunning not only that I love its asymmetrical design okay it feels a bit more naturally flowing where it was uh designed for utility and all right we'll put a tower here we'll have a bit of a gate house and and there are things to really really love about the external design of this castle and the external design is mostly authentic because this is actually a reconstruction it was reconstructed in the 19th century uh because the original well it had several stages there was uh an older Welsh kind of fortification here and it was rebuilt in the 13th century or 1300s I need to look that up and then it also got destroyed and fell into a big state of disre and in the um the 19th century it was rebuilt as a bit of a passion project now the Reconstruction did Endeavor to try and make it as accurate as possible and from the outside they did a pretty darn good job with one or two errors uh here and there uh one of the things that people point out that's a bit of an error they feel is uh the type of turrets on the castle so a turret is like a a a mini tower and it's usually you know only a couple meters in diameter and or or it sticks out so it's not a perfect circle it's like a half circle and then has a stretching rectangle thing that connects back to the castle the tower it's adjoining and so they have very pointed kind of roofs on the turrets here which is very much a Neo Gothic style not not classic medieval Gothic uh but they do look really really good and this neogothic kind of interpretation of turrets like this come from actual historical turrets that were on medieval castles and so if you have a look at say canavan castle you will see turrets on that which are tiny like mini Towers sticking up from the main towers and they were there mainly for a lookout position uh to get a bit more height perhaps in defense but so turrets very much were a thing and more fantasy style turrets are on castle c right here so most likely the historical version didn't have them but everything else is pretty darn close except for maybe some of the window placement and the size of the windows it is it is an absolutely beautiful castle here's a really interesting detail that we can see from the outside it's actually just above the Gat house do you see how there is like a break just underneath the hoarding where it stepped out that tiny little bit all right well that is kind of like a nod to the classic maculation you know um aesthetic where you had an extended you know Battlement or something sitting on corales on the outside well this design here is basically trying to match the aesthetic but not going so far to the point where you need actual micul and it's not the only castle that does this we actually see that very design feature on historical castles so this wasn't a kind of 19th century aesthetic they added because it's common you do see that style on neogothic castles now it's actually on medieval castles absolutely when you're here in person it hits differently it feels far more imposing than probably what is being conveyed through uh the video right now I particularly love the Gat housee it's just extending off a little bit from the primary Tower and uh I'm we're going to get a closer look to see what type of defenses it has but from here we can already see a dedicated hoarding that is still attached situated right above the primary entrance and that is beautiful and not only looks really good it would have been there for a direct functional purpose and as we've seen in some of the other castles we've SE explored already in Wales on chipto and Kil they had slot maculations and on some other castles in Britain they have classic maculations right above gate houses so when there's going to be maculations on British castles they're not very common they're rarely decked out on all the walls and Towers uh on English or British style castles right but when they are present they're usually present right above the primary entrance and if not magul hoardings and just that addition of the hoing right above the gate housee is gorgeous it's beautiful now this style of Castle very likely would have had provision for hoardings to be added to the towers in Wartime and so you could imagine this castle with a big wooden hoarding extending out from each of the towers you can see something really interesting here on Castle car and it's the pot lug holes see on the main tower you might be able to see there are square holes going all the way up now on castles like care Philly the potlock holes really visible on the top layer and they were left there uh to provide the ability to attach hoardings to the top battlements the thing is though potlock holes like what we see here and cilli most likely had them but they were filled in after construction cuz that's what they were actually used for they were there for the construction scaffolding as the castle was built up and so the castle goes up a layer and then they put provision in the stone to be able to put in in logs pot like it's like a hole for a log and when those beams were in place they had they would attach like uh wood it walking platforms and that would give them something to stand on to then build up the next layer and when they got to the next layer new holes new logs new platform and they would go up on some castles they fill in all those pot lug holes as they go up on other castles they're left there and you can see the square little holes going all the way up so in regards to the external Design This is a dream it's so beautiful with only a couple of little historical uh historically dubious kind of additions on the Reconstruction standing at the back of the castle now you'll see this back wall how it kind of just curves around and just there's some really great things to see we there's actually two lines of Arrow loops and they're very very thin but you can see them they're right at the edge of this kind of uh section of the base of the the wall how it flares out and as it meets the wall here we've got a line of Arrow loops and then a line of water spouts and so this is to drain the water and the spout is specifically situated further away from the wall so the water doesn't run uh down along the stone because that type of water drainage can actually damage Stone quite considerably especially over hundreds of years and so you don't want water draining out along you can't avoid with like rainfall when it's blown on the side but for like the runoff of the of the roof they want to try and channel that into the spouts and the spout will let the water fall down and not run down along the line of the wall cuz not only can it cause erosion it can also stain the wall with these kind of dark marks and we see more significant larger spouts on the towers as well so just a really cool architectural thing to make note of and then of course you see the crenelated wall but it has a roof along the top so do you see the crenels right and the actual tooth of the crenellations that's a crenelated wall but it has a roof added on that roof added on to crenelations is a later medieval style and more commonly seen on French castles so like with a lot of the surviving castles around they're not kept in as Pristina State and so they don't they wouldn't have the hoardings attached and other things like what we saw at care Philly and so if there were castles that had kind of roof coverings uh along the ramp part uh a lot of them would have r it away and they wouldn't have been restored and everything like that so there is a chance that they had a bit more presence on British castles so it's hard to say if this is more of a feature that the people who reconstructed the castle wanted to add or you could say n it's valid enough and historical enough but still it is a later medieval thing that definitely would have appeared somewhere along in Britain towards the later medieval period so this is supposed to represent a 13th century Castle it's probably a bit too early yet it looks gorgeous it looks absolutely beautiful you can't really see it from here but there's actually a moat that goes around this front part of the castle hence the need for the bridge and drawbridge and it's pretty deep but it's hard to get a perspective an idea of just how deep it is from where we are so let's go take a closer look so castle c has a type of moat ringing around it it's more like a ditch because as this uh you know mo that I'm standing in rings around the uh the ledge here basically tapers off to nothing on on the back side but still for this side of the castle having a moat like this would really nullify your ability to get a Siege Tower up where it needs to be if you're trying to breach the castle walls and I hope you can see how deep the ditch is in perspective by me walking through it right now and oh my gosh this looks amazing from this position but also ah like if you were besieging the castle like if if people up there trying to shoot down at you I can really see you know a type of cover this is the whole point of maculations so standing right here especially if when you're seeing up at the battlements that you know no one would be able to shoot at you unless they lean really out it emphasizes in a big way how important having maculations would be at the top of this Tower and if not maculations hoardings the other thing that needs to be mentioned though from this position is even if you were to get this close to get some type of cover from the arrow fire above if there weren't hoardings attached what could you do from here it's like this isn't Age of Empires where you can just no uh like castles worked for a reason and this is too tall to put a ladder against okay and so if we look over here right like again look at the height of where everything is and I like I can see the arrow Loops right here okay and I people can shoot at me from even this position if I go right here they might not be a to hit me but I'm probably vulnerable from the crenel and the arrow Loops over on the curving wall here this curving wall is actually kind of cool because you could almost imagine it as a corner of a really large Tower right imagine a tower that had the circumference of this kind of curving wall and so so it's almost achieving the same effect as if you had a tower on this back end just one with a really wide circumference because if you go back further when you know the old Romans love to build in squares and stuff this wouldn't be curved it would be coming to an actual point here which wouldn't give nearly as great a field of fire uh especially for people who are going around the by being curved all right it just enables that whoever's Manning the arrow Loops can shoot further in the opposite direction around the corner because it's already curving in that direction the other thing that I wanted to point out again like imagine trying to sail this Castle right if you are trying to uh um assault it with an Escalade so you'd have ladders right and you run here you place a ladder the ladder would have to be massive to reach the the crenel and that's where you would want it you would want the ladder to just land right underneath the crenel of the battlements you don't want the ladder reaching higher above it cuz that means The Defenders can grab the top rungs of the ladder and push it off though the angle might be too great but if they had like a a pole to really get the Lage off so at best like you would need to get a ladder that big you would almost need four guys to carry it and then imagine trying toil it with like a be Nightmare and it would be one of the only options you had you're not going to get a Siege Tower here because of the moat and interestingly if we actually try and go all the way around yes the moat is tapering down and getting lower and lower and lower but when we get to here well we're actually reaching the side of the Hill that the Castle's resting on and so even though the moat ends the land a little bit further down here begins to slope down the mountain side and so good luck getting a Siege Tower uh you know to the castle from this Vantage this might be the only position where you could get a Siege Tower but a big problem there's no flat area to bring it here like again Hillside straight down and so even though the moat basically ends here it's because it's not needed it has a cliff side right there that effectively does the same thing there's actually a number of beautiful little features that they still have on this Castle which would have been absolutely present on the medieval castle that stood here before the Reconstruction so those little coverings in on the crenels that just gives the people who are defending the castle additional cover from counter fire from anyone attacking you also see the spouts that sticking out a bit further than the ones along the back wall you can actually see one of the arrow Loops right here do you see how thin that is but there's an arrow Loop right there and of course we see all the pot lug holes on the castle all around another beautiful little detail is the statue of the mother Mary Mary and the infant savior right there with the fluid elisee in the background and man I just love that they have a permanently fixed hoarding right there looks beautiful so we're looking at the gate house here and I was almost expecting to find a slot murder hole in between these two archways like we saw in Killy gate houses that's not a slot uh murder hole but just a more conventional murder hole here in front of the pork hus and another one right behind it so I'm inside the interior Courtyard of K Castle right now and there's something really interesting what I'm walking past here are the arrow loops on the lower wall now if they were intending to reconstruct this Castle as just a fancy Lord's Indulgence or manner house why did they restore authentic battlements like this along the bottom layer here and the reason is because it's clear that there was an intention to restore this into a more authentic medieval State even though there's an oddity here or two like the top you know um uh turret up there the fact that they kept details like this of authentic Arrow loops and look how deep this Al Cove is right you'll be able to stand fully with a longbow right here shooting down goes to show you that there is still a heck of a lot of authenticity to the exterior design of this castle and there are more little authentic details like the coral that these wooden supports are resting on for the walkway up here perfectly done and this walkway kind of rings the entire inner Courtyard of this castle and just looks absolutely gorgeous gives you a view all the way around and they've kept it in great condition you know painted lots of style beautiful one of the things I love about this Castle is its more modest size but the thing is though it's actually not modest in regards to historical castles this would still be considered on the larger end when you consider all castles collectively a lot of the famous ones like the ones we've even visited honestly like cheptoo killy and the ones we're going to be visiting like canavan represent some of the biggest castles historically and they get a lot of attention as a result where castles like this are more rep resentative even though this is still on the bigger size this Tower behind me right here could have been like the sole keep of many historical castles and there's still a number of examples but because this is closer in size to the more common style of castles I I kind of enjoy it even more looking at the castle from above we can see how simple yet elegant this layout is it's essentially a linked or towered castle where the primary buildings are actually ATT attached to the outer wall and there isn't a disconnected Central Key there's one tower that stands taller than all the others which you would probably identify as the donjon or keep sometimes those terms can be interchangeable but because there's no real defined difference between a primary residence and a primary fortified Tower there's no real reason to be pantic about what the primary Tower would be on this one so pretty simple to just call it the donjon honestly modest yet still large when you regard all the sizes of Castle simple yet elegant in design with some beautiful beautiful embellishments and it's state it is in pristine condition and is one of the highlights of the castles that I'm visiting as I'm traveling across Britain this Castle is stunning so I'm currently standing on the ramp part of the rightmost tower if you're looking at the castle from the front and what you see here is the main battle went here and these ones are very very tall with shutters over the Arrow loops and on the inside a thinner wall making another room and then you have the ramp part space in between it's actually a pretty cool design but and it is accurate I've seen this type of design on a lot of castles they usually later period castles but this is to reflect about a 13th century one and so that actually fits quite nicely and oh it looks beautiful you saw this Tower from the outside well this is what it's like on the inside big you know Arrow loops with the right yeah you can get a full drawer on a bow and of course we see the shutters right here these big wooden Shutters on the inside I don't know if this is how it was done with a big this looks like cast iron as well so if you could make this out of forged iron then yeah something like this could possibly work I I have a feeling that shutters like this uh in the period most likely just had like a wooden um you know uh lever that cames out that you could just push forward and hook onto something to get the angle out uh the other thing that's a bit odd is that this crenellation is actually really high so this crenel here is so high like it's not even angled down you would not be able to shoot really anyone very close to the tower at all so that's probably quite clearly an inaccuracy in the Reconstruction here because it's it's mostly unfunctional As a result uh either you need a higher foothold or this like stand I mean or this needs to be lower do you remember that Neo Gothic turret that I was able to point out from the outside of the castle and when we're inside the courtyard well that's it right here and this actually means that there might be more validity to having that turret in its design perhaps just not with the style of roof it had cuz inside this side kind of circular part of the tower which forms the turret is a main stairwell and and it's how we got access to the roof here and so it wasn't just like a side little addition that they added on for Aesthetics which often neogothic turrets are added on to just for look this is serving a very important functional purpose and with the care and attention that the um people took in reconstructing this Castle especially with fine details like that it really seems like that they were going out of their way to reconstruct the castle in its original design which makes me suspect that this side kind of circular uh attachment to the main tower here was very well likely part of the original foundation and castle and might have ended in just a crenelated turret or something more typical of the period like we see on canavan and so the presence of the turret on the side I think is actually far more valid and and plausible and it's just really the roof which is more neogothic now but so it's an important functional part of the castle this looks to be a cast iron drain uh no not medieval as a result but what's interesting there would be be water run off from this roof that would fall down right here and so what they would want then is the water would run off and what they have here I believe is very accurate we have a drain the water would run down here come into a drain and this more stereotypically would run into one of those spouts that we saw outside which would let the water drain and not run down the side of the wall and then it will just fall uh just like that and so this yes uh this not so much it's not to say that they couldn't have had a type of of um clay piping uh or pipe work maybe even wood uh but this is clearly cast iron and so that's what makes me very dubious about it so overall the layout and design of K Castle K again sorry for the pronunciation is actually brilliant it's a beautiful example of people will consider it smaller yet this is still a bit on the large scale but more represent representative of what most medieval castles were in size and it's beautiful I love it yet the inside is its own beasts to tackle and from having explored the castle inside it's actually far better than I was expecting it's this Castle's become one of my all-time favorite for a big reason but you get to find that out in the castle where we explore the inside and there's some great things to see so I hope to see you there and thank you for joining me in this video so until that time farewell [Music]

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 208,899

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Id: YSxusWyQ7ac

Length: 23min 49sec (1429 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024