Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This is all that remains of the Great Hall at Sandal. The hall itself was on the first floor and the arches – recently restored – opened on to the ground floor cellar which was used as a store room. The windowsill on the left has a groove for a wooden shutter.
As with the garderobe drawing, I’ve gone for a simple graphic style, with flat colours, as a contrast to the main illustration, which is an aerial view of the castle in ruins.
Amongst the most substantial remains at Sandal Castle are two garderobe shafts on the moat side of the Great Chamber. The gardrobe gets its name because the smell associated with a medieval toilet was reputed to protect clothes from moths.
I’ve drawn this using the cartoon style that I used when I painted scenery for the Pageant Players’ pantomime. To create something that looked like pen and ink from the point of view of the audience, I’d draw the scene in slightly watered-down black emulsion using a half-inch filbert brush and get my team to fill in the blocks of colour.
We’d normally conclude a pantomime with a palace scene but occasionally we’d have a more rugged-looking castle to paint but the audience never got to see the garderobes.