Ploo Stots

PLOO STOTS (stot: a staggering, clumsy person), plough stots, farm servants, having patched dresses and ribbon ends on hats and clothes, a blowing cows’ horns, going round begging on Plough Monday (the first after Twelfth Night), with a plough-frame steered by the last married man, the two youngest lads being drivers, two of the eldest being the beggars, and the rest taking place of horses. The practice is almost gone out now, though one party, without plough, came into Wakefield in 1865, but on the wrong Monday – namely, a week too soon.

William Stott Banks, 1865, quoted in Richard Bell’s illustrated ‘Wakefield Words’, 2011

Cannon Ball Impact

cannon ball impact

You can still see where the Roundhead artillery hit Richard III’s Octagonal Tower, also known as the Well Tower, at Sandal Castle. I’ve also drawn one of the forty cannon balls that were found on this slope during the excavations. The tower was already in a poor state of repair before the siege of 1645 but the bombardment reduced much of the keep to rubble.

The rectangular structure immediately to the left of the impact was a garderobe chute.

The Great Hall

great hall

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.

Garderobe

gardrobe
gardrobe

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.

Medicine Jars

Medicine jars

My latest drawing for my Sandal Castle spread if of some of the jars found during excavations.

To quote a caption from Wakefield Museum:

Many small jars or bottles made of pottery and glass, probably for medicines and ointments, were found in the building that used to be the kitchen of the castle. This suggests that wounded soldiers were being treated there in the Civil War.

Diggers

diggers

Presumably the Royalists didn’t employ any of The Diggers, otherwise known as The Levellers, in the construction of Sandal Castle’s English Civil War defensive earthworks because The Diggers were a radical Puritan group keen to claim common land on behalf of the people.

earthworks

Earthworks

earthworks

I’ve added a few more figures to my illustration of constructing defensive earthworks at Sandal Castle and now I’m adding flat colours, using a vector brush in Adobe Fresco and the paint-bucket tool to fill in larger areas. I can see why people find colouring relaxing.

I was going to go for red for the cavalier directing operations but I discovered that Cromwell’s New Model Army was issued with red shirts, so I’ve gone for blue instead.

Bastion

constructing defences

As a contrast to my detailed aerial view of Sandal Castle, I want quite lively, smaller drawings to dot around the spread to illustrate aspects of its history. I’m starting in the south-east corner with the gun emplacement constructed by the Royalists during the English Civil War. By then, with the introduction of artillery, the medieval stone walls were old technology. Cannon ball-proof earthworks were needed.

Unfortunately the cannon needed to complete the defences never arrived.

My swaggering cavalier directing his team of barrow boys is drawn directly from a detail in an engraving by Henrik Rusc, The Strengthening of Strongholds, dated 1645. I’ve used the ‘Blotty Ink’ virtual pen in Fresco, which matches the style of the engraving. Examining Rusc’s drawing so closely, I’m impressed with the way he could evoke character with just a few lines. The wheelbarrows themselves look as if they’ve had a history and repeated figures of the labourers in a broken rhythm give a sense of movement and suggest the hard work that was involved.

Final Touches

Sandal Castle
car park

The cars in the car park were the final details that I added to my Sandal Castle illustration. The car park looked too empty without them but I tried to draw them fairly sketchily so as not to distract attention from the main subject, the castle ruins. Also included a few visitors – dog walkers and a lone pushchair pusher – in the positions they were in when I took my reference photographs.

The advantage of having drawn this in Adobe Fresco is that if I change my mind about the figures and cars, I can delete them and redraw them as I like because they’re on a separate layer.

Ruins

Ruins

I’ve been working on this illustration as if it was a jigsaw, making a point of going around the edges of the Sandal Castle site, drawing the trees and hedges before turning my attention to the centre. This afternoon I’ve made a start on finishing off the centre by redrawing the ruins of the Great Hall. That’s working pretty much as I imagined it, although I think that it now needs a suggestion of a shadow, to look more three-dimensional.

Sandal Castle is rarely this lonely, so I also need to add those cars, dog walkers and visitors. And perhaps a table or two outside the cafe.