Another colourised shot of Sandal Castle in 1964, this time looking from the motte towards the Presence Chamber and kitchen. In 1964 wooden palings were used to cordon off the area.
Sandal Castle excavations, 1964
Tag: Sandal Castle
Sandal Motte, 1964
More of my 127 mm black and white negatives (colour added in Photoshop) and this is the climb up the motte at Sandal Castle in 1964.
This is looking back to the south-east across the bailey with the ruins of the Great Hall on the left and the Presence Chamber on the right, with the houses along Manygates Lane, Sandal, beyond.
Milnthorpe Woods lay in that direction along the ridge and it has been suggested that this was the weak point for the castle, the route the Lancastrian force from Pontefract Castle was likely to have taken when they attacked the castle in the Battle of Wakefield, on 30 December, 1460.
Link
Sandal Castle
Sandal Castle my illustrated guide
Paperback, 32 pages,
black and white, £2.95, post free in the UK.
Thornes Park
Also available in the same format, £2.99:
Thornes Park, where there was once an unlicensed castle, perhaps a bit of rival to Sandal.
Sandal Castle
It’s good to see the display boards are now in place at Sandal Castle, including my illustrations on this panel on the bailey which overlooks the barbican, drum towers and keep. I like the contrasting styles by the five artists who have each illustrated a panel. In my photograph you can just make out Liz Kay’s board – a bird’s-eye view of the castle in its heyday – which has been set up on the viewing platform on top of the keep.
We called at Sandal this morning to see the panels and, for once, there wasn’t a stiff breeze blowing up over the ramparts! A dunnock was singing its rather rushed, jingly song from a fence post as we walked across the bridge to the bailey.
My ‘Sandal Castle Guide’ 
Yes, there’s a Robin Hood connection with Sandal, this booklet features a walk around the castle. 
You can still see damage from the Civil War siege. 
The castle had its own kitchen and bakehouse. 
A team of oxen and horse yoked together were used during the construction of the castle. 
The well-preserved sally port was blocked long ago. 
We have accounts of exactly what foods were stored in the castle’s larder. 
Remnants of the great hall. 
A garderobe: a medieval privy. 
Oinment jars. 
Civil war defences. 
The Castle today. 
Aerial view 
The barbican. 
Privy shaft. 
Castle folk.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.