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The reason wood fell into disuse as a material is that it is quite flammable. Soon stone became more popular. Stone castles took years to construct depending on the overall size of the castle. Stone was stronger and of course much more expensive than wood. Most stone had to be quarried miles away, and then brought to the building site.
Particularly large towers are often the strongest point of the castle: the keep or the bergfried. As the gate is always a vulnerable point of a castle, towers may be built near it to strengthen the defences at this point. In crusader castles, there is often a gate tower, with the gate passage leading through the base of the tower itself. In ...
A rock castle (German: Felsenburg) is a type of medieval castle that directly incorporates natural rock outcrops into its defences to such an extent that the rock formations define the structure of the castle.
A shell keep is a style of medieval fortification, best described as a stone structure circling the top of a motte. In English castle morphology, shell keeps are perceived as the successors to motte-and-bailey castles, with the wooden fence around the top of the motte replaced by a stone wall.
The most important and prestigious buildings, such as the great hall and the keep or bergfried, were usually located in the inner bailey of the castle, sometimes called the central bailey or main bailey. Nonetheless, there are a few castles where the keep is outside the inner bailey, such as Château de Dourdan and Flint Castle.
A 19th-century reconstruction of the keep at Château d'Étampes. Since the 16th century, the English word keep has commonly referred to large towers in castles. [4] The word originates from around 1375 to 1376, coming from the Middle English term kype, meaning basket or cask, and was a term applied to the shell keep at Guînes, said to resemble a barrel. [5]
The fortification varies by site. While Dholavira has stone-built fortification walls, Harrapa is fortified using baked bricks; sites such as Kalibangan exhibit mudbrick fortifications with bastions and Lothal has a quadrangular fortified layout. Evidence also suggested of fortifications in Mohenjo-daro.
Earth ditch and rampart defences on the Ipf near Bopfingen, Germany Reconstructed pfostenschlitzmauer of the oppidum at Finsterlohr, Creglingen, Germany. The composition and design of ramparts varied from the simple mounds of earth and stone, known as dump ramparts, to more complex earth and timber defences (box ramparts and timberlaced ramparts), as well as ramparts with stone revetments. [2]