New Methods on Old Castles: Generating New Ways of Seeing

THE USE of new methods on old castles generates new ways of seeing and leads to new interpretations. Three types of analyses are demonstrated on four late 13th-century castles from North Wales. Feature Analysis invokes the use of a decision-tree to help in the determination of room function. Access Analysis via access diagrams is used to understand the functional organization of rooms within each castle. Finally, a Comparative Analysis employing access diagrams, plans, a table and a cumulative graph is performed to note developmental trends in the castle designs, to detect differences between the castles, and to lead to new interpretations or new working hypotheses.