Forts and Castles Fred Dibnah's Magnificent Monuments

TOOT-TOOT!

Some years ago, I met the gentleman who owns this engine.

He lives in a castle,

and he invited me to have a look at it.

It's not a proper castle,

it's a country house built to look like a castle,

with battlements and everything.

But it's never been under siege.

'Its owner is James Harvey Bathurst.

'We got friendly because he's a traction engine enthusiast

'and a railway enthusiast.'

That's happened to me.

'I helped him restore one of his engines, Atlas,

'which once resided in Manchester,

'but now it lives here, on the forecourt of Eastnor Castle.'

Here we are in the Great Hall,

but it looks a lot more comfy than a proper castle.

Castles are cold, draughty places,

and this is lovely and comfortable.

James, the owner, will tell us all about it, and how it all came about.

It's a bit surprising, isn't it?

It does look like a castle from a distance,

and, in 1800, people were looking back to medieval times.

My family had been here 200 years

and, to show they were a really old family,

they wanted an impressive building.

Revival castles - this one's Norman revival - seemed to be the fashion.

It's the sheer size of this room to impress people, eh?

It's incredibly impressive, yes.

So this pretend castle was never put to the test in war.

Real castles had a serious purpose.

They were built to keep attacking armies out.

So how did something so functional

turn into something as ornate as this?

BELL TOLLS

In this series, we'll be looking at how and why things were built,

what materials and tools were used,

and how buildings

were adapted to meet changing needs.

We'll visit some of my favourite castles,

cathedrals and great houses,

as well as bridges, tunnels, and other great engineering marvels,

all different in style and purpose.

But what they have in common for me

is the craft skills involved in designing,

building and decorating them.

From some of our most mysterious and ancient monuments

to a shiny, futuristic structure like the Lloyds Building in London,

the skills of architects and builders are there to be seen.

But I'm starting off by going to see something very simple.

Man's most basic need was to defend himself,

and our earliest constructions

were earthworks like the banks and ditches

surrounding Old Sarum in Wiltshire.

These huge earthworks were built in the Iron Age,

you know, 500 years BC.

It defies all wonder when you think they had no machinery, you know.

It were built by basic tools and muscle power.

When you think, to get up there where the defenders were,

you'd to come up this banking over here

with whatever you were going to throw at 'em... You'd be knackered!

Then you've to descend into the valley,

with men up there throwing rocks at you,

and attempt to get up. It must have been a pretty...

you know, impossible place to take.

And when you think, all that time ago, you know...

Like the forerunner of a castle.

But it was all pretty basic.

To see real engineering skills on a truly grand scale,

you have to wait for the Romans.

When the Romans came to Britain,

they brought more complex building techniques

than we'd ever had before, you know.

Hadrian's Wall is the biggest monument they left behind for us.

It stretches across northern England

from Bowness on the Solway Firth to Wallsend.

Its purpose was to stop marauding Scots crossing the border,

or as Hadrian put it,

to stop the barbarians getting towards the Romans.

Work started in 122AD,

and it took six years to build.

They worked bloody hard, you know.

It's an amazing piece of work.

You can't help but notice how the quality varies

as you go from area to area.

In places, it follows the contours of the land, and other places, it's level,

as though that section had some sort of levelling gear.

Of all the forts along Hadrian's Wall,

Housesteads is one of the best preserved, with examples of nearly everything:

the governor's house, the granary, the latrines.

This is rather a splendid pillar

that I think once upon a time must have supported two arches

in what's left of the northern gateway.

Beautiful chisel marks still here...

It's amazing after all these years, all these centuries.

These two towers, one on each side,

the far one were once the guard room, I've heard tell.

Judging by the thickness of the walls,

it must have been maybe 30 or 40 feet high.

Quite a nice bit of building...

No wonder, really, that it's lasted so long.

If it were so well built, why is so little of it left today?

Well, when the Romans left in about 400AD,

the wall was abandoned, and people nicked bits of stone

to build walls, farms, even churches and abbeys.

But even from what's left today,

you can see how it was built, if you look carefully.

This is one of the highlights

of the whole fort,

the communal bathtub, and the communal toilets, or latrines.

It's rather ingenious how they kept the water in it, you know.

They chiselled grooves down the ends of each stone,

and poured molten lead down,

and then of course they'd caulk it up,

rather like they'd caulk the planks in t'deck of a ship.

The water from the bath came out here

and was channelled into the latrines.

It came round here, dripped into this trough,

than ran the full length of the toilets,

and back this way,

back into the main channel that took away all the effluent.

The reason for the trough were that while you sat on the thunderbox,

you washed your sponge in the water,

and when you'd done that,

these sinks, the rectangular one and the round 'un,

were where they washed their hands.

What became of the sponges, I don't know,

because all the actual planking with the holes in's all gone.

I suppose it ran down the hill where the sheep are.

It must have been a bit stinky down there.

What's interesting is how they kept the water in the bath.

Right, that's it.

At Housesteads Fort,

the Roman baths...

The way they had of keeping water in 'em, you know -

as the stone flags came end to end,

they actually cut a groove down the middle,

and poured molten lead in,

like I've just done.

They would maybe have had to build

a pile of stones up at each side,

with clay behind to stop the molten lead shoving the clay out, you see.

I'm lucky. I've got a moulding box,

and sand on each side, which has the same effect.

I'll now dismantle the moulding box and shift the sand,

and we'll be able to see er...

just how well the lead is all the way down in the joint.

Now, if we...

If you imagine that these things were three feet deep,

the diamond-shaped slot in the middle

would stop the flagstones moving in either direction.

Blooming heck! It's stuck, believe it or not!

I didn't expect that. I didn't think it would have done that.

Erm... You know, I mean, really,

if it were caulked, it'd be watertight.

I think I'll go and build a Roman bath now! Quite good, that.

Hadrian's Wall only saw active service for 300 years.

Dover Castle, one of Europe's strongest fortresses,

saw action from the Iron Age

up till the atomic age, almost.

Ken, who's the general manager,

is going to tell me why it's such a strategic and important spot.

We're high up. That's a good start.

The reason why it's so important is out there. You can just see France,

they can see us, and that means they want to invade.

This place is here to protect this country from invasion.

Just in case Mr Bonaparte set sail.

Everyone landed here. It's a natural harbour, the cliffs are steep,

and it's the only place you can land.

It probably all started with an Iron Age fort.

On top of that, the Romans built a lighthouse. They landed nearby,

wanting to invade and go on from there.

Iron Age fort, Roman lighthouse, a Norman keep, both World Wars...

It covers the whole of history.

The 12th-C keep was built by Henry II,

and with a few modifications,

it retained a military role

right up to 1945.

'Henry made Dover into one of the most powerful medieval castles. Its great strength

'was due to the successive rings of defensive walls protecting the keep.

This is the last line of defence.

To get to the keep from here, you have to cross a drawbridge

to get to the inner bailey, which has a wall, then there's the outer bailey.

The ditches on both sides go all the way down to the cliffs,

which are fairly impregnable anyway.

It's a 300-foot sheer drop.

This is the highest point, so 300ft of cliffs, and we're about 90ft up.

You get a good view.

You can see France very well.

And from across that narrow strip of water came the greatest threats,

so Dover Castle was heavily fortified,

and barracks were built.

In the late 18th C, when Britain was at war with France,

conditions here became overcrowded,

so the Royal Engineers brought in miners

who tunnelled into the cliffs

to create underground barracks for over 2,000 men.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, they were very little used.

This is the Napoleonic staircase. It's a double helix.

That means there's two staircases, one on top of the other.

There's a triple one the other side of the hill for Western Heights.

'And just before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939,

'they were turned into a bomb-proof command headquarters.'

It's very interesting down here.

This is the command centre for the coastal artillery.

Each of the tunnels

had its own use by different people.

Next door was the Navy, with Admiral Ramsay.

Coastal Artillery were here, but the guns and radar

were all controlled from here.

And the gentleman who planned Dunkirk,

somewhere in these tunnels he had his little hideaway.

The next long tunnel along is the Navy's tunnel,

That's where Vice Admiral Ramsay,

who was initially looking after the Dover patrol,

the Channel and the ships going through there...

He masterminded the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Altogether, 338,000 men were evacuated from Dunkirk,

and over 800 ships brought them back

to the safety of Dover.

This is the balcony for the secret tunnels.

All other railings in World War II

were melted down for guns, but there are pictures of Ramsay and Churchill

and the King coming here to observe France.

They could see the war happening. If there was something coming over,

they nipped back into the tunnel and were safe.

What makes Dover so important is its location,

and the places castles were built

were usually determined by geographical features.

The best example is in Scotland,

so I went up to Edinburgh to see Scotland's most famous castle.

Edinburgh Castle stands on the sheer crag of Castle Rock,

the core of an extinct volcano. It rises 435 feet above sea level,

and it's a pretty formidable natural defence.

You couldn't build a castle on better foundations,

and so high up, that's what's interesting, on top of this volcano.

Even now, when you're down in t'town and look up,

with all these escarpments chiselled on the edge of the rock,

it looks a hell of a long way up.

What it must have looked like when just this bit was stuck on top...

I can imagine the enemy turning up, and saying, "Sod it! We'll go."

In the 15th and 16th centuries, this was a royal palace,

and it became a symbol of royal power.

And even today, Edinburgh is more than just an historic monument.

It still has symbolic significance,

and that's why the Scottish National War Memorial is here.

The impressive building behind me, the Scottish National War Memorial,

is one of the most recently built.

I've seen a few war memorials

but, believe me, this one takes some licking.

Inside this war memorial is this magnificent bronze

that depicts every aspect of the 1914 War, you know,

from nurses to tank regiments,

artillery, flying-machine men, the lot.

The whole lot of this bronze were first carved in wood

by Alice and Morris Meredith-Williams.

Must have been Welsh.

And after it had been carved in wood,

it went to the foundry to be used as a pattern

to cast the bronze.

It certainly captured the sadness of it all.

There's nobody smiling, you know,

in any of the faces, and it's all very sad.

Inside this iron casket

are the names of 150,000 Scots men and women

who died in the First World War.

BAGPIPE MARCH

Military tradition and pageantry are still strong here.

I've seen the Tattoo on TV and been impressed. On my visit,

I had an appointment with a man who keeps another tradition going.

-That were exciting. Hello, Tam. How are you doing?

-Very well.

This is Tam the Gun, and every day for the last 21 years

he's done that. Why do you do it?

It dates from 1861, Fred. They started it for shipping in the Forth

-so ships' captains could set their chronometers.

-It's a lovely gun.

Actually, it was designed in 1936,

put into production in 1939,

and it's been going strong ever since.

I found it exhilarating, the build-up to one o'clock.

It were like when we're knocking a big chimney down,

the same exciting feeling, you know.

-Give it a good welly, Fred.

-Will do! I'll do that.

CLANG!

You can imagine that in 1914!

-Did you enjoy that?

-Yeah!

-Good.

People have them by t'fireplace

-as poker stands.

-Do they? THEY BOTH LAUGH

From ceremony and pageantry in Scotland,

I went to Wales to see an awesome symbol of military domination.

Conwy is a classic example of the invincible medieval castle.

Edward I was by far our greatest castle builder, and his memorial

is the great chain of eight great stone fortresses

he built in north Wales in the space of 25 years.

It was the greatest feat of royal building in British history.

The castles were a symbol of Edward's power,

an ultimate weapon against any threat of a Welsh uprising.

Their defences needed to be very sophisticated,

so, to carry out the work, Edward employed a Frenchman,

James of St George, the greatest military architect of his age.

And in these outposts of English power,

the art of castle building reached its peak.

They were all built to withstand

any pounding from any siege weapon that had been devised at the time,

and made any form of attack difficult and dangerous.

There are eight main towers,

but the four more smaller towers at this end were the king's quarters.

The only way in... It's really two halves.

The only way into the king's quarters

were by battling through the main body of the castle, or by sea.

As you can see, it would have been a heck of a job scaling the walls,

especially with people pouring boiling tar on you,

throwing all sorts of stuff, bows and arrows.

It's not as if you could dig under it. It's all based on solid rock.

It's a piece of monumental engineering,

a massive achievement for its time, and when you look closely

at the walls and towers, you get some clues as to how it was built.

That's a big stone, that.

Apparently, when they built these castles,

in-between the flat, level decks of scaffolding, they had these inclined planes

they dragged the rocks up. So it's odd,

when you study castles and look at 'em,

some appear to have no putlog holes.

That's these little black holes

where a piece of timber, a short length called a putlog, went in.

Tied to the end were fir poles,

or tree trunks, for want of a better name,

and of course lashed with rope, and the planks rested on the putlogs.

They sawed them off as they went back down, and then most castles

were cement-rendered and lime-washed.

You can imagine the rendering over a bit of wood,

and 500 years later the wood rots.

Some of them look like currant cake, there's so many putlog holes in 'em.

But what was it like to attack one of these places?

I went to Warwick for a practical demonstration.

Tell us a bit about....

-how you'd get in here.

-Well, Master Frederick,

you're well within archer range.

Below 200 yards, you're taking your life in your hands.

Look across the crenellations at the top of the castle.

I have my men positioned in each of the archer loops

to look down on anyone attacking the gateway.

Once we got to the drawbridge...

Presumably they had something to shelter behind,

while we started work on it.

Once you'd got to the portcullis, it'd be a bit tough even then.

It's the castle's strongest point,

this barbican. You'd almost be insane to attack here.

If you got this far, you'd look like a pincushion!

Right, Master Frederick. We're in the barbican itself,

and assuming the enemy had made it through the mighty oaken doors

that rest upon these hinges there...

While they're trying to batter through those,

look up, and you're below murder holes, from which in the floor above

people could pour boiling sand, or quicklime, or burning oil onto the attackers.

But once you're through THIS portcullis,

doorways surround this bottom level!

YELLING

I didn't like THAT.

Bloody hell!

The Middle Ages were turbulent times,

but most castles last saw real action

at the end of the Civil War.

Many of them became palaces and stately homes.

Warwick is a good example of how they changed.

It's one of the finest medieval castles in England,

but within its walls is a magnificent country house.

By the 1890s, it was a favourite retreat

for some of the most important figures in Victorian society.

In some of the castle's rooms

is a re-creation of a house party including a young Winston Churchill.

This is really my period, you know,

the beauty and splendour of it all.

I'd like to have been a maintenance man here,

coming to work every morning and fettling bits of furniture.

I believe you've got a squeaky caster.

Ah, Dibnah. Remove your cap, please.

Thank you.

I think there's something wrong with this caster.

Excuse me, Mr Churchill,

while I fettle this here table leg.

Subtitles by Paul Murray, ITFC, for BBC Subtitling - 2000

E-mail us at [email protected]