Page:Medieval Military Architecture in England (volume 1).djvu/469

 Conisboroiigli Castle, 433 wholly fictitious. Those, and they are many, who ascend the guarded mount, care little for the great Norman Earl who raised its tower ; to them it is peopled with the creations of Scott. The chamber remains, though roofless, in which he places the funeral banquet of Athelstan, and the oratory is still unaltered within which Rowena poured forth her very mingled devotions. The present view must necessarily be of a more prosaic character. It must take notice of the great earls whose tower stands almost unrivalled as an abiding evidence of their feudal magnificence and constructive skill. Although Conisborough may not be compared to Coucy in dimen- sions, and the power even of the House of Warren pales before that of its more than royal Sires, the lesser but older tower is not inferior to its great rival in position, excellence of material, or delicacy of workmanship. He who selected the hill of Conisborough as the site of a strong- hold, if not, as King James said on visiting a similar position, a thief in his heart, must have thought security of the first importance, and have been prepared to expend a vast amount of human labour in obtaining it. What he had to deal with was an isolated knoll of rock and gravel, rising at about 400 yards from the bank of the river to a height of about 175 feet, naturally steep on every side, though rather less so to the south-west, where the exterior ground is somewhat higher. On this side, distant about a furlong, stands the ancient church of St. Peter, and about it the village of Conisborough. The top of the knoll has been levelled and trimmed into a platform of a rounded outline, 90 yards north-east and south-west, by 60 yards in the cross direction, thus enclosing about three-quarters of an acre. From this summit the slopes have been scarped steeply down to the bottom of an immense ditch about 60 feet below the crest. The outer slope or counterscarp of the ditch varies in height, or rather depth, according to the character of the ground, and for about two-thirds of its circumference is crested by a steep bank, which gives the ditch a depth of from 18 to 25 feet, and the exterior slope of which dies away into the natural fall of the hill-side. To- wards the south-west, or town side, where the ground occupied by the church is about 25 feet higher than the terre-plein of the castle, the intervening hollow is occupied by a large outwork, resting upon the main ditch, a branch from which embraces and separates it from the town, and thus is formed an outer ward, convenient either for the lodgment of troops or the secure pasture of cattle. The principal approach must always have been on this side and across this earth- work. At no other point could so safe or so convenient an ap- proach have been contrived ; scarcely, indeed, one practicable for a horse with a rider on his back, still less for a litter or a vehicle on wheels. Such, as regards the earthwork, was, and still is the original fortress, the seat and stronghold of the king from whose office the borough was named, and, supposing the walls and keep to be removed, and the crest of the platform, the counterscarp of the ditch, and the outer edge of the earthwork to be palisaded, the place 2 F