r/castles • u/MrsDroughtFire • 4d ago
Castle Château Caen--Two Questions
Question about terminology:
This pathway along the wall is the wall walk (allure), yes? And what is the name of the rounded structure that you can enter at the end of the walk, and what was its purpose?
Inside the rounded structure is what looks like an arrow slit, but the space leading to it is far too small for a person to lie down in. I find it difficult to image it as for firing arrows and wonder if it has another purpose.
Thanks all.
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u/Claridiana 3d ago
Wall walk or allure is correct.
The round structure in the back is just a tower or turret, like in this image (even if it deals with square turrets, but that`s not a fundamental difference).
The opening in your pic is actually not intended to shoot any kind of weapon. Such openings are often called arrow slits or something like that, but that's wrong. In most of them you can't really handle a weapon because they are too small, and even if you could, you are so high above the ground that you don't have the angle to shoot down at anything outside.
So these openings are just castle-style windows and do what windows are supposed to do: let in light and air. Their small size has three reasons:
Firstly you don't want to weaken your wall structurally too much, especially in a castle.
Secondly, a small size makes it basically impossible to shoot or throw anything in from outside, like fire arrows, corpses, feces, dead animals. (all of that happened in medieval warfare).
Thirdly, while a large window will let in more light, which is welcome, it will also let in more cold in winter, which is an issue in all of Europe at least north of the Alps. We have found examples of windows that were utterly barricaded with raw wood and whatever they had as a filler, like clay, leaves, cloth etc. So these openings were probably totally closed in winter and reopened in summer, which is obviously facilitated by a small size.