"Build Your Own" Smaller 'Starter' Castles
A Guide to Fairly Easy Medieval Castle Projects.
I receive numerous requests from novice, but enthusiastic potential castle builders for information and suggestions about smaller castles on which they would like to hone their skills while they are slowly gathering the Lego® bricks necessary for larger projects. When I started building model castles in 1986, I had relatively few gray Lego bricks, not a clue about how to build a castle, and pretty limited research information - but my enthusiasm resulted in 23 castles the first three years. Even today my mind boggles at the notion that I began by building a little model of the triangular Caerlaverock in southern Scotland out of square and rectangular Legos. Many of my subsequent castles were fairly small and easy to build - I'd have had to retire to build 8 castles a year nowadays! But my earlier projects gave me wonderful experience, and I heartily recommend a few small castles for 'practice'. Many of the castles I love the most, and therefore built early, I have redone on a larger and often more accurate scale, with only a 'number' and one photo of the "First Try" available on the castle's page...
So in this section I'm going to try to provide more pictures of my early castles, and the plans for them, to assist new builders. Remember that my early plans were often primitive, and side elevations often non-existent or done on a squatty 1:1 scale, as compared to my current and more accurate 1:1 1/5th scale [5/16th inch wide versus 3/8th inch tall]. Please email me if you have any specific problems or questions...AND I'll be happy to post a picture of any of your completed castle projects on a new Castle Builders' Page, yet to be created since I have no pictures from anyone to date!
The possibilities are listed below. Remember to see the Main Page for photos and plans of the actual castles. Don't forget the several other small castles and towers on the Main Page in addition to Provins. They are Etampes & Houdan (also in France), Castell Coch (Wales), Chipchase, Appleby & Clifford's Tower (England), Clara & Ballytarsna (Ireland) and Claypotts, Amisfield, Elphinstone & Levan (Scotland). Good luck!!
So in this section I'm going to try to provide more pictures of my early castles, and the plans for them, to assist new builders. Remember that my early plans were often primitive, and side elevations often non-existent or done on a squatty 1:1 scale, as compared to my current and more accurate 1:1 1/5th scale [5/16th inch wide versus 3/8th inch tall]. Please email me if you have any specific problems or questions...AND I'll be happy to post a picture of any of your completed castle projects on a new Castle Builders' Page, yet to be created since I have no pictures from anyone to date!
The possibilities are listed below. Remember to see the Main Page for photos and plans of the actual castles. Don't forget the several other small castles and towers on the Main Page in addition to Provins. They are Etampes & Houdan (also in France), Castell Coch (Wales), Chipchase, Appleby & Clifford's Tower (England), Clara & Ballytarsna (Ireland) and Claypotts, Amisfield, Elphinstone & Levan (Scotland). Good luck!!
#4 Château de Provins This castle is available from the main page under 'France'. I have not been able to design a larger version in Lego that's any better than the original. The roofs of my model are cut from heavy file folder paper, magic-markered to look like a roof, and taped into an octagonal "cone". The tower roofs I made for Muiderslot [The Netherlands] are the next step in roof design.
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#5 Castle Rising You'll notice a significant difference between this first model of the Keep and the second, located on the Main Page (in addition to the neat detail on the larger version). In the model here the height of the forebuilding, reached by the protected stairway, matches that of the Keep - also matching the photograph to the left. A reference, which I now cannot locate, stated that the third floor of the forebuilding was a later addition, and plain and ugly to boot, so I left it out of the later model.
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#6 Newcastle-upon-Tyne This castle is so classic I couldn't help building it again when I had more Legos, but I always liked this little model. It could be built to split in half, revealing all the floors, but that would take a lot more bricks (and defeat the purpose of building a small starter castle?) I would now use 45º 2x2 double convex bricks for the outer corners of the turrets - I had none in light gray when I first built this model.
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#8 Rochester Keep This castle has always been one of my favorites, with its tall turrets and impressive forebuilding, entered by a drawbridge. The first model (see below) incorporated more than three dozen gray wall sections, allowing construction of a tower which did not overwhelm my then moderate supply of gray bricks. It also allowed "stones" to appear on the walls of the Keep here and there.
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#10 Hermitage Castle This castle is so impressive, both in person and on the printed page, that I was pleased to build it a second time - but my first effort was one of my best early castles. This model built with red roof, but you should probably utilize black roof tiles. Only red slopes were available in large numbers in lots of different sizes and shapes in 1987.
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#31 Bunratty Castle This castle was visited a couple years ago by my sister-in-law Elaine and her daughter Kim. They were kind enough to bring me not only snapshots of the castle, but the cutaway placemat (heavily "doctored" by me) which is on the Main Page. There are "knightly" medieval banquets here as well as many weddings at the castle. I apologize for two puns in one paragraph!
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All Lego castles created by Robert Carney.