Orford Castle - England
Traveller
🖼️ 13 images Traveler
Orford Castle is a 12th century castle located in Suffolk, England (East Anglia, a "bit" North of London). The castle itself did not survive, but the central keep is an impressive, thick walled tower with 5 floors and a useful roof. (Much more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orford_Castle and in https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/orford-castle/ )
The presented plan is of the keep as it stands today. Some elements have changed through the ages - arrow slits became windows and in modern times the roof was changed to a flat concrete slab, one of the smaller towers hosted a Radar antenna in WWII.
Very little "special" tools were used in the drawing , most of it is lines drawn over a scanned plan.
Basement - actually above ground, but has no external access. Has a well and maybe a prison cell.
First (and Second) floors - Lower hall (two storeys), external stairs lead to the gateway and entry hall. The Lower hall is 2 stories high, while several chambers and spiral stairs are built into the thick walls.
Second floor - A chapel.
Third floor (and Fourth) - Upper hall (two storeys). The main hall of the Keep, it used to have some sort of a wooden gallery or stairs (not in the current plan). There is an exit to the roof of the chapel.
Forth floor - a water cistern (yay in-door plumbing ;-) and a room that has access only from the missing wooden gallery.
Roof - used to be a conical wooden construction, now it is a flat concrete slab. Has 3 small towers, one of which is the keeps ovens. The older crenelations are lost.
Tower tops - Walkways and crenelations.
Comments
Basement
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First - Second Floors
Third - Fourth Floors
Roof
Your maps are nice, but I notice several of your fills look horribly pixelated. This is either due to their scaling being really wrong for this map, or the resolution settings being wrong. You can check the resolution settings by going to Display Speed Settings
and set them to manual - very high and see if that changes anything. If it doesn't, you'll need to edit the scaling for the fills, which you can find by clicking the fill style indicator in the top right, go to the bitmap files tab, select the correct fill, and severly reduce the values under 'scaled'.
Also, I would recommend replacing that old "striped" stone texture. That is an ancient legacy fill from the CC2 days, you should have better stone variants available.
Also, those castle walls will look nice with a small bevel applied to them, it helps enhance the 3-dimensional feeling of the wall.
I like the mapping of something historic, with reference to all the changes made over the years. Bravo.
Indeed, looking good!
The "stripy" stone texture might be improved by adding something like a mild Blur Effect to the Sheet it's on, though it doesn't really look too bad here anyway, to my eye.
I would though consider adding a scale to the maps, as it's hard to judge the size, and thus impact, of the structure without one.