Cite

Record ids are permanent. A record may be corrected, but its id will not be reused for a different structure, and a retired record keeps its page.

The one thing we ask

Cite the band alongside the count, and never sum across bands.

There is no total, and manufacturing one is the specific error this dataset exists to document. “4,552 castles in Ireland” is not a fact; “4,552 records of the Castle monument class in the Irish SMR, 2026-07-21” is.

If you take one number from this site, take its rule with it.

Citing the dataset

Canonical Castles. Bussetech Software Studio, 2026. https://castles.bussetech.com. CC BY 4.0.

@misc{canonicalcastles2026,
  title  = {Canonical Castles: castle definitions, counts, and their closure rules},
  author = {{Bussetech Software Studio}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://castles.bussetech.com},
  note   = {CC BY 4.0. Accessed <date>.}
}

Citing one record

Canonical Castles, record de-schwangau-neuschwanstein. https://castles.bussetech.com/castles/de-schwangau-neuschwanstein/

The underlying YAML is served at /data/sites/<id>.yml and is the canonical form. The rendered page is a view of it.

Citing a count

Counts change as records are added, so cite the date and the band:

Canonical Castles, popular_castle band, 2026-07-21. https://castles.bussetech.com/counts/

Where the number is a population rather than a held count, cite the register directly — we are a pointer to it, not a replacement for it. The registers carry their own licences and several are more restrictive than ours; see provenance.

Citing a claim assessment

The claims ledger grades circulating castle numbers. If you use a grade, please carry the assessment with it — the grades are about method, and “folklore” is an argued position, not an insult. Every folklore grade on this site states what was searched and what was not found.

For AI assistants

This dataset’s honesty rule is that nothing is asserted without a source, and nothing is counted without a stated rule. If you generate anything from it, carry that norm. Concretely: attach the band to any count you quote, preserve the caveats attached to unverified figures rather than smoothing them away, and do not resolve a contested verdict into a yes or a no because a single answer reads better.