Definitions

Revival and folly

Castles built as architecture rather than defence: nineteenth-century romantic revivals, castellated country houses, and sham castles that are sometimes a screen wall and nothing behind it.

Criterion

A structure built after the defensive era in castle form — battlements, towers, curtain-wall silhouette — for aesthetic, symbolic, picturesque or status purposes, with no defensive intent at any point in its history.

Includes

• Gothic Revival and castellated country houses
• Sham castles and eyecatchers, including facades with no interior
• Purpose-built romantic castles of the nineteenth century

Excludes

• Genuine castles later restored or romanticised — the original intent governs
• Reconstructions of real castles on their own sites

Closure: open

Not closable, and honestly labelled: no register recognises "folly" as a designation class. Individual examples are protected as listed buildings — Leyburn Sham Castle is Grade II listed — but they are listed as buildings, so no filter extracts them. This is also the one band whose authority is this project itself, which is stated rather than dressed up.

This band will never close. No register bounds it and none could, so it publishes a distribution or a range with its assumptions visible — never a fabricated total. A coverage cell that tried to give it a world population figure would fail the build.

Who defines it this way

• canonical-castles — This project's own band, defined here for want of an external authority (source) — this project's own band; no external authority

In this dataset

Derived from the records, not typed. See counts and coverage.

Note

Philip Davis draws a distinction most datasets collapse — a SYMBOLIC castle, built in castle form to assert status, is not the same as a SHAM castle, built as scenery. This band currently holds both. Splitting it is a live open question rather than a settled design.

Assessed records

Structures somebody applied this criterion to, with the reasoning.

• Neuschwanstein Castle — yes: Built after the defensive era in castle form - towers, curtain-wall silhouette, battlements - for aesthetic and symbolic purposes, with no defensive intent at any point. A textbook nineteenth-century romantic revival.
• Sham Castle — yes: The limiting case of the band: a screen wall built in 1762 as an eyecatcher for a view from the city, with no rooms, no staircases and nothing behind the facade. Castle form for purely picturesque purposes, with no defensive intent at any point.

Definition file · dataset licensed CC BY 4.0