I can lean out and down and I can shoot.
Hi it's Tod from Tod's Workshop and Tod Cutler here and today I am at Dover Castle. So thank
you very much Dover Castle and English Heritage for letting me film here because there's really
interesting things about this place. I mean obviously it's a fantastic, iconic,
complete, nearly mint in most of it, castle. You know those are rare, the other thing that is
amazing for me is that 13, 14 years ago they did a fantastic renovation project on the Great Keep
here behind me, trying to show what it might have looked like when it was recently built
and I made loads of pieces that went in there, but of course the salt atmosphere and all the visitors
touching and, and breathing, means that things get degraded. So every year I come in and I clean and
I repair and I make sure that everything's as good as it can be for the visitor season coming up and
so for me this is like a, a marker in my year. You know we have Christmas and then the next big event
for me is coming down to Dover and spending two or three days in the Great Keep on my own because the
place is closed, so I have this fantastic royal household to myself and that is an amazing thing.
So let's go up the top and I'll show you the site because this place has been continuously
a military encampment since the iron age, so let's say two and a half thousand years until only seven
or eight years ago and that of course has left a fantastic legacy which we can see from the top of
the tower, so let's go. I'm up on the battlements now and in fact this shot here pretty much sums up
Dover Castle; this battlement behind me 1180, that tower there, it's the old Roman lighthouse from
when they landed and invaded and then on this side here, we've got second world war bomb shelters
and everything in between. It's just layer upon layer, year upon year, of human endeavour really,
and time and history and living and dying and fighting and loving and all of that.
So you've got on the right hand side here Saint Marie in Castro church which is of course
within the defences of the castle, because your spiritual life is massively important in the 12th,
13th, 14th century, but then on the right hand side of the church you have what was
a bell tower for a while, but it's the Roman pharos, a Roman lighthouse
and then just above it where it sort of thins down a little bit, with the battlements on it,
that's actually a 15th century edition and I think it was a bell tower for a while. The church
itself is Saxon, thousand AD, but doesn't look it because the Victorians came in and "improved it"
and then you go to the left and you've got some gun emplacements, but the whole place is just a
hive of activity. Under here we actually have a tunnel system of four miles, so about six
kilometers of tunnels, they've been built since Napoleonic times. Well seeing as we are on a
castle battlement, there's something that I'd like to show you and that's the relative difference in
this situation between a longbow and a crossbow, because people of course always associate English
armies with the longbow, but crossbows were very, very useful in certain situations. Now imagine
this, so I've got a siege happening outside, I'm going to shoot somebody who's right down at the
front of my tower, my longbow is heavy and hard to draw, I've got to put all my work into it,
but now I'm trying to get my bow over that battlement and I'm trying to lean out
and shoot down. It's awkward as anything and actually to shoot outward, no problem at all,
I can do that to shoot downward, really hard. So again if I then take my crossbow,
I'm now able to span my crossbow, to load it and now I can lean out and down and I can shoot. and
If you're wondering whether the bolt is going to fall off, it's not, because I just put my thumb
on the back of the bolt so you can shoot straight downward, it's still awkward but I can do it. But
the other thing of course don't forget now is that castles very often had hoardings all around it,
so actually the battlement was part of the defences, but there'd be a wooden walkway
all the way around on the outside which has got better access for shooting downward, but
of course it's not just the shooting of bows or crossbows that you do from battlements like this,
there's all the other defensive things that you can use. Rocks, big ones,
like baskets of smaller ones , incendiary compounds of some kind, burning pitch and things,
hot oil water but then of course my current favourite, war darts, and these are absolutely
perfect for sieges and you see them fair amount in manuscript pictures and the reason is that
because they have the fletchings here if i throw a spear out there it won't necessarily fall through
and point down they can be a little bit awkward these things because of the fletchings i just
have to toss them over the side and they will straighten up and drop down onto the
attackers so this is just a small introduction to dover castle but i'm gonna have some more
films where we start to look at the inside of the tower as well, so I'll see you next time