Romanesque Architecture---making castles

To learn about Romanesque architecture, we talked about several Romanesque/Norman-style castles and monasteries. We loved David Macaulay's book Castle to go along with this discussion. Then, of course, we wanted to make our own Romanesque castle! Important features of the era include small windows, large thick masonry walls, and defensive fortifications.

You can find lots of cardboard castle tutorials online, but all you really need are a bunch of boxes and containers and paper towel rolls and tape. We covered our castle in butcher paper so we could draw on it.

We didn't do the motte-and-bailey-style castle (where the city is downhill from the keep) but you could easily do that, with a couple more boxes to make the hill and the walled city. We made a central courtyard in ours. A lovely, Edenic place.

While we were building our castle, Daisy made her own castle all by herself. I love the flag on top. :)

The keep, with arrow loops on the upper story

We used an old cake box for our main outer wall, so it made sense to repurpose the clear top into a moat for the outside of the castle (with alligator, of course)

This bunny is entering the castle, across the moat

The drawbridge goes up and down with strings, but the portcullis just lifts up like a flap (we couldn't figure out how to make it slide up and down easily)

These soldiers are shooting flaming arrows from their positions between crenellations