The Medieval Fortified Buildings of Cumbria by Denis R Perriam

The Medieval Fortified Buildings of Cumbria

An Illustrated Gazetteer and Research Guide

Denis R Perriam

John Robinson

Over 440 A4 sized pages in which 495 medieval fortified building are descibed. Most existing sites have a ground plan. This text is as truely a comprehensive county gazetteer as one could ever expect to get. It modestly calls itself an update of John Curwen's Castles and Fortified Towers of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire North of the Sands. Not the source for a detailed history of a well know castle, though it will give you the right references of where to go, but for a county wide research project it would be indispensible. For my purpose in identifying all the medieval fortified sites this is perfect. Comprehensive, well sourced and fully referenced it gives the reader full confidence in the accuracy of its content. My only complaint would be the inclusion of homestead moats, Abbey gatehouse, unfortified hall houses and some other such features in a gazetteer of fortified buildings. This has the effect of rather inflating the numbers of fortifications. In the appendix they give a statistic table and record that King gave a total of 18 earthwork sites for the area and that they give a total of 91. But since King excluded homestead moats from his definition of a fortification and they do not this does seem a misleading comparison and of the sites I have record of which they don't include almost all are possible earthwork castles. That said I consider 442 of their 495 sites to be worth entering into my database

442 sites

Published by Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society (1998 )
ISBN 1 8731234 23 6

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Last updated on Monday, January 22, 2007

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