My husband, Julian Birch (1945-2015), set himself the task as a young man of photographing every castle site in the British Isles on which even a vestige of stone, a hump of earth or a remnant of a ditch remained. His interests eventually extended to other remains of the Middle Ages but not much beyond. If, after few days of chasing lumps of earth in a field or single arms of moats I tentatively suggested visiting a nearby Stately Home he would say incredulously that there was nothing there worth seeing.
The current collection represents his endeavours up to around 1990. For many years he gave evening classes to very appreciative audiences and this website primarily contains the working collection which supported these. He covered the wider social and economic context of castles so the slides include a range of other sites and the subject headings and descriptions are primarily those he used to organise the collection.
Our castling expeditions continued in the UK and abroad until a few years before his death but from the early 1990s he no longer did the evening classes and he failed to keep up with the detailed labelling of the slides which he felt necessary. He would get so far through one set, we would then go on another expedition not just in search of castles but also of, amongst others, Central Asia Nomads and the earlier set would be abandoned. I have retrieved as many slides a possible from these sets but the level of detail is much less, in some cases just the name of the site. This is why the amount of information for the slides is so varied.
The castles were just a hobby. His day job was as a lecturer in Soviet/Russian Studies and keeping up with the twists and turns of events there distracted him somewhat. Labelling and organising the backlog of slides was to be his retirement project but sadly he was struck down by illness before he was able to pursue this object to its conclusion and anyway he would always far rather set off on a new expedition than go over an old one. My attic is thus full of slides accompanied by lists of sites and it may be possible one day to extend this site further.
Counties
The assignment of places to counties is a fudge. Julian decided to use the post 1974 boundaries for the shire counties and adopted the new entities created then. Given the subsequent adjustments and the possibilities of future ones this did not seem satisfactory but the prospect of checking every place to find its pre 1974 county was too daunting so the following compromise has been adopted.
The 1974 Shire counties boundaries and names have been retained and subsequent adjustments ignored: e.g. Hereford and Worcester
Sites within the new entities created in 1974 e.g. Humberside but excluding Greater London, have been reassigned to their historic shire counties (I hope).
Given that the focus of this collection is on the Middle Ages I would like to have recreated the original counties but life is too short and it would probably have been even more confusing than the current compromise.
Copyright
This site should contain only photographs taken on site by Julian Birch and these are copyright but may be used freely in a non-commercial setting with an acknowledgement.
However, to save time Julian did take photographs for his own private use of information boards and other such material. Every attempt has been made to extract these before digitization but please let us know if any have slipped through and they will be taken down.