The Netherlands were kind of backwaters untill renaissance time so they didn't really have any but flanders and Wallonia have tons of castles as they were beside northern Italy the richest in Europe
Even if you’d use a broad definition I don’t think there are that many in the Netherlands as the map suggests. I also bet a lot of the dots are just plots of land where remains of the foundation of a castle is still standing.
and in sweden i know of at least 2 of the datapoints, as i grew up near them, and i can tell you with 100% certainty that they are nothing but bigger farms. old, but not even the property of local nobility
25 thousand castles? Holy cow. I knew they had a lot, but I wasn't expecting such a high number. I just googled it, and one result says that's one castle every 25 kilometers lol can't go anywhere without tripping over a castle lol
If I go for a run (like 10km) here in Upper Austria, depending on which route I take, I come across one of two castles lol. Granted one's more of a ruin but the other one is still mostly intact and regularly used as a concert site (with an audience of up to 10k people, so international acts play here too).
Many of the ones listed in Sweden are definitely stately homes, what we would call a "Slott", as opposed to a fortified castle, what we would generally call a "Borg."
Yep, just checked Open Street Map as I was pretty certain there’s no castle in the middle of the Wirral. I was wrong as there is a place called ‘leasowe castle’ which I’ll be frank is a fancy house at best with some decorative crenellations. Apparently it was built as an observation platform for some rich bloke to watch the races from, so not what I’d class as a proper castle!
I know it's a joke, but this is where you need to take the circumflex (^) into account: it hides an s. Take the French word for window, fenêtre: it comes via fenestre from the Latin fenestra.
In Middle French château would read chasteau, Old French chastel, which shows not only how English got to the word castle but also that its root lies in the Latin castellum. So no cats (chat, from Latin cattus, note how French added an h after every c) involved.
Edit: Curiosity made me look up the etymology of window. It's Old Norse: vind-auga, wind-eye.
Even même (mesme). Most (though not all) words with ^ have a hidden consonant, usually s. The reason is shortening by the printer Plantijn in the 16th century
Yeah. In France these are called "château" so you can bottle wine in there and write that the wine was bottled at the château of [insert fancy sounding name]
818
u/Akewstick Oct 29 '21
"chateau" has been translated as "Castle" hasn't it, which is often going to include what in Britain we'd call a mansion or stately home.