In the medieval period a king needed strong castles to defend his borders. The massive buildings made his own people feel safe and sent out the message ‘don’t mess with me!’ to his enemies.
So what makes a good castle? We reckoned the best way to find out would be to build one ourselves.
We started by making the ‘stone’ building blocks – and it takes quite a few blocks to build a castle – as you can imagine!
But we worked out a way of mass-producing them and soon had plenty of excellent masonry piled up and ready to use.
The next step was to decide on the ground plans and design of our castles. So we had a bit of a think about the best place for gates, kitchens and keeps.
Before long we were surrounded by castles! They were all excellent, with brilliant defensive double-walls and impregnable keeps. This gave our leaders a bit of a problem. The idea had been to give a prize to the best one. But it was so difficult to choose between them that in the end there were prizes for us all!
