The Castle Builders - Masters & Masons - How Medieval Castles Were Built Ep.1<br /><br />Castles – citadels of world heritage. All over Europe, millions flock to see these masterpieces in stone.<br />They are drawn by the astonishing scale of construction – and by a sense of a lost world of heroism and chivalry. But castles are more than magnificent monuments to a past that’s dead and gone. They hold the key to understanding a crucial period in the growth of our civilisation.<br /><br />In this first episode, we’ll see how some of the great castles of Europe were built, and how the ideas and techniques behind their construction changed and developed in a few short centuries. Kings and barons found the resources and manpower to start building castles, and spent fortunes on finishing them – and all of this happened at on a huge scale, at a frenetic pace, and often in the heart of hostile territory.<br /><br />We’ll meet the Castle Builders – the labourers and masons who did the hard work; the geniuses of design who imagined them, the structural engineers who turned them into reality; and the kings and barons who commissioned them and lived in them.<br /><br />We’ll travel from Richard the Lionheart’s astonishing Chateau Gauillard in Normandy to the ‘layered’ defences of Caerphilly – the first castle in Britain built to be defended by walls within walls – and around Edward I’s massive ‘ring of iron’ that gripped North Wales.<br /><br />Large-scale dramatic reconstructions and state-of-the-art computer graphics will give us a thrilling sense of how all of these mediaeval mega-structures were designed and built.<br /><br />