Did you know there's a website called Thousand Castles, which has, or at least aims to have, a page documenting every "castle" in the world? Rather more than a thousand, obviously, especially since they're very broad about the meaning of the word "castle". The front page says there are 56,956 of them, including a lot of things that are a very long way away from counting as a castle if you ask me.
But I was pleased to see that the local castle from where I grew up, Tattershall Castle, was ranked 446th of all the castles in the world, and that you can vote castles up and down to affect the ranking - when I gave the place a vote, it went up to its current position of 434th. It really is quite a nice place, although being made of red brick instead of stone it really doesn't look so much like a castle should. But it's still cool to visit on a cheap school outing if you go to a primary school just down the road.
But the best part of the website was noticing that there's a page for another "castle" about ten miles further down the road - Horncastle!
I went to secondary school in Horncastle. That's the school badge up at the top of this blog entry, with a beautiful illustration of a horn and a castle. Horncastle is ranked only 46,619th on Thousand Castles, and the page describing it is a little lacking in detail, with no pictures. That's because it's a small town, not a castle. As we learnt at school, the name is nothing to do with horns or castles - it derives from 'hyrn' (angle, corner) and 'castrum' (settlement). It was a Roman walled town two thousand years ago, which I suppose just about falls under the website's definition of a castle. There are a few old bits of the Roman wall lying around the place. I assume the library's still got its mini-museum section with a couple of yards of wall on display.
We need to get more of this kind of "castle" added to the site. I've seen chip shops called Castle Chippy before now. Add them in there, and vote them to the top of the world rankings!
