News and notes

This page collects what has been added or revised, with enough of each piece to tell whether it is worth following. The record is added to when there is something to add, which is the honest way to run a site about a building that has not changed in five hundred years.

Ireland's most picturesque and popular castles

A survey of the Irish castles worth the detour: Blarney, Bunratty, Cahir, Kylemore and the Rock of Cashel, with the test that separates a genuine medieval keep from a nineteenth-century house built to look like one. It ends across the Irish Sea, at the English estates now let as venues, among them the De Vere Horsley Estate.

Read the full piece, which covers Blarney, Bunratty, Cahir, the Rock of Cashel and Kylemore, and sets out how to tell a genuine medieval castle from a nineteenth-century one built to look like it.

Eight papers from the Friends of the Old Hall

The association's exhibition notes, events schedules and press files are now indexed. The fullest is the Rose Throckmorton material prepared for the 2013 exhibition, which follows Rose Locke, a London mercer's daughter who married into the Hickman family, from Cheapside into exile in Antwerp and back. The Richard III file covers the king's visit, which the cutting dates to October 1483 and English Heritage to 1484. All eight are listed in the archive index.

The photographic record is thinner than the paper one. The views page carries the room-by-room sequence, and the two kitchen frames are the most valuable of it: a medieval kitchen with two roasting hearths of that size is a rare survival.

Two pages on English painting

Two pages cover the English school. Old English paintings covers Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough and the problem they were all solving: how to have a national school when the only market was for portraits. The Pre-Raphaelites covers the generation that decided the answer had been wrong.

The connection to a fifteenth-century manor is not decorative. The Pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic Revivalists were looking for exactly the kind of medieval building this one is, never pulled down or rebuilt into something else, and a good deal of Victorian interest in halls like it comes directly from that search.

Great houses, listed buildings and the very largest

Three related pages have been rewritten: UK house styles on dating a building from the street, historical buildings in the UK on how listing actually works, and the Mayfair megamansion on what the largest private house in the country is and why almost none of it is visible.

The last of these makes a point worth repeating here. A medieval hall put its money into the room that visitors saw first; the modern equivalent puts it into rooms designed so that nobody knows they exist. Both are the most a household could build in its moment.

Five pages on casinos and their arithmetic

Five pages make up the casino section. Four of them set out arithmetic rather than ranking brands: house edge and RTP game by game, the UK rules on tax, age and player protection, what a no-deposit offer is worth once the winnings cap is applied, and what to check on the Gambling Commission register before trusting a site. The fifth is a review of a single operator, All British Casino.

Where the section cites something outside itself, it says what the thing is. The Oxford Mail's survey of roulette sites is affiliate content, a commercial comparison carried by a regional paper, and is pointed to as an example of that form rather than as independent reporting.

How this record is maintained

Pages are revised when there is something to revise. A building that has stood since the 1460s does not generate news on a schedule, and most of what changes here is a correction or a document added to the index.

Where a fact rests on local tradition and not on evidence, the text says so. Royal visits attract that treatment most often: Richard III in 1483 is documented, Henry VIII in 1541 is well attested, and several later claims are repeated more confidently than the record supports.

Questions about this record