THE BELVOIR CASTLE

The Belvoir Castle is built mostly from the same black basalt upon which it stands, with limestone employed as freestone as well as for much of the inner and upper parts of the inner ward. It consists of two almost square enceintes, one inside the other, both defended by projecting rectangular towers.

The outer enceinte (100×110 m) is surrounded on three sides by a rock-cut ditch, 20–25 m wide and 12 m deep, from the bottom of which the walls rise on a battered base.

The east side, however, was protected by the natural scarp and by a projecting barbican, roughly 30 m square and probably no more than two storey high, which commanded the otherwise dead ground below and contained the main entrance.

The principal route into the castle led from an outer gate at the foot of the south-eastern tower, up a ramp and into the barbican, before doubling back and up again to reach an inner gate next to the same corner tower.

The inner gate is 2.35 m wide and was closed by a pair of wing-doors, defended above by a slit-machicolation between two pointed arches and from either side by enfilading embrasures.

A secondary gate, more conveniently sited for peacetime use but easily decommissioned in time of war, lay on the west of the castle and was probably reached across a level timber bridge spanning the ditch.

The outer walls would originally have stood some 12–16 m high (or 25 m within the ditch) and 3 m thick, but the destruction has left no more than 3 m standing. From their outer face, at the angles and mid-way along the sides, massive rectangular towers project; the three towers at the south-west contained staircases leading down to narrow posterns concealed in the angles where they met the curtain wall.

The inner face of the wall was lined with a continuous barrel vault, 8 m wide internally, which, besides providing covered accommodation for the personnel, stores, stables, smithies and other services of the castle’s outer ward, in wartime would have also given protection to those firing from the embrasures in the outer wall and created another tier of defence on the terrace above.

Enclosed by the outer enceinte, like a castle within a castle, stood the inner ward, some 50 m square with a tower 10 m square projecting at each corner. The inner ward had two entrances, a small postern on the east and a wider gate on the west, to which was later added a projecting rectangular gate-tower with an outer gate set in its southern flank, forming a bent entrance.

Both gates in the gate-tower have slit-machicolations above them; but while the outer one is set between two pointed arches, the inner one is placed behind a flat arch with decorative joggled voussoirs of a type probably derived from contemporary Islamic architecture. There is also a postern in the north wall of the gate-tower.

In the centre of the inner ward, a courtyard some 22 m square is enclosed by barrel-vaulted ranges. The undercrofts seem to have contained stores, stables and, on the south-east, a kitchen, while the living area of the knights seems to have been on the floor above, with access by a stone staircase on the south side of the courtyard.

On this piano nobile were to be found the chapel above the western gate and probably the dormitory and refectory; but all that remains of these more finely built apartments are some fragments of corbels, capitals, pilasters and sculpture, including the head of a youth and an unfinished flying angel (both Jerusalem, Rockefeller Mus).