I love the round towers too. I got mine from Ridge Road last summer for an incredible price. I am still mad that I didn't buy more than one!
Anne
It's a shame they haven't introduced round towers to System-X yet. The early Crusaders saw round towers in the Holy Land, and from the 13th Century on started incorporating them into English castle design.
The round tower had several advantages over a square one - it deflected missiles better, no corners made one more difficult to undermine in a long siege, and they presented better interlocking fields of fire.
The round tower enjoyed a resurgence during the Tudor period with improvements in cannon power. Gun forts along the coast such as those at Pendennis
St Mawes
and Portland
to name but a few, were composed entirely of rounded sections, and the string of Martello Towers
erected to keep that pesky Napoleon off our shores took the idea of a small self-contained gun tower to its logical conclusion.
Of course some people are more illogical with their choice of location.
I've visited the first three castles, really gun forts, and see many Martello towers, though not this particular one which is in South Africa.
Pendennis and St Mawes make a marvellous day's visit as a pair.
Originally built to protect the approach to Falmouth Harbour in Cornwall, the guns of each could fire 1/2 a mile across the mouth of the river, which was a mile wide, so they needed one each side.
By Elizabeth's reign the technology had improved enough that guns could fire a mile, so now only one was required. Pendennis was chosen (being the same side of the river as Falmouth, I guess, it was easier to support and supply by land) and sections were upgraded or added to from the date of the Spanish Armada until WW2, when it was still in use (with new guns).
St Mawes meanwhile was mothballed, and remains structurally almost unchanged from the day it was built.
