The Repository Stone Record

Orford Castle Has Two Kitchens in One Turret

October 30, 2026 · Runtime 8:56 · Watch on YouTube

Orford Castle's keep has two kitchens, one above the other, in one turret. The official listing names that turret twice: west in its plan, south-west in its rooms. We measured the three turrets in nine years of Environment Agency laser survey: 22, 142 and 272 degrees. The kitchen turret is the west one.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Two kitchens, two names
  2. 0:43 What the guides repeat
  3. 1:11 The listing names one turret twice
  4. 1:52 Nine laser surveys of the keep
  5. 2:29 Measuring the turrets
  6. 3:17 The height check
  7. 3:29 Hartshorne's survey, 1840
  8. 4:07 Basement and entrance
  9. 4:37 South-east turret: the stair
  10. 5:03 North turret: chambers and the oven
  11. 5:24 West turret: the first kitchen
  12. 5:48 How a kitchen gives itself away
  13. 6:35 The second kitchen and the cistern
  14. 7:21 Why two kitchens
  15. 7:46 What the laser cannot see
  16. 8:11 How to read this keep

Transcript

Two kitchens, two names 0:00

Orford Castle has two kitchens, one above the other, in one turret of its keep. Which turret? The official description gives it two names, west and south-west. So we measured the turrets ourselves, in the Environment Agency's laser survey.

Henry the Second began this tower on the Suffolk coast in eleven sixty-five. Round inside, many-sided outside, with three square turrets standing out from it, and a lower block against its side.

By the end you will know what is in each turret, floor by floor. How a kitchen gives itself away in stone. And why a careful description can point the wrong way.

What the guides repeat 0:43

The English Heritage visitor page puts the interior in one line. A maze of passages, leading to the chapel, kitchen and other chambers in the turrets. One kitchen, and no turret named.

A village website repeats that sentence word for word. Another online guide puts the kitchen and the toilets in the western turret. The official listing, which describes every room, says both.

The listing names one turret twice 1:11

The listing is Historic England's scheduling text for the monument, last amended in nineteen ninety-six. Its plan of the keep names the turrets by the compass: north-north-east, west, and south-east.

Then it walks you through the rooms, and inside, the turrets change names. The northern turret. The south-eastern turret. And, for both kitchens, the south-western turret.

Same page, same tower. One turret is west in one paragraph and south-west in another. Standing in the grass with the guide in your hand, you need to know which wall to look for.

Nine laser surveys of the keep 1:52

So we went to the laser. The Environment Agency has surveyed Orford from the air in nine different years since two thousand and eight. Each pass records the height of the ground and of everything on it.

One survey gives a few points per square metre on the keep. All nine together give about thirty. That is enough to draw the tower on a grid a quarter of a metre wide.

What you are seeing is that drawing. Nothing in it is modelled by hand. Every height is a laser return, the ground comes from the terrain model, and the vertical scale is true.

Measuring the turrets 2:29

Now measure. Take the centre of the tower and the top of each turret. The first stands twenty-two degrees from north. That is north-north-east, almost to the degree.

The second is at a hundred and forty-two degrees: south-east. The third is at two hundred and seventy-two. That is west. South-west would be two hundred and twenty-five.

So the compass list in the listing is right, and the room descriptions are an eighth of the compass off. The kitchen turret is the west turret.

English Heritage's own floor plans of the keep, drawn in twenty twenty, agree. They label both kitchens in the turret on the west side, with north at the top of the sheet.

The height check 3:17

The laser checks the listing in one more place. It puts the turret tops twenty-seven point four metres above the grass at the foot of the keep. The listing says about twenty-seven.

Hartshorne's survey, 1840 3:29

Now go inside, with the listing and an older witness. In eighteen forty the Reverend Charles Hartshorne went through the keep room by room, and read his notes to the Society of Antiquaries.

He saw the plan at once: a circular centre, with towers on three sides. Three main floors in the centre. But five in the towers, because two of them sit between the main floors.

That is the first rule for reading this keep. The halls are tall, and the turrets slip extra floors into the height. The room you are looking for is often halfway up.

Basement and entrance 4:07

Start at the bottom. The basement is a store, lit by three narrow loops. In the middle is a well, lined with stone, about thirteen metres deep. In the east wall, a shallow sink and a drain.

You do not come in here. The door is one floor up, through the lower block, by an outside stair. Under its lobby is a small dark room reached by a ladder. The listing calls it a probable prison.

South-east turret: the stair 4:37

The south-east turret holds the great spiral stair. Hartshorne measured the corner there at nineteen feet thick. With only one exception, he wrote, the stair reaches every room in the keep.

At the top of that turret today is a block of concrete: a look-out post from the Second World War. In Hartshorne's day, the same turret was used for signals, and carried a flag staff.

North turret: chambers and the oven 5:03

The north turret stands behind the hall fireplaces. It holds small chambers, one above another, reached by short passages and a little stair of its own.

And at the very top, above the roof, Hartshorne found what he called the most remarkable feature of the whole interior. A large oven, built of Norman brick.

West turret: the first kitchen 5:24

Which leaves the west turret, the busiest of the three. Off the lower hall, through a window recess, is a vaulted room with a double hearth against its outer wall.

In its north wall is a shallow sink. The drain runs through the wall and out of a stone spout on the outside. A later opening now leads from this room to a double latrine in the wall.

How a kitchen gives itself away 5:48

Here is how a kitchen gives itself away. A fireplace alone makes a warm room. A fireplace with a sink, and a drain to carry the water out, makes a room where food was prepared.

Hartshorne stood in this room and was careful. A scullery, he wrote, or a room for culinary purposes. Two fireplaces side by side, and a sink.

Climb to the level between the two halls. Above the lower kitchen, in the same turret, are the chaplain's rooms, reached by a passage from the main stair.

A door off that passage opens onto the chapel, which sits over the entrance lobby. It is an odd, roughly triangular room, with the remains of an altar in a recess.

The second kitchen and the cistern 6:35

Then the upper hall, the room for the lord and his guests. And in the west turret, in the same position as the first, a second kitchen.

The listing says it is laid out like the one below, with a smaller fireplace and a single chimney, and the sink and its drain at floor level. Beside it, a latrine, directly above another.

Hartshorne gave this room the same hedge. A chamber with a fireplace and a sink, he wrote, occasionally used for the purposes of cooking.

Above the second kitchen is one more small room. It is believed to have been a cistern, catching rain from the roof. Four rooms, stacked in one turret, and every one of them about water or fire.

Why two kitchens 7:21

Why two kitchens? The listing's answer is the two halls. The lower one for the garrison and the household, the upper one for the lord. Each hall was served by its own kitchen.

Part of this you can check from outside. The chutes from the latrines, the double one below and the single ones above, come out at the foot of the wall in two pairs of arches.

What the laser cannot see 7:46

Two limits. The laser sees roofs and outer walls, never rooms. Every room in this episode comes from the listing, the English Heritage plans, and Hartshorne, not from the survey.

And we did not open the official guidebook by R. Allen Brown, which the listings point to. If the south-western name has a source, that is the next place to look.

How to read this keep 8:11

So, to read a keep like this. Find the stair first, because it reaches everything. Look for fire, water and a drain in the same room. And check every compass word against north on the plan.

A tower that sits a little turned on its mound will collect two names for one turret, and both will sound right. The stone has one answer. You can measure it.

Orford fed two halls from one turret, one kitchen above the other. Next time: the oubliette, the trapdoor prison under the floor. Warwick Castle shows one to its visitors. Viollet-le-Duc, who made the word famous, wrote that most of them were latrine pits.

Description and sources

The keep Henry II began at Orford in 1165 has three square turrets. Historic England's scheduling text (list entry 1014860, amended 1996) names them in its plan as north-north-east, west and south-east, and then, room by room, puts both kitchens in 'the south western turret'. We combined the Environment Agency's airborne laser surveys of the keep from nine years (2008-2024, about 31 points per square metre) into a quarter-metre grid: the turret tops stand at 22, 142 and 272 degrees from the centre of the tower, and 27.4 m above the grass at its foot (the listing: c.27 m). West is 270; south-west would be 225. English Heritage's floor plans (2020) label both kitchens in the west turret. Inside, by the listing and Charles Hartshorne's survey read to the Society of Antiquaries in 1840: the spiral stair in the south-east turret, chambers and a Norman-brick oven in the north turret, and in the west turret a lower kitchen (double hearth, sink, drain to a stone spout), the chaplain's rooms, an upper kitchen, and a probable rain cistern. The laser sees roofs, not rooms; the rooms come from the documents. We did not open R. Allen Brown's guidebook, so we do not say where 'south western' comes from.

PRINT-READY, FROM THIS CHANNEL

How to Read a Castle, Vol. 01 — the method, the measured drawings and the documents behind the first two episodes

https://therepository.gumroad.com/l/read-a-castle

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • Environment Agency airborne LIDAR, 13 survey views drawn for this episode (2018 / 2008-2024) | Environment Agency (Defra Data Services Platform) | Open Government Licence v3.0
  • The Royal History of Eastern England. James Macdonald Co, 1873. — 1737 (printed 1873) | Wikimedia Commons | Public domain
  • Keith Roper — 2009 | Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 2.0
  • Flickr user: Draco 2008 https://www.flickr.com/people/draco2008/ — 2008 | Wikimedia Commons | CC BY 2.0

Stone Record reads castles as documents — what the paperwork and the standing masonry actually say, against what gets repeated. Primary sources are linked above.

The moving survey views are drawn from the Environment Agency's airborne LIDAR (Open Government Licence v3.0; © Environment Agency copyright and/or database right): the ground is the 2018 0.5 m terrain model, and the keep is the point clouds of nine surveys (2008-2024) on a 0.25 m grid, at true vertical scale. Trees and the town's buildings are left out of the drawing on purpose. Nothing is AI-generated. The other images are public-domain or CC BY material from Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive, credited on screen; the diagrams and set-type quotations are code, drawings of the argument.

#castles #history #medieval