Let me tell you something: there IS a floor plan of Castle McDuck, and it has existed for almost 30 years!
I don’t know if you know anything about the German Donaldists – they treat Duckburg as a real place and Barks' stories (in their German translation) as true accounts of that place on which they conduct all kinds of research. In 1995, a Donaldist named Daniel Veith created a floor plan of Castle McDuck that is purely based on „The Old Castle’s Secret“. I recently got access to it. I have tried several times now to attach it to this post, but for some reason it doesn't work. I could mail it to people who are interested - or maybe someone who is not as new to this forum as me, has any tips on attaching pictures?
Anyway - Veith's map is followed by 12 pages of explanation (with a lot of pictures, though), and it seems he really thought it through. He comes to some weird, but apparently inescapable conclusions - for example that Scotty's room, despite having two windows, has no connection to the outside.
The plan is impossible to reconcile with Rosa's depictions of the castle, but I would like to try and create a synthesis.
Last Edit: Jul 21, 2024 17:33:13 GMT by slyemacduich
Let me tell you something: there IS a floor plan of Castle McDuck, and it has existed for almost 30 years!
I don’t know if you know anything about the German Donaldists – they treat Duckburg as a real place and Barks' stories (in their German translation) as true accounts of that place on which they conduct all kinds of research. In 1995, a Donaldist named Daniel Veith created a floor plan of Castle McDuck that is purely based on „The Old Castle’s Secret“. I recently got access to it. I have tried several times now to attach it to this post, but for some reason it doesn't work. I could mail it to people who are interested - or maybe someone who is not as new to this forum as me, has any tips on attaching pictures?
Anyway - Veith's map is followed by 12 pages of explanation (with a lot of pictures, though), and it seems he really thought it through. He comes to some weird, but apparently inescapable conclusions - for example that Scotty's room, despite having two windows, has no connection to the outside.
The plan is impossible to reconcile with Rosa's depictions of the castle, but I would like to try and create a synthesis.
This sounds super-fascinating! I would love to see these floor plans and the explanation!
The best way to upload images to the forum these days is to use an external image hosting site. I use ImgBB. Simply create an account, upload your image, choose the "BBCode full" option, and then copy+paste the link into your forum post! It should be that easy.
Very exciting stuff! I'm gonna have to get this translated into English, but I can't wait to dive into this! Thanks so much for posting!
If the translation is unclear in places, ask me and maybe I can clear it up.
So, how could a floorplan that includes Rosa look like? Before getting to the interior of the castle, I tried to make sense of the basic layout of its walls and towers.
In „The Old Castle’s Secret“, we get two exterior views of the castle. Both perspectives are reiterated by Rosa:
Perspective 1: Perspective 2:
Each time the castle shows up, a few details are different – the number of windows, whether or not certain walls are damaged and whether or not certain towers are there. Still, there is a broad continuity WITHIN each perspective. But are the perspectives reconcilable WITH EACH OTHER? Veith says no, and bases his floorplan solely on the second perspective. But do we agree with him? I drew a stripped down version of each perspective and numbered or named the walls and towers:
Questions:
Do you agree with me that Tower 8 is the same tower in both pictures?
Where is the slim tower in the left picture?
Are Tower 9 and Tower 4 identical?
Might the mostly absent tower be identical with the damaged tower?
Could Tower 5 and Tower 7 be the same tower?
How many walls are there that we can't see?
Last Edit: Jul 27, 2024 16:21:12 GMT by slyemacduich
The following is a translation of Daniel Veith's article. I pretty much just ran it through Google Translate and made some minor corrections. Names have been altered to match the characters' English names. However, I have not edited the dates mentioned (for some reason the German translators changed the year Sir Eider was killed, for example. Weird.) Thanks to user slyemacduich for providing the scans of the article!
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I. INTRODUCTION The car jolts along the lonely road through the high moors of Scotland towards the north. Visibility to the right and left is only a few metres, then everything is blurred in thick fog. There is a scattering of heather on the ground. A withered bush. Suddenly the outline of a huge, dark something appears in the fog. Gradually the fog begins to clear, the contours of an old building marked by countless battles emerge. As we get closer, this building turns out to be a castle, towers everywhere, a high ring wall, everything towered over by the palace. A piece of collapsed wall, a hole in the roof, a crumbling tower – Castle McDuck lies before us....
As is well known, this castle (Fig. 1) is the ancestral home of the Scottish line of McDucks. Its existence is documented as early as the early Middle Ages, as shown by the dating of various suits of armor worn by respected knights, here Sir Eider McDuck: "... killed in battle against the Anglo-Saxons in 1174." The worthy gentleman was then possibly born around 1130/40. The castle could therefore have been built in its original form as early as the 11th or 12th century. As with all of his travel destinations in the Ducks' adventure stories, Carl Barks consulted National Geographic magazine. His models for Castle McDuck were three castles in the British Isles: the basic structure comes from Harlech Castle in Wales, and various other details from Glamis Castle and Cawdor Castle in Scotland. The geographical location is not mentioned, but it can be assumed that the castle is located in the high moors of Scotland somewhere north of Glasgow. North or south of Loch Ness? So little is known. Today we want to turn our attention not to the location, but to the floor plan. The research is based exclusively on the images from the Barks story "The Old Castle’s Secret" in Classic Album No. 22. I have not taken the story "The Hound of the Whiskervilles" into account, as in this story we are most likely dealing with a completely different castle. I will proceed with my explanation of the plan in the same way that the rooms in the story follow one another chronologically.
II. THE HISTORY OF CASTLE McDUCK What do we know from "The Old Castle’s Secret" about the history of the property, which, according to General Director Duck, is steeped in history? Not much. We only know the years of death of a few Duck knights, which I would like to list in order: 1174 Sir Eider McDuck, killed in battle against the Anglo-Saxons (Fig. 2). 1236 Sir Roast McDuck, died of apoplexy during the victory banquet at Brakenburgh. 1314 Sir Quackly McDuck, disappeared during the siege of Castle McDuck. He is said to have walled himself up alive with his treasure (quote from Scrooge McDuck). According to tradition, Sir Swamphole McDuck had the old underground passage walled up (exit unknown to us) because he had been betrayed to the enemy. He is said to have created a new one (quote from Scotty McTerrier). The only year that is specifically linked to a historically important event in Scotland is 1314. In this year, Robert Bruce, a son of the former crown pretender who allied himself with the Scottish nobility in 1307, defeated the English in the Battle of Bannockburn. Perhaps this battle is connected to the siege of Castle McDuck. Here too, one can only say: we know so little.
III. THE STRUCTURE OF CASTLE McDUCK As every castle is a multi-part structure, an assessment of the structure is only possible by looking at the whole. The floor plan (which we now have) provides information about the planning, but the completed building is decisive for the assessment. The castle as a building and work of art can only be understood in a three-dimensional view, which takes into account firstly its structural form, secondly its historical characteristics and thirdly its location in the landscape. In terms of location, Castle McDuck is a so-called deep castle, which are moated castles, shore or harbor castles. Logically, the former applies to our castle. We have a moat that does not run completely around the castle, but encloses most of it with the exception of the gate side. The fact that the gate side does not have a moat may be related to a landslide. According to its historical characteristics, Castle McDuck is a so-called allodial castle, i.e. it was built by members of the ancient nobility. And ancient nobility is included in abundance in the Scottish line of the Duck family tree. The last point to consider would be the structure of the castle according to its shape: it is a ring and edge house castle with several towers. A palace, stables and outbuildings are leaning against the ring wall. A keep is nowhere to be seen. It may have been cut off at some point in a battle.
IV. THE CASTLE GATE Castle McDuck lies in the east, as shown by the shadow cast on page 6 (Fig. I and 4). One must assume that the Duck clan arrives at the castle at dawn. Morning fog is not uncommon in this part of Scotland. You can see the usual portcullis and a gate with "man-thick oak planks". The drawbridge, which is also usual, is missing. It was certainly removed due to the landslide that buried the moat.
V. THE RING WALL is still largely very well preserved, as can be seen in the views in Fig. 1 and 3. On the gate side there is a shield wall, to which two towers are attached to the right and left of the castle gate for defensive purposes. The small wall openings above the gate are loopholes, behind which there will be a covered battlement. One floor above there is an uncovered battlement, which appears from the outside in the form of battlements. I would like to mention here that I did not base the following explanations of Castle McDuck on Fig. 3. There are many differences between Fig. I and Fig. 3: Where does turret No. I come from, for example, which can be seen in Fig. 3 but has disappeared in Fig. I? Why do we see a tower (No. 2) right next to the palace in the foggy picture, which should actually be visible in perspective in Fig. I behind the second tower from the right? Why do we find a hipped roof on the palace in the fog, but a gable roof in the picture next to it? Where does tower No. 3 come from on the left of the palace in Fig. 3? These are all questions that seem unfathomable. An impossible explanation for this: could the ducks also come from a direction other than the east? No, because in both pictures you can see the hole in the roof and the collapse of the wall on the right-hand section of the ring wall. It is very unlikely that these two pieces of evidence are present on different sides of the castle. I assume that the "strange" tower apparitions etc. are due to mirages or fog formations that occur in the fog. As the story progresses, we find two more hidden towers on the ring wall: the southwest tower, which defiantly protects the southwest corner of the castle, and a small tower a little further east of it. Both are mentioned again later.
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VI. THE COURTYARD adjacent to 3 parts of the building: 1. the main facade of the palace, where the main portal is also located (Fig. 5). 2. the building that forms the northern end of the courtyard, the purpose of which is unknown (it could be an outbuilding). We only know that there is a gate entrance, a window and a rain barrel (Fig. 6 and 7). 3. to the southern building opposite the one just mentioned. There you will find a staircase and a window (Fig. 8). The tower stump X in my plan is the 3rd tower from the left in Fig. 1, which cannot be built into the ring wall because it would be too thin for a defense tower. Back to the southern building. Since we don't know anything more specific about it, I assume that it was once the stables. It is surprising that a few moments after entering the castle, one finds the room lighting with such a dazzling light. A large open fireplace, such as we have in various castles of this era, is nowhere to be found.
VII. THE MAIN PORTAL, THE ENTRANCE HALL AND THE KNIGHTS' HALL The main portal of the castle (Fig. 9) consists of a staircase built onto the main facade of the palace and a large wooden door. Behind this entrance door begins a dark vaulted corridor, which is called the entrance hall (Fig. 10). The knights' hall (Fig. II) that follows is the largest room in Castle McDuck; it extends over two floors. Its ceiling is supported by 8 square pillars, which are incorporated into a network of stone arches. On each of these pillars there are two suits of armour, which give the castle a special medieval flair with a touch of mystery. The windows are in the west; the length of the entrance hall and the knights' hall fill the entire width of the palace. Further evidence of the position of the windows in the west are the shadows that lie behind the ducks' backs in the picture with the corridor (Fig. 10). The same can be found one picture lower in the Classic Album (Fig. 12). The window in Fig. 13 must have been a mistake by Barks. If there were one here, the ducks would not be able to cast such shadows. Moreover, given the position of the sun, it would already be midday if we were to pay attention to the window. But that is impossible, because we know that the ducks arrive in the high moors in the early, misty dawn. So the sun is not visible. It also seems unthinkable that the fog disappears so quickly that a few moments after entering the castle you find the room lighting with such a glaring light. A large open fireplace, as we have in various castles of this era, is nowhere to be found.
VIII. SIR QUACKLY'S GRAVE AND THE ROOM WITH THE TREASURE We will skip Sir Quackly's armory (Fig. 14) because the floor plan does not pose any problems here. The shadows show exactly that we are in a room on the east wall of the castle, so the window opens into the castle courtyard. It is the one on the right in Fig. 15. We are now in the room with the bulge in the wall (Fig. 16), which, thanks to the X-ray machine, contains Sir Quackly's remains and armor (Fig. 17).
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The treasure hiding place (Fig. 18), however, is not in the same room, but in the one next to it. Fig. 19 tells us that. We are still in a room with a window facing east, as the shadows reveal. The X-ray machine is therefore on a south wall (the shadows run parallel to the wall). But since the shadows in Fig. 16 have the same properties as those in Fig. 19, we must be in a different room, because in Fig. 19 there is no longer a bulge in the wall. The alleged "treasure hiding place" in Fig. 20 can't be found on second glance, as it's much too high up! I've never heard of anyone climbing up from wall niches. According to this, Scotty carried the little chest back into the room with the bulge to put it on the table that we can see in Fig. 20 and 21. Donald sprints a few panels further with the treasure chest towards the entrance. The window visible in the background (Fig. 22) cannot be on the outer wall, since the shadows of Donald and the chest are cast in the direction of the window in question. So we only have a barred opening in the wall here; it will probably be used to illuminate the room behind it. You can see from the disappearing treasure chest (Fig. 23) that the entrance is on the right around the wall. Huey, Dewey and Louie come into the entrance hall after they have run around the corner. The archway under which the three brothers are standing (Fig. 24) can be seen on the left wall of the corridor in Fig. 10. It was only after completing my research that I noticed an error in the floor plan. Fig. 25 is in the southwest part (see XIII), not in the section of the castle just described.
IX. THE ROOM WHERE SCOTTY IS KILLED AND THE WEST WING As the story progresses, Huey, Dewey and Louie follow the treasure chest as it disappears down the arched passage into the archway outlined on the right-hand wall in Fig. 10. They come through Sir Quackly's armoury and cross the weapons hall. They turn left and then left again and finally have the door slammed in their faces (Fig. 26). Louie gets an axe from the armory around the corner and smashes the door in half. They find Scotty (Fig. 27). (The room is marked S.) Through the door (TI) that Scotty points to, you can get back to the entrance hall. However, the entrance hall cannot be the room that follows behind the second door (T2) in the illustration, as there are no pillars to be seen in the entrance hall. However, there is one (P) in the room in question (see arrow I in the illustration; on the floor plan, the two doors must be a little further west in order to be able to see it from the room). This belongs to the Knights' Hall. To get to the entrance hall, go between the two doors on the left (see arrow 2) through three more rooms (C, D, E) to the entrance hall, and you come back through the archway on the right in Fig. 10. The bricked-up door to the old secret passage is to Scotty's right, i.e. on the west wall of the room. The door next to it opens, and Donald shuffles around like a fake knight (Fig. 30).
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Shortly after this scene, Huey, Dewey and Louie disappear down the long corridor to the west (Fig. 31 and 32), Scotty disappears from our sight in the direction of the armory, and Donald goes there after a short pause for memory. After choosing a helmet to suit his needs, he runs to the entrance hall. He is thrown out through the window south of Sir Quackly's armory by a kick, the imprint of which on Donald's bottom is quite peculiar for a "ghost" (do ghosts wear shoes these days?) (Fig. 15, window on the left). The description of the west wing is thus over, the floor plans of the remaining rooms are fictitious due to the limited image material. It is possible that a castle chapel is set up in one of these rooms.
X. THE CORRIDOR WITH THE KNIGHTS' ARMOR AND SCOTTY'S ROOM The knights' armor in Fig. 33 is well known. It is a witness to the relentless battles and fights of the glorious McDuck family. We find this corridor (R) again in the castle section south of the entrance hall. Judging by the sparse shadows, it has no windows, but is artificially lit. After the boys have thoroughly searched the armor, they go around the corner visible in the background of the picture (E) to search Sir Swamphole's armor as well. The door (Fig. 34), which can be seen in the background from the fifth picture on the page, is the one to Scotty's room. The window in Fig. 35 (behind the table) does not open outwards, but into another room, otherwise the table and chair would have to cast a shadow. The window was apparently fitted with glass and curtains to make Scotty's room more beautiful. The light comes in through a window on the floor above, which is connected to Scotty's room via a shaft (Plan 2). The shaft in Scotty's room is again embellished with glass and curtains. It is the window behind his bed, which we only see in the picture towards the end of the story (Fig. 36).
THIS SKETCH IS ONLY INTENDED TO SHOW THE LOCATION OF THE SHAFT AS AN EXAMPLE
There is no other solution than the "shaft solution" because the window behind Scotty's bed would point into another room, the aforementioned corridor continues behind the pillar with Sir Swamphole's armor and then turns left behind the two other pillars (PI and P2) (Fig. 37). Consequently, there can't be a real window there, otherwise there shouldn't be any Fig. 37 at all, because in this case the outer wall would have to start immediately behind the Swamphole pillar. The other window behind the table is also impossible as an external window, because if there were one here, there could be no corridor with knight's armor, because the outer wall would run right through this corridor. Huey, Dewey and Louie would have long since been outside the castle wall when they were wondering who owned the armor. So let's stick with the "shaft solution", as there can be no other.
XI. THE LOWER HALL is the next section we will cover. I made up the name because of the "upper hall" mentioned by the children (Fig. 38), which must be above the hall they are in at that moment. Therefore, there must be a lower hall too. Huey, Dewey and Louie have walked along the corridor (G) behind Sir Swamphole's suit of armour (Fig. 37), turned left and arrived in the lower hall. They have (in order to see everything clearly) made a detour around the pillar (P3) west of the stairs and then stop there. Then they go up (the further course with the dark corridor etc. follows later). The door in Fig. 39 leads to a room that is surrounded by the stairs. The lower and probably also the upper hall have, as can be seen in Fig. 40 and 41, pillars that are arranged in a circle. These pillars represent the supports for the southeast tower, which is marked with the number 4 in Fig. I. The lower hall is thus built into the tower, so to speak, it is the lowest floor of the tower. Why else would pillars be standing in a circle in a clearly structured room?
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XII. THE UPPER HALL, THE BATTLESHIP AND THE UPPER FLOORS We know almost nothing about the upper floors. Only the following can be deduced from Barks's accounts: In addition to the ground floor, where we spent the whole time, there are three upper floors. Floors, first the two that can be seen in Fig. I. But there is another one below (it is the one with the upper hall, the windows of which cannot be seen through the high ring wall), as the ground floor certainly does not have rooms so high that it would take up the entire height from the floor to the first row of windows on the upper floor in Fig. I. We know nothing at all about these two visible upper floors. But back to the story. Huey, Dewey and Louie, after they have reached the first floor via the stairs, turn right into the dark corridor (Fig. 42). Then they are on the battlement (battlement 1; Fig. 43). This is on the southern long side of the castle, as we can easily see from the shadows cast. (It should be afternoon after all that has happened.) Therefore the passage must turn at right angles to the south, otherwise you would end up on the west side, but that cannot be possible for two reasons: firstly because of the shadows, and secondly because there is not even the slightest hint of a battlement on the back of the castle (Figs. 46, 48 and 53). The second battlement (Fig. 44 front) on this section of the wall probably has its entrance in the upper hall. The small tower in Fig. 44 is not the southwest tower. The southwest tower protrudes quite a bit above the battlements (Fig. 46, 48 and 53 on the far right), the small tower does not. We are therefore dealing with a small tower, built on the south wall just east of the southwest tower. Because I have hardly any images of the upper floors, I have not drawn any floor plans.
XIII. THE REST OF THE SOUTHWEST OF THE CASTLE is not overwhelming. Here we only come across the gallery along which Donald hurries from Scotty's room to the lower hall (Fig. 45).
XIV. THE CEMETERY The Duck scenes of suffering on the airy battlement do not need to be analyzed here, because we find no architecturally interesting objects. Now we turn to the cemetery, "the burial place of the old McDucks". One of the most remarkable clues in the whole story is the following: The entrance to the Swamphole secret passage is opposite the castle (Fig. 46)! This Swamphole lived up to its name: the secret passage has to make a 180° turn to even get into the castle! But more on that later. First, the location of the cemetery. It can only be on the back or west side of the castle, as the castle backdrop shown in Fig. 46, 48 and 53 is nowhere else on the other sides. As can be seen in the pictures. The outer tower is therefore the southwest tower, the large building is the back or west side of the palace and the small tower is a watchtower or something similar above the gallery. According to the story, Huey, Dewey and Louie went to the left from the entrance (Fig. 47), walked halfway around the castle and then came to the cemetery (Fig. 48). This can be seen very clearly in the picture sequence on page 25 in the Classic Album. Normally in the Middle Ages, graves in Christian cemeteries were always strictly with the headstone facing east, which is not the case in Castle McDuck Cemetery (Fig. 49). This may have something to do with the accumulation of fallen knights in battles, so that the gravediggers had had enough of aligning every grave correctly to the east. (Sir Swamphole's grave is strikingly and strangely aligned here.) The mechanism of the secret passage entrance is a remarkable achievement for the time it was built (Fig. 50).
XV. THE SECRET PASSAGE AND THE CASTLE DUNGEON After a thrilling trip through the secret passage, in which many people have certainly died or been murdered, like Emperor Caligula in the Cryptoporticus in Rome, we find ourselves in the castle dungeons. The Scottish soil must be hard and durable, because you can't see a single ceiling support in the secret passage. It was apparently hewn into the ground "just like that". (The geotectonics of anatid Scotland would also be a nice research task!)
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Such enormous vaults as the one under the Castle McDuck are something worth seeing (Fig. 52). The uncamouflaged secret passage, whose entrance and exit are only an archway (Fig. 51), is located on the west wall of the dungeons. The smaller secondary vault (see also plan 3 [it is not drawn to scale]) is located north of the large main vault, whose longitudinal axis runs from west to east. The stairs go up towards the east. Huey, Dewey and Louie escape via the stairs, then through the secret door in the pillar behind Sir Swamphole and run down the corridor with the knights' armor (R) to the west to the steps (Fig. 33).
V=DUNGEON G=SECRET PASSAGE
However, they do not take the path they took to get to the knights' armor in this illustration (K), but instead they turn into a room (F) right next to the steps. Then they run through an archway (B) into the knights' hall (here it is called the entrance hall), where they also run over Donald. Why is the knights' hall called the entrance hall here? Both terms apply to the knights' hall; both knights' hall and entrance hall. This is because the entrance hall is actually just a corridor, but because the knights' hall is immediately adjacent to the entrance hall, it is sometimes called the "entrance hall" to show off. The curtain that we see in panel 7 on page 29 is used to decorate the wall; there is no window there.
XVI. PAGE 30 At the end it gets complicated. To do this, you have to open page 30 in the Classic Album. The ghost races into the corridor marked I. Scrooge rushes into corridor II to cut off the ghost's path. Donald follows him, cheering maliciously. The two are standing in position III. When Scrooge spots the ghost's shadow and the sword in corridor IV (in which Huey, Dewey and Louie disappeared when Donald called for them to leave the castle [Fig.32]), he shoots. The commotion becomes too much for the ghost and he runs into Donald for the second time, who is still standing in position III. Scrooge has dodged the way; he cannot be seen on the panel. Now the ghost has crossed the knights' hall between the west wall and the westernmost row of arrows again and disappears through the archway (B) through which it came, and up the stairs back into the dungeons. The end of the story (Fig. 53) no longer takes place in the castle, we have already covered Scotty's room, and so I have reached the end of my remarks.
In conclusion, I say (firstly) to the general public: "May the real Sir Quackly continue to cause mischief in Castle McDuck!", and (secondly) to the critics: "Probate rectum contrarium!" (This time this is not legal Latin and means: "Prove the true opposite!") As all illustrations are taken from the story "The Old Castle’s Secret" in Classic Album No. 2, a list of illustrations is superfluous.