- What it is
- Dressed stone over the natural slope
- Above the river
- About 68 metres
- Stops
- Climbing, and undermining
- Type
- The truncated cone, as at Aleppo, Hama and Homs
Above the ditch the mound is faced with a glacis — ashlar laid smooth and steep straight over the natural slope, from the rock up to the foot of the wall.
It does three things at once. Nothing can be climbed, because there is no purchase. Nothing can be undermined, because a sapper would have to cut through dressed stone in the open, under the wall, in full view. And rain runs off it instead of soaking into the mound and softening it.
It is also why the castle reads the way it does from the water: not as a building standing on a hill, but as one solid mass rising out of it. From the lake the stone and the hill are a single object.
The mound carries the castle about sixty-eight metres above the level of the river.