# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > Building/Structure Mapping >  The Hawthorn Fort

## Kiba

So I'm writing an urban-fantasy story about the Fair Folk that's set in Ireland, and the climax involves the human protagonist getting dumped into a hawthorn maze by the Wild Hunt. Her father then kills the Wild Hunt's leader before they can kill the protagonist, and he unintentionally gains the Wild Hunt's title as king of a Fair Folk region. He's not having that after so much fairy-induced trouble, so he refuses the title and heads back to America while his daughter takes on the ruler's mantle because SOMEONE has to rule.

The story ends with her restoring the castle after a thousand years of neglect. It only takes a few weeks to do so, but that's because she calls in about five or six hundred people for the cleanup crew in addition to LOTS of magical repair work.

*Basic facts:* There's nine towers of drystone connected by bridges, with trees as support (the gates are marked as such). The outermost bridges double as curtain walls, and are also constructed with drystone. Everything is built on the perimeter of a giant 3-acre hawthorn maze that's enchanted to be even larger on the inside, and it extends to form a triskele when viewed from above. The three towers within the spirals are watchtowers.

The throne room is in a cave underneath the keep, and it's somewhere by the moat since people nearly get flooded while tunneling underground to ambush the Wild Hunt's leader.

The directions are intentionally reversed. It's a plot point that my protagonist gets literally turned around in the maze because she doesn't know the Otherworld's directions are the opposite of the human world's.

---
*Artsy Writer's thoughts:* The Hawthorn Fort is meant to feel like Stonehenge: Old and massive, but not too ornate. It would also be impractical to live in without magic because you'd have to be a marathon runner to walk up seven flights of stairs and cross a network of bridges all the time.

I didn't want a standard "square/rectangular castle with a keep and a few towers," so I watched my favorite movie _Pan's Labyrinth_ and went, "THAT. THAT IS MY AESTHETIC. This castle is built around a maze, and the throne room is in a cave under the keep. Everything is twisted and crumbling thanks to the Wild Hunt's neglect, but it's still meant to be beautiful in a primal and nameless way."

My friend saw my sketch of the towers and said it looks like an Elf castle, which tickled me. XD

If it matters to see the intended aesthetic of the Hawthorn Fort, here's a couple sketches of the towers and their bridges, as well as the underground cave of the throne room. (Please ignore the throne room's scribbled walls and ceiling. It's supposed to be covered in cave paintings that record the Fort's history. Not enough space in my sketchbook for that.  :Razz:  )




Thoughts on the concept and how to continue with the map?

----------


## Larb

It sounds like a very nice idea - it has a lot of interesting features. I really like the idea of a maze in the middle of it all too. 

Are you doing the map digitally or on paper? And do you want more of a isometric map or a plan view like in the first image?

On a related note in Ireland they have these super interesting round towers (usually associated with monastic sites). I don't know how tall your towers are supposed to be but it looks like they could look similar to yours although with a more twisted, irregular roof like in your drawing. They are mortared though but for a good idea of what a dry stone round tower wall looks like, just look up Mousa Broch - one of my favourite buildings! It is also over a thousand years old too.

----------


## Chick

Wow, that looks really interesting!  And tough!  Seems like you have a good start on a map/drawing of it, but a big job ahead of you, too.  This will be fun to watch you develop  :Smile:

----------


## Kiba

I based my concept sketches on round towers and the brochs/duns of the Iron Age. Yay! The towers are all technically seven stories, but the keep is leaning towards dun-sized since it's got the great hall in it, so it's probably somewhere around 80-100 feet high instead of the standard 70 feet. The keep plus a watchtower are also on hills, so that would skew the bridges/curtain-walls accordingly.

As for the map, I'd love to start on a plan map in the medieval style. I'm hand-drawing it, probably in both bird's eye and a 3/4 view so I can get the textures of the drystone and the hawthorn trees in the maze.

----------


## Kiba

Updates! These took about half an hour.

So I'm building on the plan map and I made a couple of minor but very welcome tweaks! For one, the lake actually looks like water now.  :Very Happy:  Another tweak is that I changed the name of the "Gloaming Gate" to "the Raw Gate." Then I just filled in the curtain-wall detail and the hawthorn maze. Still wondering how that triskele hedgerow is going to get detailed--maybe just some dots or really tiny crosshatching.

In my head I was planning to have the bridges' lines be really thick and heavy to contrast the maze's doomy squiggles, but now that it's on paper there's just a solid block of color. I'm probably leaving the bridges blank again, so there's a little bit of negative space to break up the maze.

I'm thinking of just doing most of the line-work by hand and then using GIMP to color it in.

*EDIT:* Resized the picture! Don't know how I missed making sure the zoom-in wasn't eight times bigger than my screen.

----------


## Kiba

Here's draft three with more minor tweaks. I just realized that I forgot to put in kitchens and laundry, so now they're in one of the courtyards by the keep. Also filled in the hedgerows. I'm trying to work out a fancy Celtic-knot styled compass--I might draw it separately and then resize it to fit the actual map. Scale-wise, since the hawthorn maze's physical size is three acres, that's roughly the size of a good-sized city block (600x600 feet) with nine concentrated points for living areas.

Definitely going to be impractical without magic or modern amenities. (In the story, it's basically the same thing.)  :Razz:

----------


## Kiba

Yay, I finally got a new scanner to replace my broken dinosaur one!

Unfortunately it's still a bunch of small tweaks. I shifted the buildings around, made the dotted lines in the hedgerow more distinct, and plugged in the names for the nearby villages and the forest. I also removed the compass because there's just no freaking room.

Once I'm done with the working draft, I'm going to trace the map onto a non-holed piece of paper sans the compass and title, and then I'll draw those on another sheet and edit them digitally onto the map.

----------


## Larb

Are you going to label and colour it digitally after scanning the traced version?

----------


## Kiba

The buildings and towers will have a key and I'll hand-draw the title and compass. I might write out the key by hand since I want a Celtic calligraphy feel. I'll test out digital coloring, but if I don't like the look, I'll use pastel or colored pencil.

----------


## Kiba

For those curious, here's a link to the Hawthorn Fort's village! Right now it's still in-progress.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...815#post273815

----------


## Kiba

Here's some more updates of the Hawthorn Fort! I basically rounded out the outer-ward, got rid of the badly-placed title, and added the sheep/horse pastures. The pigs would be turned out into the forest.

It occurred to me that I didn't explain why the map is a perfect triskele from a birds' eye view.

Short answer: They're the Fair Folk, and there's a population of bird-spirits in the southeast of fairy-Ireland. A number of said bird-spirits are indeed cartographers (and merchants, and air-force troops).  :Razz:  So despite their medieval levels of technology thanks to their inability to use iron, they have a gigantic boost to their societies in many ways. (Plus they've borrowed a crapton of ideas from humans to magic up equivalents of technology.)

----------


## Kiba

Just letting you know that I'm going to transfer this map to a new piece of paper that hasn't been erased to death.

----------


## Kiba

And here's the clean new version that I transferred to another two sheets of paper! Just need to get all the little details finished before I start thinking about coloring it in.

I've figured out the scale for the castle itself (1 inch = 80 feet), but I don't think the pastures would be held to that scale since that would only make a few acres for several hundred head of livestock. Since the castle is about 6 inches square, that's 480 feet square and probably 5-600 feet if you include the outer ward around the keep. Just around the size of a city block, which is perfect for being impractical without magic.

----------


## Larb

You'd be surprised how well pre-modern people were able to accurately construct big monumental images and structures on the ground that are best viewed from the air! A triskele would be perfectly achievable even without fae assistance or magic. I imagine such assistance would simply make it easier and faster.

Do you intend to draw the actual layout of the maze at some point? I have a thing for mazes (I posted one here once) so I am very curious to see it.

----------


## Kiba

Yes, I'm well aware of all the awesome monuments that ancient people could pull off. I imagine it involved crazy amounts of drafting and shifting stuff around, though. Having sentient birds on the crew would cut down on a lot of that.  :Very Happy: 

I'm liking my mass of greenery for the maze, but I'm definitely thinking of drawing up an actual pathway since it starts in the middle (you get thrown in from the center bridge) and ends... somewhere. Probably at one of the watchtowers. A solid map would be a moot point since the hedges shift around specifically to confuse people.

Also, 80% of the linework is done!

----------


## Kiba

Mockup of the maze! It was fun and surprisingly quick--I spent maybe half an hour on it. According to my map scale, the maze would be roughly 3-4 acres physically. Going on the real-life mazes, that would mean a good 3 miles of paths, so that's maybe an hour just using the correct path. It would probably be at least two or three hours with a couple of the dead-ends, and if you're REALLY unlucky and get a shift in the path (or four or five dead ends at once), you could be stuck there for a full day trying to reorient yourself.

I might not even _need_ any magical enchantments to multiply the maze's acreage. Although I might, since they use it as a method of execution.

----------


## Kiba

This week was horrible thanks to losing my dog in the first half, but at least I have nearly complete linework. All I have to do is paste a copy of the bridges over the maze, and then I'll start coloring it in.

The pages didn't quite match after I scanned them. It's strange since I'd taped them together to try and avoid that problem, but it looks like it's just a tiny bit off, so I'll see if I can figure it out later.

----------


## Larb

Sorry to hear you had an awful week. I know what those can be like.

In your image editor of choice you should be able to just select one half of the canvas and move the selection so that the lines will match up with the other half which should eliminate that small gap.

----------


## foremost

I'm also sorry to hear about your tough week. I hope you're doing better now, and that working on this [very interesting] project will take your mind off of things. Though the idea sounds very difficult to map out clearly, I'm liking what you've got so far.

You should remember to keep your scale (1 inch = 80 feet) in mind, especially when you're stating the acreage of your pastures. Because I don't know that this image is the actual size of the project, I can't take any reliable measurements, but it is something for you to consider.

If you're coloring by hand, make sure that you stay patient and color within the lines. Same thing goes for digital work, I guess, but in that realm it's easier to make corrections!

----------


## Kiba

Thanks for the condolences.

As for matching up the canvas, I did paste one half of the map onto the other half's file and tried matching it up. It's that weird little blank line messing it up--that's not in the actual map at all because I'd taped the pages together. Maybe I'll take a pic with my phone again, but then it's going to end up at least a little bit crooked.

I think I'll either have to add a page to the top/bottom left for the correct acreage scale.

*Edit:* I got rid of the sheep pasture/pen, so now there's just the cow and horse pastures. Also, while the pastures would only be a few acres each at this scale, I'm having the pastures be enchanted to hold many times their normal capacity of livestock. Because fairy-rulers have the resources to defy physics.  :Very Happy:

----------


## Kiba

Argh, I keep getting that blank line messing stuff up whenever I try to scan the pages, so I just took shots of half the map and then matched them up as well.

Still had to scale one half down a teensy bit, which promptly messed up about half the linework on the right side.

----------


## Kiba

Oh lord, I posted here a full year ago! Man, was I busy.  :Razz: 

I had to get some giant sketchbooks for my art class, so I might as well transfer everything to the giant paper while I've been procrastinating on the maps.

----------

