How valuable is the guide book information when investigating the history of Dover Castle?

The guide tells us in the introduction about not just the actual castle after it was first built but also how it came to be the shape it is and why it was placed there. This is because there was an old pre-existing iron-age hill fort, and within its walls are a Roman pharos and an Anglo-Saxon church which probably formed part of an old town. The castle was rebuilt and improved during the Middle Ages by Henry II who improved the concentric defences by building a new keep and it was surrounded by a double ring of defensive walls. Wall towers were also built best-fortified castles in Western Europe. Later on Henry III made some other improvements like plugging up the weak points that was exposed during the siege of 1216. The north gate was completely plugged up and was replaced by the Constables gate. A curtain wall was also constructed and the facilities were updated. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, Dover town sided with Parliament while the garrison sided with the king. The townspeople captured the castle when some of the villagers climbed the cliffs and surprised the garrison with hardly a shot being fired. After the monarchy was restored, a small garrison of gunners with a gun was quartered at the foot of the cliffs while the actual castle remained uninhabited. By the 20th century the castle was used as a headquarters for the immediate area but as technology advanced the area that the castle commanded expanded to include the fire control of guns to Hastings in 1943. It was from Dover Castle that the evacuation of Dunkirk was planned. After the German occupation of France the castle was fortified and further armed. The tunnels were extended to add defence for the people inside against air attack. After the war in 1962 the castle was transformed and adapted to house the government in the event of a nuclear war.

In other sources that are in the book, a lot of them are paintings from events of the past and there are a few medieval pictures. These all represent the castle in the different ways that the castle was viewed in those time periods. Some of these would be detailed plans and/or pictures that were used to restore the castle and make the reconstructions of what happened. Others would be pictures of people who were involved with the castle like Hubert de Burgh and King George III. By checking the sources in Q.1 we can see the varying degrees of importance that these people had on the castle. It doesn’t make any differentiation in the guidebook as to who were more important and who obstructed more than helped build the castle. It makes no reference as to the restoration and skips over the non-wartime or construction because these are the main points and it cannot give a thorough history, as that will bore people.

So it is possible to see that while the guidebook and the sources that it contain do give a great wealth of information, it does not mention anything of the boring bits or of anything that might get the public bored. The sources won’t be totally reliable because they are all dependent on who was respnsible at creating them ie photographers, artist’s etc. It depends on the view that they had both the physical view and what they thought of it. The actual historical information would be correct, as while they would not want to bore people they also would not want to mislead them through giving them false information, but what conclusions that could be brought from the sources would be different for everyone.