Wiki Wiki Submission for Highgarden

Arkilstorm

Dowager Countess of Grantham
Staff member
Highgarden

Tyrell
The Reach

Project Lead(s): Arkilstorm, Enahsian

Build Type: Landmark

Warp: /warp Highgarden

Project Application:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ym3x4tyCccZB4dcB0hQoAOqzq0CWD5WC/view?usp=sharing

Build Status: Completed

Start Date: Jan 1, 2018
Completion Date: Oct 10, 2020

Description

“ You need a taste of summer before it flees. In Highgarden there are fields of golden roses that stretch away as far as the eye can see. The fruits are so ripe they explode in your mouth—melons, peaches, fireplums, you've never tasted such sweetness.”

Robert I Baratheon to Eddard Stark

Highgarden is a castle that serves as the seat of House Tyrell, the regional capital of the Reach, and the heart of chivalry in the Seven Kingdoms. It lies on the Mander where the ocean road meets the roseroad, making it an important crossroads.

Highgarden is located on a broad verdant hill overlooking the Mander. The castle is surrounded by three rings of white stone whose crenelated curtain walls increase in height. Between the outer and middle walls is a famous briar labyrinth that serves to entertain as well as slow invaders. The oldest towers, squat and square, date from the Age of Heroes. Newer towers are tall and slender, round fortifications dating from after the coming of the Andals.

Highgarden is filled with flowers, singers, pipers, fiddlers, and harpers; pleasure boats sail along the Mander. There are fields of golden roses that stretch as far as the eye can see. Fruits grown nearby include melons, peaches, and fireplums.

Features

Highgarden’s verdant farmland is bisected by the great slumbering river Mander, through which trade to the towns of Highgarden and Chipping Barter is fed. The two towns in the shadow of the palatial castle are joined by a long, arching stone bridge. Along the western bank of the river to the south lies the village and manor of Manderside, nestled between fields of fragrant flowers.

The lands surrounding the castle are punctuated with elegant manor houses, sprawling farmland, vineyards, and bustling farmsteads. To the east lies the stately hunting lodge of the Tyrell family, and nearby, a modest Motherhouse and orphanage. In between each settlement are blankets of golden roses stretching to the walls of the great castle. Northward lies a semi-permanent tourney ground with makeshift camps for those in attendance.

The castle with its famous concentric ring-walls and lofty marble towers stretch high above the landscape, its glades, gardens, and terraces draped in ivy and blooming with roses at every turn. Seemingly unaffected by the wars of the neighbouring kingdoms, Highgarden remains in a seemingly unrelenting state of elegant play.

Construction

Arkilstorm and Enahsian took leadership of Highgarden as a co-op led server build in January of 2018. Initial planning took a few weeks with a document of creative direction uploaded and signed off by the mod-team the following month. Testing continued throughout the spring and summer with the castle being completed by early 2019.

The surrounding landscape was developed organically with loose plans for settlement locations, which were slightly amended or changed throughout the build process. With Whitgrove, Holyhall, Woodwright, and Hornhill all neighbouring projects under construction, the borderlands were developed in mid-2019. The final regional layout was agreed upon and began plotting around the same time, with work on the landscape completing in mid-2020.

The main Highgarden town was re-plot in mid-2019 following a revision of plot shape and the introduction of some new blocks.

Highgarden was fully completed in October 2020.

Inspiration

Inspiration for Highgarden was predominantly influenced by late medieval France, most notably landscape loosely influenced by parts of northern Italy, Southern England, and rural central France.

The castle has influences from a number of sources including Hampton Court Palace, The Louvre, The Tower of London, and a number of medieval references from the Dictionnaire de l'architecture médiévale.

File(s) attached
 

Attachments

  • 2020-11-28_21.44.11.png
    2020-11-28_21.44.11.png
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Arkilstorm

Dowager Countess of Grantham
Staff member
Thanks Ric! Is it possible to embed the video Veggie made from the HG thread in the lore section, please?

there are another couple of amazing HG shots I love, I’ll put them in a Google Drive file shortly if you don’t mind juggling them about just a bit.
Thanks for sorting this!
 
I was wondering if you can have more details about elements in the castle grounds in the wiki.
It's important for the long term when people who have that knowledge might not be around. Another way would be to make warps such as "HGDowagerWing" "HGArmory" "HGBallRoom" "HGSeptry"...

For the KL redo, people didn't remember the lesser guilds of KL and there weren't that many people around left knowing which was what. Imagine within a 10 year span how much knowledge could be lost.
 

Azulejo

Bloodmage
Staff member
I was wondering if you can have more details about elements in the castle grounds in the wiki.

The Highgarden Project application contains lots of information about the different areas of the castle: name, location, history, function... I think any visitor may find all of that very useful and interesting. It could be uploaded in the wiki of Highgarden (not the link, the text itself). The Drive/Google Docs link could easily break or be abandoned in the future, if the account owner decides to erase it. It would be a shame to lost all of that. I myself used it to identify places that I wasn't able to locate, and to comprehend how the history and canon of the books is displayed on the build.
 

DutchGuard

Shadowbinder
Staff member
Pronouns
he/him
I used this link ↓. I'm not aware if there's any more apps. I wasn't a member when this project started.

There should be a link to the project thread direct from the wiki page. The problem with linking directly to Google docs is that after X number of years the author might have deleted it or the account is closed, and the link goes dead. At the moment we don't have a dedicated backup for any of that stuff.
 

Arkilstorm

Dowager Countess of Grantham
Staff member
The document wasn't really a full application - It was more of a summary of how things were going and planning needed for the castle. The regional plans were updated a little more organically as the mander was updated, borders were properly drawn, and the landscape divided up. That document is in my personal Google Drive but we can always pull out some of the information and add it.

Highgarden as a castle, as well as a region, is quite vast and has a lot of smaller builds with their own canon, stories, builders - If we filled out the whole wiki with all this information, it'd be monstrously long. I'd rather maybe do a between-the-blocks video with DutchGuard about Highgarden and cover some of the areas, or something similar, than a very very wordy wiki article.