Black Street cottages, wells, cattle fanks, a skating rink, wartime traces, and older burial stories all sit in the layered memory of Castle Gardens.
Historic image gallery
Archival and reference images collected for this page. They are here to help fix the place in memory, not to act as the final caption set.
Then / Now compare
Historic reading
Compare old street and garden-edge mapping against the present paths to track where Black Street cottages, wells and recreation layers sat.
Present landscape
Today the site reads as a park first. The compare view restores the buried complexity.
What it was
Castle Gardens is not one story but many: medieval power, settlement loss, leisure uses, utility traces, and wartime adaptation all overlap here.
What was lost
Black Street housing, wells, cattle structures, skating-rink life, and the easy legibility of the place have all faded or vanished.
What remains now
Paths, lawns, topography, and fragments of local memory. The value of the site is in the stacked history beneath an apparently simple park setting.
Research leads
Use museum blog posts, old maps, postcard views, and oral testimony to split this page into sub-pages later.