Castlemap — what’s new

“Ink & Bone” — a calmer, more human look

2026-07-18T12:00:00Z

The whole site moved from the launch palette (dark navy + amber gold) to ink, bone and verdigris — closer to an antique sea-chart. The honest reason: readers whose taste we respect said the old colours looked machine-made. They had a point.
New favicon and social-share card to match, rendered from the live dataset.
This changelog page, with an Atom feed at /changelog/feed.xml.
The all-castles index was rebuilt for scanning: a country grid with flags in place of a run-on link wall, columned category lists, and an on-page contents line.
The same treatment for castles by country and tidier action rows on the ranking pages — and on the map itself, “All 2,400 castles” is now a proper button, so the browsable atlas is one obvious click away.
The display face changed from Cormorant Garamond to Fraunces — a warmer, wonkier old-style serif — completing the redesign the palette began: headers on every page, the map included, now carry it.
The site header gained the castle mark, the wordmark settled on a single colour, and the content pages grew wider — prose keeps its reading measure while grids and tables breathe.
Country chips now set a deliberate country code (ENG, SCT, WLS and NIR included) instead of emoji flags, which rendered differently on every platform — and the Netherlands got its missing NL back.
The map panel slimmed from five controls to three buttons — Browse, About and Surprise me — and the atlas gained a proper about page: what it is, how it is built, who keeps it. The region quick-jump row went too; the map itself is the region picker.
The map loads faster: the castle data now travels beside the app instead of inside it — the code download halved, data and code arrive in parallel, and each is cached independently.

Honest sitemap dates

2026-07-15T12:00:00Z

The sitemap now re-dates a page only when its content has actually changed, instead of stamping every page on every deploy — kinder to crawlers, truer to the word “lastmod”.

German edition, phone ergonomics, a data fix

2026-07-14T12:00:00Z

Full German mirror at /de/ — the map UI and all 2,400 castle pages, with German Wikipedia content where it exists (about 84% of landmarks).
Proper iPhone / touch ergonomics across the map and every page: safe-area insets, bigger tap targets.
Data correction: Jaigarh Fort’s founding year (1726 — Wikidata carried −1000), plus an override list so future data refreshes keep audited fixes.

The most famous castle in every country

2026-07-13T12:00:00Z

New page: one national champion per country, ranked by fame — the Palace of Versailles comes out world #1; the 131 champions span fame ranks #1 to #2,120.

Statistics, embeds and an MCP server

2026-07-12T12:00:00Z

/statistics/ — citable castle statistics computed from the dataset: country league tables, density and per-capita leaders, founding centuries.
An embeddable, chromeless version of the map at /embed/, free to put on any site.
An MCP server at /mcp, listed in the official MCP Registry — AI assistants can query the atlas live.
The dataset mirrored to GitHub, Hugging Face and Kaggle, and made citable with a Zenodo DOI.
Unknown URLs now return a real 404 instead of the map shell.

Stories, fame and free data

2026-07-11T12:00:00Z

Every castle page gained its story — the lead of its Wikipedia article, with attribution.
A fame ranking of all 2,400 landmarks at /castles/ranked/, blending Wikipedia coverage with real readership.
The free dataset page at /data/ — GeoJSON and CSV, CC0.

2,400 landmarks across 131 countries

2026-07-10T12:00:00Z

The atlas grew from its launch size to 2,400 castles, fortresses and palaces — Japan fixed, the UK split into its four nations, and a Ruins category (97) added.

Launch

2026-07-09T12:00:00Z

Castlemap goes live: the world’s great castles, fortresses and palaces on one interactive night map, each with a photo, founding century and its own page.