Palace · Coastwood
The Tidewatch Palace
Ninety metres of cut stone facing the sea, and every room in it open to the sky.
The Tidewatch Palace is a walled seaward palace in Coastwood — 467 solid pieces, a wall-walk you can circle, and 12 exhibit cases inside an open court.
Measured
- Centre — x 240, z 1220
- Ground height — 48.7 m
- Band — Coastwood
- Solid pieces — 467
- Curtain-wall blocks — 160
- Merlons — 66
- Corner towers — 4
- Stair treads — 78
- Columns — 26
- Exhibit plinths — 28
- Wall crest above sea level — 59.0 m
- Outer radius — 82.8 m
- Sea terraces — 4
- Models on display — 27
- Nearest named place — Reedhollow, 260 m away
- From Landfall — 1327 m south
The building
467 solid pieces stand here: 160 curtain-wall blocks carrying 66 merlons, 4 corner towers, 78 stair treads and 26 columns around an open court.
The whole curtain is cut to ONE crest, 59.0 m above sea level, rather than to a constant height above whatever ground each block stands on. The ground under the wall falls 3.7 m from its highest corner to its lowest, so on the low side the same wall is that much taller — which is what a curtain wall does, and it is why the walk along the top is a level ring instead of a staircase nobody asked for.
You can stand on that walk. The parapet takes part of the outer lip, and the clear band left over was measured by sweeping a body along the whole north run rather than asserted — the same discipline that put an arch over every gate so the ring actually closes.
The court
28 plinths and 12 cases hold 27 models, and not one of them is structural. Every exhibit stands on a procedural plinth and every exhibit also has a plain stone understudy drawn at its exact size; the understudy hides when the real model arrives and comes back if it never does. A file that fails to load costs detail here, never a hole and never an invisible wall.
4 terraces step down toward the water on the seaward side.