• The view of ruins in aesthetic theories
  
  • Shenstone, in Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764),  praises irregularity.
    
  • Whateley wrote about ruins that their effect is to 'carry the imagination to something greater than is seen' (Observations on Modern Gardening, 1770)
    
    
  • Price (see previous chapter on dissymmetry) sees ruins as an intermediary between art and nature, and he speaks of the 'circumstances' of aesthetic objects, showing the link between motif and context.

• William Shenstone, Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764).
  RUINATED structures appear to derive their power of pleasing, from the irregularity of surface, which is VARIETY ; and the latitude they afford the imagination, to conceive an enlargement of their dimensions, or to recollect any events or circumstances appertaining to their pristine grandeur, so far as it concerns grandeur and solemnity. The breaks in them should be as bold and abrupt as possible.

• Ruins and the imagination: in JSTOR (University subscription), search the article by Louis Hawes, 'Constable's Hadleigh Castle and British Romantic Ruin Painting', The Art Bulletin 65 (1983), 455-70.
  
• Price's Essay on the Picturesque

• Castles and 'Gothic' turrets

See late-18th century castles in the mediaeval style : Belvoir, with turrets placed on one angle of the towers only: