donjon

• A curtain wall with towers and gates surrounded it, the skyward-thrusting bulk of the keep rose above where the hill had been planed away to make its base, the high walls of the donjon were covered in granite of a pale pearl color, and towers higher yet were spaced around its oval length, with banners flaunting from the spiked peaks of their green-copper roofs. —  Map.html
• After passing over a hilly road we crossed a marsh which extends from Carentan to the sea, and reached a town called La Haye-du-Puits—a singular name derived from the custom in the middle ages of surrounding the "motte" or enclosure upon which the donjon was built, with a wooden palisade, or sometimes with a thick hedge formed of thorns and branches of trees interlaced: hence La Haye-du-Puits, La Haye-Pesnel, and others. —  Brittany ; Its Byways
• Although the restoration was accomplished with distressing thoroughness forty years ago, some parts of the chapel date back to the seventh century, and a huge double donjon--the dominating feature of the island from the coast--remains from the twelfth-century fortifications. —  Riviera Towns
• The donjon, a prodigiously strong square tower dating from the twelfth century, partly is surrounded by a dwelling in the florid style of two hundred years back--the architectural flippancies of which have been so tousled by time and weather as to give it the look of an old beau caught unawares by age and grizzled in the midst of his affected youth In the rear of these oddly coupled structures is a farm-house with a dependent rambling collection of farm-buildings; the whole enclosing a large open court to which access is had by a vaulted passage-way, that on occasion may be closed by a double set of ancient iron-clamped doors. —  The Christmas Kalends of Provence And Some Other Provençal Festivals
• It held meetings in our big vault, which they called the donjon keep, and, naturally, when one of them was going on, boys were scarcer around the office than hen's teeth. —  Old Gorgon Graham More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

Allen's Synonyms and Antonyms

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