Importance

The focus here is the whole site, rather than the significance of one individual feature. A particular room, building or surviving structure can provide evidence, but your explanation should connect it to the wider role of the place. Knowing what a room was used for is not yet a judgement about how important the site was.

Portchester Castle provides a worked example below. The same reasoning can be applied to your selected study site, using its own history and remains.

Local and national importance

Local importance concerns the surrounding community or area. Consider how the site affected people's lives, the organisation of the area or the exercise of power there. Establish who was affected and how substantial that effect was.

National importance concerns the site's connection to events, institutions or developments affecting the country. A connection to a nationally important person is not enough on its own: explain what happened at the site and why that made the place matter beyond its immediate surroundings.

Use the scale that fits your site's history and the question. A site can be highly important locally without playing a major national role. Local importance is not simply a weaker version of national importance.

Portchester: a place of defence and royal power

Portchester stands at the north end of Portsmouth Harbour. Its position helps explain its repeated importance: it overlooked a large natural harbour linking southern England with the Channel and France.

In the late third century, the Romans built a coastal fort here as part of the defences against Saxon raiders. The entire defensive circuit survives, with relatively little later modification, including 16 of its original 20 towers. These remains support an argument about the whole site's military role: Portchester was a substantial fortified base within a wider coastal defence system, not simply an isolated settlement.

Its defensive value continued after Roman rule. In 904, the Bishop of Winchester gave the fort to Edward the Elder, king of the English. It became a burh, a fortified place helping to protect the kingdom against Viking attack. The reuse of the Roman enclosure shows how the site's location and existing defences remained useful under different rulers.

After the Norman Conquest, a castle developed within the north-west corner of the Roman fort. Portchester remained in royal ownership from 1154 until 1632. Henry II used it as an embarkation point for his territories in France, while Henry V launched his invasion of France from Portchester in 1415, a campaign culminating in victory at Agincourt. This gives the site national importance through its practical role in royal government and warfare. It would be an overstatement, however, to claim that Portchester itself caused the victory.

Using remains and records together

A convincing assessment connects three things: a claim about importance, specific evidence and an explanation of the connection.

At Portchester, Richard II's royal apartments, built in 1396–99, help demonstrate the site's role as a royal residence. They are the most complete surviving series of royal apartments from the late fourteenth century. Their survival also makes the whole site important today as evidence of medieval royal accommodation.

These are two different arguments. Royal use explains why the site mattered in the past; unusually complete remains explain why it matters for understanding that past today. Neither argument requires a detailed description of every room.

Physical remains and written records answer different questions. Walls and apartments reveal the site's defensive and residential capacity. Records of royal ownership and military departures establish who used the site, when and for what purposes. Combining them produces a stronger assessment than relying on impressive architecture alone.

A national prisoner-of-war depot

Portchester's later use provides another strong argument for national importance. It first held enemy prisoners in 1665, during war with the Netherlands. During the War of Austrian Succession, 1740–48, it held around 2,500 prisoners—about a quarter of all prisoners of war in Britain. That proportion demonstrates its substantial contribution to Britain's wartime prison system.

During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1793–1815, Portchester was one of Britain's 12 main prisoner-of-war depots and held up to 8,000 prisoners at any one time. In 1796, about 2,000 mainly black and mixed-race prisoners arrived from the Caribbean. Their presence connects the site with the wider geographical reach of these wars and the varied backgrounds of those caught up in them.

Timber beams used to support prisoners' hammocks survive in the keep. They are evidence of accommodation within the castle, while the prisoner totals establish the scale of the whole site's role. Together, they turn the statement ‘Portchester was a prison’ into an explanation of why it was an important national wartime institution.

Local importance and changing influence

Portchester also mattered to its surrounding community. A priory was founded inside the Roman enclosure in 1128. Although the religious community moved to Southwick in 1150, its church survived as Portchester's parish church, St Mary. The village grew outside the castle's landward gate, while parts of the enclosure were used for farming. These uses connect the whole site to local religious life, settlement and livelihoods, rather than only to kings and wars.

Importance was not constant. The developing town of Portsmouth increasingly overshadowed Portchester economically and militarily. This qualifies an argument about Portchester's long-term influence: its commanding position did not guarantee that it would always be the area's leading military or economic centre. Its later large-scale prison use nevertheless gave it a renewed national role.

Reach a judgement, not just a description

Identify the period and type of importance you are assessing. Was the site important because of what it did at the time, because of its effect on a community, or because its surviving evidence helps us understand history?

For Portchester, a supported judgement is that its importance extended well beyond the locality at several points: it served coastal defence, royal journeys and campaigns, and Britain's prisoner-of-war system. Its parish church and surrounding settlement also demonstrate local importance. Today, its exceptionally well-preserved Roman enclosure and medieval royal apartments make the whole site valuable historical evidence.

The strongest conclusion weighs these roles rather than treating every period as equally important. For your own site, select the evidence that most clearly supports the scale and extent of importance asked about.