AEthelmearc Royal’s new look. Photo courtesy of Her Majesty Juliana

Any gentle walking by or into Æthelmearc Royal since Sunday has remarked on the gorgeous new encampment walls (as was reported here). But what was the inspiration? Her Majesty Juliana kindly sat down for a few minutes with The Gazette today.

“We wanted the encampment on the whole to be more welcoming, be more accessible, look more coordinated, and for people to be able to see in when they walked by,” she explained.

She and His Majesty Gareth sewed and block-printed the majority of the shorter, striking dark red walls in recent months. She noted that red fabric generally does not hold up well in bright sunlight, but these are UV resistant and she hopes they will last a long time.

The older, much taller walls (some with the heraldry of all of the Kingdom’s groups, some with simply escarbuncles) are indeed quite faded but have not been totally abandoned. They have been repurposed to serve as interior walls and along the back boundary of the encampment.

His Majesty, Lord Otto, and Lord Rickard made the portable holes for the new walls, she added.

The wider entryway is specifically intended to make it more accessible for those gentles in scooters or wheelchairs, she noted. In addition, she hopes it will eliminate the bottleneck that frequently happened when a fighter or other gentle pulled a handcart through the gate or gentles simply stopped for a moment to chat with each other. “It was way too crowded!” she remarked.

Reporting by Baroness Katja (Chris Adler-France)