Editorial Standards

Last Updated: July 2026

StoneKeep Atlas is a reference publication about castles, chateaux and fortresses. This page sets out who publishes it, where the facts come from, how they are checked, what we do when the sources disagree, and how the site is funded. It is here so that any claim on this site can be traced back to something. It should be read alongside our About page and our Affiliate Disclaimer.

StoneKeep Atlas publishes anonymously, so this page, rather than an author biography, is where the case for trusting the site is made. Judge the site on it.

1. Who Publishes StoneKeep Atlas

StoneKeep Atlas is an independent, self-funded publication based in Quebec, Canada. Editorially it is the work of one researcher, and articles are published under the StoneKeep Atlas masthead rather than a personal byline. There is no team, no newsroom, and no guest contributors; where the site says “we,” it means the publication, not a staff.

That is a deliberate choice, and it has a cost: you cannot look up the author’s credentials, because none are being claimed. So the case for trusting this site rests on something that can be checked instead – the sources under every article, and the method described below.

Reaching a person is straightforward: info@stonekeepatlas.com, or the contact page. Every message is read.

2. How Articles Are Researched and Written

Articles are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools, then verified against primary sources and edited by a human before they are published. Nothing goes live unverified. We state this plainly because the alternative – letting readers assume otherwise – would be the dishonest option, and because the process is the reason the articles are good, not a caveat about them.

What matters is not which tools touched a draft but whether the finished article is true, and whether you can check it. Every substantive guide on this site ends with a Principal Sources list naming exactly what it was built from. Very little castle content on the web does that, by human or machine.

3. Where the Facts Come From

Sources are used in a strict order of authority. A claim is traced as far up this list as it can go:

• The site operator or owning institution – its official pages, annual reports and press material.
• The national heritage authority – Monumentum and the Base Merimee in France, the Bayerische Schlosserverwaltung and the state monument offices in Germany, UNESCO for World Heritage designations.
• Academic and peer-reviewed literature on architecture and regional history.
• Regional tourism boards and national broadcasters, for practical and current detail.
• Castle literature, treated as scholarship to be weighed rather than as final authority.

Wikipedia is used for orientation – to find out what a question even is – and is never cited as a source. Neither is our own catalog: a figure that appears in one StoneKeep Atlas article is re-checked externally before it is repeated in another. Recycling your own numbers is how a mistake becomes a house fact.

4. How We Check, and What Happens When Sources Disagree

Castle history is a field where misinformation travels easily. Romantic legends get repeated as fact, construction dates drift between sources, and buildings are described as they once were rather than as they now stand. So every article is re-checked against its primary sources after it is drafted, by a reviewer who did not write it and has no stake in defending it. Architectural descriptions are held to what survives today, not to what once stood. Elevations are given as metres above sea level, never above the nearest river or valley floor, because that distinction is where a great many published castle heights go wrong.

Sometimes two credible sources simply contradict each other. When that happens we do not quietly pick the more convenient one, and we do not split the difference. We keep the specific out of the article, or we say that the record is divided. A few standing examples:

• Schloss Drachenburg – the operator’s own history dates the foundation stone to 1882; other accounts place it in late 1881. The conflict is real, so articles that mention Drachenburg avoid the date rather than assert one.
• Chateau de Saumur – no figure in metres above sea level exists in any source we can find. Tourism material says roughly 60 m above the Loire, scholarship says roughly 40 m above the valley floor. These are different measurements of different things, so we give neither as an altitude.

A fact we cannot re-confirm is not the same as a fact we have found to be wrong, and we do not water down a well-sourced claim just because a later search failed to turn it up again. It is logged and revisited.

5. Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it standing. Write to info@stonekeepatlas.com or use the contact page, and point us at the source if you have one. Corrections are made to the article itself so that the page a reader lands on is the corrected one. Getting it right matters more than having published it first.

6. Images

Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons, from licensed stock libraries, and from public-domain archives. They are not our own photographs, and we do not present them as such. Every image on the site carries a credit naming its photographer or holding institution and its licence, and each article ends with a credits line covering all of them. No image on this site is AI-generated: a factual guide to a real building has no business illustrating it with a picture of a building that does not exist.

7. How the Site Is Funded

StoneKeep Atlas is independent and self-funded. Some articles carry affiliate links to booking and tour partners, which may earn the site a small commission at no extra cost to you; where they appear, they are disclosed on the page itself. The full terms are on the Affiliate Disclaimer page.

No article, ranking or recommendation on this site is paid for, and we do not accept sponsored posts. A commercial relationship has never decided which castles get covered or what is said about them, and if that ever changes, this page will say so.

8. Contact

If you have a question about how StoneKeep Atlas is researched, a correction to suggest, or historical context that would improve an article, please get in touch through the contact form or by email: