What is a collective term for castles, citadels, forts, palaces etc.?

We at Travel-SE are having an ongoing tag reorganization, and we're trying to find a collective term that encompasses the following:

• castles


• châteaux (which are really castles, but not every castle is a château)


• palaces


• forts


• citadels


• country houses (which are really palaces, but for non-royals)

We'd appreciate if you guys can come up with an appropriate category that covers these all. We don't want to create separate tags because frankly people won't know the difference between these and won't care.

We were thinking of fortified-structures or palatial-structures, but these don't work quite well. residences is just too broad, and royal-residences is not correct since country houses were not used by royal figures.

Any other ideas?

Answer

After looking at wikipedia entries for castles and fortifications, I can see that there are many technical historical-architectural terms which are very precise and detailed.

1^st option
The encompassing term might be fortifications. This is technically probably a bit wide as it would include military constructs which people do not inhabit and might (technically) miss some of the buildings you are trying to describe. (You might go with fortified historical residences or some such term)

2^nd option

On the other hand, depending on technical correctness you are aiming for, pragmatically and simply castles might be a good tag (you can explain in the tags summary that it also includes citadels, stately homes, etc.. )

Both the term castle and fortification are taken from this paragraph in wikipedia:

Castle is sometimes used as a catch-all term for all kinds of fortifications, and as a result has been misapplied in the technical sense. An example of this is Maiden Castle which, despite the name, is an Iron Age hill fort, which had a very different origin and purpose. Although "castle" has not become, like chateau in French and schloss in German, a generic term for an English country house, many of these use the word in their name while having few if any of the architectural characteristics...

3^rd option

Combining common characteristics of the terms that you want to describe

• Historical private residences (is it really necessary to say private, I wonder)


• Historical or fortified residences

Finally, I am not a historian nor an architect, so maybe asking in a more specialized environment might yield technically more appropriate result (wikipedia discussion page?).