This one I can roughly date to between 1981, when Barbara Strachey's 'Journeys of Frodo' appeared, and late 1982, when I contracted glandular fever. I rapidly decided Ms Strachey's map of Helm's Deep was incorrect, and worked out my own map. I have only shown one of the sets of steps from the Deeping Wall down into the Deep. The direction they ran was determined by the fact that Gimli was able to run down them and directly attack the orcs in the culvert. I had one difficulty and that was with the position of the culvert. Unless the cliff face turned north abruptly at the Hornburg, there was no "angle of the burg-wall on the west, were the cliff stretched out to meet it". I have compromised by tucking it in the corner between the Hornburg and Deeping Walls, where it could be covered by cross fire from the two walls. Peter Jackson agrees with me.
At Helm's Gate, before the mouth of the Deep, there was a heel of rock thrust outward by the northern cliff. There upon its spur stood high walls of ancient stone, and within them was a lofty tower. Men said that in the rar-off days of the glory of Gondor the sea-kings had built here this fastness with the hands of giants. The Hornburg it was called, for a trumpet sounded upon the tower echoed in the Deep behind, as if armies long-forgotten were issuing to war from caves beneath the hills. A wall, too, the men of old had made from the Hornburg to the southern cliff, barring the entrance to the gorge. Beneath it by a wide culvert the Deeping Stream passed out. About the feet of the Hornrock it wound, and flowed then in a gully through the midst of a wide green gore, sloping gently down from Helm's Gate to Helm's Dike. Thence it fell into the Deeping Coomb and out into the Westfold Vale. ...
...
'We need not fly much further,' said Éomer. 'Not far ahead now lies Helm's Dike, an ancient trench and rampart scored across the coomb, two furlongs below Helm's Gate. There we can turn and give battle.'
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The king and his Riders passed on. Before the causeway that crossed the stream they dismounted. In a long file they led their horses up the ramp and passed within the gates of the Hornburg. ...
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The Deeping Wall was twenty feet high, and so thick that four men could walk abreast along the top, sheltered by a parapet over which only a tall man could look. Here and there were clefts in the stone through which men could shoot. This battlement could be reached by a stair running down from a door in the outer court of the Hornburg; three flights of steps led also up on to the wall from the Deep behind; but in front it was smooth, and the great stones of it were set with such skill that no foothold could be found at their joints, and at the top they hung over like a sea-delved cliff.
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... There was a small postern-door that opened in an angle of the burg-wall on the west, where the cliff stretched out to meet it. On that side a narrow path ran round towards the great gate, between the wall and the sheer brink of the Rock.
The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, 1st Ed, Allen & Unwin, 1966, p133-139
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