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Did you have a fort when you were a kid?

B

Blue Velvet

Moderator emeritus
Original poster
Jul 4, 2004
21,929
265
Or a treehouse, or other special place to hide out and play? Who did you let in there?

I was reading a short piece on Andrew Sullivan's blog which linked to this excerpt of an article.


I am, unabashedly, pro-fort. It is a childish impulse, I suppose, the building of forts. One generally constructs them out of pillows and extra sheets in the first go-round. Then you graduate to the out-of-doors. You go into the trees in an act of reverse-evolution, harkening back to distant ancestors with prehensile tails. But you’re also playing at building things, reenacting basic civilizational urges embedded in the species mind. As soon as you’ve built one fort, you try to make the next one even better, bigger, more innovative. I had a friend in the Hollywood Hills, where I grew up, who built a fort with indoor plumbing, electricity, mechanical devices. But it still felt different being in the fort than being in the house. The fort was an experiment and the house was just a house.
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My brother and I had a great one, built in amongst a maze of tunnels we clipped out with my dad's hedge clippers — also secretly borrowed — in the middle of a huge field of six foot high gorse. You had to know where the secret entrance was... my oldest sister was not allowed to know about it. :D

And then, one day my brother told one of his classmates and within a couple of days, it was overrun by some kids from the neighbourhood, who pulled my curtain door down. :(

Fort two was a shed-thing down beyond the bottom of the garden in a vacant section. The roof leaked and it was cold. Some comics we had in there got all soaked through.... we lost interest in it pretty quickly.
 
i built the pillow fortresses, yes. kinda miss them actually. but thats all. no tree house or anything to run to when i got older.
 
Indeed we did. :) But they were called Base's when I lived down south, and Den's when I lived up north. ;)

We had a partial underground one, that we dug into some earthen banking behind my old house, complete with a spy-slit that was partially hidden by grass, so you could keep a lookout, a near constant supply of ammo from a Crabapple tree, and a completely turfed roof that unless you knew about the Base, you'd have never guessed what lurked below. :D
 
PlaceofDis said:
i built the pillow fortresses, yes. kinda miss them actually.
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There's nothing stopping you building your own blanky and pillow fortress under the table, and hiding up with a pint of icecream for a while. :)

We knew some kids that had their fort built for them by their father. It had a hinged door and a padlock. I'm not sure it qualifies as a real fort if a parent built it.
 
when i was a kid, we lived on a dead end in the suburbs, so after it would snow the plows would just pile up all the snow at the end of the street, making a giant, dense snowbank sometimes as high as 10 feet. we would then tunnel into it vietcong style and make a snow fort.

it.

was.

awesome.
 
We had NO trees, and clay. (New subdivision)

But we did snag every large appliance box that appeared after a new move-in.

Many 'rooms' resulted.
 
Haha, this reminds me of when I used to have a bunk bed and I would make a hammock out of a sheet, some times it worked, sometimes it did.

But where I lived we used to have wetlands behind out house, and I used to have my fort there. If you didn't come in a certain way, you would fall into the water (which was about 3 feet deep) I used to take neighbor's old furniture and put it in our fort. I let anyone in it, I just liked to play. Good times.
 
My first "real" fort was a snow fort, just like Shecky, but I grew up on a farm and we just had giant snow drifts from the wind. This fort had a main gathering room and then four other side rooms down a bit of a hallway.

It took me about six hours to scoop out, and then the VERY next day it rained. Talk about depressing. :(

The next real fort I made with my cousin/best friend who lived on the next farm. This time we were 11 and 12 years old respectively and decided to up the ante. We built the entire thing ourselves. No help from any adults. We weren't supposed to use any power tools, so we had to sneak out to the shop to use the table saw. We used leftover bits of wood from a large shed that was built a few years before.

This bad boy was on stilts about four feet high with a combo-lock trapdoor entrance. We dug some stairs into the ground and installed a retractable ladder. The fort itself was a six by six by six square with four shuttered windows that could be opened from the inside. It had two fold up cots (boards on hinges with fold-out legs) and a storage area for non-perishables. I can't even count the number of nights we slept in that thing. The creepiest though was when we woke up in the middle of the night to scrapings on the outside. Imaginations will run wild at that age and in those settings, but we finally got the guts to peep out a window. It was a freakin' cow! We built the thing in a pasture, of course. Heh heh.

I must admit we did a very solid build job on this thing, and it lasted a VERY long time. When the property that we built on was sold to someone outside the family they wanted to take it down but they couldn't easily dismantle it so they just burnt it to the ground!

Man, those are some good memories. :)
 
My cousins and I had a cave, at night we're pretty sure other things happened there though. :x

We had pillow forts at home on rainy days and had an actual treehouse for all other times. It was good fun. Something about being hidden was so fun as a child. Come to think of it, it sounds like fun now!
 
floyde said:
Nah, I was mostly on the invading faction, I did conquer a few of them though ;):D
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Ha ha! That's awesome!

We had a few local kids (and parents!) try to infiltrate our fort, but as we kept it pretty well stocked with berries and slingshots people quickly learned. :D

jessica. said:
My cousins and I had a cave, at night we're pretty sure other things happened there though. :x
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Vampires?
 
My pops made us an igloo twice as a kid, thing was tiny but it worked :3
Also had the one where you shove chairs together, pull out the cushions and such. T'was all quite fun.
Oh and one set amongst the bushes at an old playground (sadly it got overrun by chavs and the council had to remove it).
 
We had lots of briars on our property, and two very irritating neighbour children that would heckle the crap out of me an my brother. We'd take over a clump of lilacs and pile up the briars/prickers/thorns all over around the outside to keep them out. It got rather cozy at times.

Before that we had two unused doghouses stacked on top of each other that made a castle-ish type of thing - which sat in the midst of a clump of raspberries (more thorns). That was the best!
 
I helped my little brother build his. Its a damn masterpiece.

We still use the fort for paintball wars. It's built about 16 feet high with a catwalk going around the inside for the guards, it has 2 small Trebuchet's that we use for paintball grenades. We also have a lookout tower that is 28 feet high. It took us a week to build.

I guess you could call it a castle
 
Sort of. We would get all sorts of stuff out of the garage (milk crates, sun loungers, bits of wood etc.) arrange it all out on the garden lawn so that it made some sort of closed shape, then chuck a big blanket over it for a roof. All the neighbours' kids would also join us in there, so at times we could get 10 or so people in one "fort".

When you're six or seven years old there's nothing better :cool:
 
I built several using old cardboard boxes taped together, if that counts. I remember turning one into a space capsule by drawing buttons and control panels with crayons.
 
My favorite sorts of indoor fort was a series of sheets attached to a square floor fan. The sheets would bubble up making the perfect (airy) corridor or room area that you could then attach to the more traditional corridors of cushions.

When I was even younger, I used to like weaving a spool of thread from object to object in my room, creating a massive spiderweb out of the place that one would then have to creep around, under, and through. Drove my parents mental.
 
When we moved into our house 7 years ago (wow, that long!), my (current) room was used as a temporary storage place. Once it became my room, but there were still a lot of boxes in there, I made an awesome fort. I basically built a room out of the boxes, with windows and blinds, "spy holes", and secret entrances. I was devastated when it had to be taken down. :(
 
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Oh I used to live doing these kinds of things with my little sister.
We used to make forts out of pillows, make secret hideouts under beds and in closets... and we then finally got this indoor playhouse to play in...
Oh gooooood times... :)
 
I just about remember, long time ago.

The garden is very long so at the bottom of it my dad got quite a few old railway sleepers and built a platform around a tree and made that up into a sort of tree house.

We also had this sort of plastic tube thing, think of life sized lego/technic which you could use to make carts or houses with. :cool:
 
Forts, tree houses, caves we dug in creek banks, the middle of thickets that we cleared just enough for a gathering. Lots of fun. Circa 1971 the last time one was made.
 
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