I always imaged Hogwarts as, essentially, a cube. A gate and some wooden doors on one side, four towers in the corners and some crenellations on top. I never knew where I got that image form. Neither the books nor the films portray Hogwarts as just a cube, and I haven't seen any fan art do so either.

And then a couple of days ago it hit me, it's the castle icon in Age of Empires 2:

Spoiler: Castle

AoE2 came out in 1999, right around when I was reading the first couple of books, and clearly left an impression. Over the years the game got updated and a lot of new civilizations were introduced. And with them came a lot of new designs.
The various castles are usually tied to a specific set of civilizations sharing a region or time period. And sometimes they are actual castles squished into cube form to fit the game engine. I left off the origin though as to not influence the vote.



There are a couple more ingame. But with the poll only having 10 options, I paired it down to the likely candidates. I doubt anyone's headcanon features Hogwarts as a Mayan pyramid, for example.


Number 5 is the most movie looking one. Number 2 is a close second, but the wooden ramparts don't fit.
I think number 8 is the most visually interesting, but the "ring around the rosie" construction makes for a poor Hogwarts.
Number 9 does have a very whimsical feel to it. But the colouration just puts me in the wrong headspace. And if I remove square towers as options as well, I land back at number 3. Which isn't a huge surprise, given that it's been my headcanon for twenty-odd years now.

If you want to go look for more information on the various styles the wiki should have you covered.

 

Interpreting the question as what the central keep looks like, rather than the castle as a whole, I would pick 6. I imagine it being of a relatively dark stone, and blocky more than circular.

 

I think I like number 2, personally...

But wait, does that mean that Dumbledore looks like this?

 

It's a toss up between 2 and 5 for me, but I don't think that Hogwarts has any whitewashed stone, so it's number 5 for me.

 

Definitely not a cube - shapeless, chaotic, and spread out. To be honest, the movies got it perfectly, aside from that weird viaduct.

 

"Castles in Galloway range from iron grey to the fairly definite pink of Caerlaverock, but seem for the most part to be quite brown. Castles are more thinly scattered in the West Highlands and some survive only as a few tumbled ruins, but the two major still-standing castles in the Lochalsh area, the reconstructed-Mediaeval Eilean Donan and the Victorian Duncraig, are both a warm brownish-grey: although Eilean Donan can look almost as red as Caerlaverock in some lights. So we can guess that Hogwarts, too, is quite a warm brown-grey, probably with a red cast in some lights: the colour of the stonework is evidently one thing Warner Brothers did get perfectly right."

http://members.madasafish.com/~cj_whitehound/Fanfic/map_of_Hogwarts/castle.htm

I watched a few of the movies before I ever read the books, so I didn't really have any special imaginings of the castle. This resource is what I use whenever the subject of what it most likely looked like comes up.

 

It's a tough question because, however you slice it, you're probably gonna end up with some fairly strange anachronisms.

I'd tend not to think of Hogwarts as a pure keep/fortification-style castle (like many Welsh castles, for example, Caerphilly, Beaumaris, or Harlech). They just seem too utilitarian for somewhere as fantastical as Hogwarts.

I'd tend much more to the kind of almost pre-palatial castles. Usually, these were historically much more fortified but gradually altered over the years to be more comfortable as a residence. Examples of this kind of castle are Alnwick, Stirling, Edinburgh, or Warwick. The classic castle silhouette, but with larger windows, and more non-military internal buildings.

The palatial castles more often found in continental Europe also don't match my expectations, because I feel like something like Neuschwanstein is simply too ostentatious for the Scottish Highlands. Funnily enough, castles actually in the Scottish Highlands, like Balmoral or Dunrobin also fall into this category. I feel this is fair, though, as these are really more like palaces which have been designed to have some castle-ish features and were built long after castles lost their value as defensible locations.

Hohensalzburg might be good for the shapes and silhouette, though, while Eilean Donan is very much how I'd envision the castle texturally if only because its setting feels like I'd imagine the Black Lake to feel. Honourable mention to Urquhart castle, though.

So, maybe aspects of the shapes in 8, but with the material and texture of 3. I suspect this is really just a case of me describing my 'ideal' castle. We go to visit every castle we can reach whenever we travel, so I've had a lot of time to think about it.

 

Huh. Hogwarts was founded in 990 AD. Stone keeps don't seem to start showing up until the 12th century. So Hogwarts would presumably be the first true castle in the British Isles. Though I'm no expert in the subject.

I kind of imagine that Hogwarts wasn't built all at once, instead growing as needed. Presumably it was initially rather small, with the two towers of Gryffindor and Ravenclaw, the Great Hall, and whatever connects them. Then things like the astronomy tower would get added later, as would the quidditch pitch.

So presumably the castles in the OP would have been the core, before the rest was added on to get what we saw in the movies.