Snow fort
recreational snow building
A snow fort or snow castle is a usually open-topped temporary structure made of snow walls that is usually used for recreational purposes. Snow forts are generally built by children as a playground game or winter pastime and are used as defensive structures in snowball fights. They are also built and used for make-believe games such as "house", "store", or "community", a game where multiple forts are built in a group. Along with the snowman, it is one of the two structures commonly built by children out of snow.
Snow structures made for sleeping are called igloos when made from snow blocks and quinzhees when made by hollowing out a pile of snow.
Variations
A snow fort consists of walls of piled and compacted snow. They may be "open" or "closed", that is, a person in the snow fort may be completely surrounded by the walls on all sides, there may be a "door", or the person may be completely exposed on one side. The latter variation is used for snowball fights, in which opponents have forts facing each other and attack exclusively from their own fort. Existing structures such as the walls or concave corners of a building can be used as part of the snow fort, allowing for faster and easier construction. A snow fort can also be a tunneled-out burrow built in a large snowdrift.
“Snow fort” enters the record as recreational snow building. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Snow, fort and recreational can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Snow fort” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Snow, fort and recreational provides the most credible route into that argument.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1822908. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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This entry incorporates text from “Snow fort” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.