Ask most people when modern England really began and you’ll get a shrug. Push a historian into a corner, though, and a surprising number will point to a single grey

There is a good chance you have already seen Alnwick Castle, even if you have never been to Northumberland. When the young wizards of Hogwarts had their first flying lesson,

From the water meadows of the little River Arun in West Sussex, Arundel Castle looks almost too good to be true, a great pile of towers, battlements, and turrets rising

Here is a strange kind of masterpiece: a castle so perfectly designed that architects still study it as the textbook ideal, and yet a castle that was never actually finished.

Most castles are built with corners: square towers, straight walls, rectangular courtyards. The Castell de Bellver, standing on a wooded hill above the city of Palma on the Spanish island

There is a word in English that means smooth, flattering, persuasive talk, the kind that charms and disarms and gently gets its way. That word is blarney, and it comes

If you asked a child to draw a castle, they would probably draw something very like Bodiam. It has everything: four round corner towers, square towers on the walls between,

There is a photograph of Burg Eltz that almost everyone has seen, even if they have never heard its name. A cluster of pale towers and steep grey roofs rising

Most castles are square, or round, or a sprawl of walls following the shape of a rock. Caerlaverock is a triangle. Rising from the flat, marshy land near the Solway

Most castles were built to keep enemies out. Caernarfon was built to keep a whole nation down. When Edward I of England finally crushed the independent princes of Wales in