In the desert of southeastern Iran, rising from the arid plain like a great golden sandcastle sculpted by giants, there stands the most extraordinary mud-brick monument in all the world.

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

At the southern edge of Sydney, where the suburb of La Perouse looks out across the mouth of Botany Bay, a short wooden footbridge leads out to a small rocky

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.

At the very point where the River Sava flows into the mighty Danube, on a great ridge above the meeting of the waters, stands one of the most fought-over fortresses

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

In the heart of Bergen, at the edge of a harbour that has bustled with ships for a thousand years, stands one of the oldest and best-preserved fortresses in all

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,

If you asked Slovaks to name their most beautiful castle, a great many would answer without hesitation: Bojnice. Rising above a leafy park in the country’s west, all pale walls,