At the mouth of the Aura river, where it meets the Baltic on the southwestern coast of Finland, stands the oldest and greatest of all Finnish castles. Turku Castle, Turun

On the shore of the most famous stretch of water in Scotland, perhaps in the world, stand the broken walls of Urquhart Castle. Below them lie the deep, dark, cold

On a long, steep-sided ridge of rock rising from the plain beside the shimmering waters of Lake Van, in the far east of Turkey, stand the ruins of one of

Some castles impress you with their size, others with their beauty. The Wartburg does something rarer: it makes you feel that you are standing at one of the places where

If you had to pick one castle to show someone who had never seen a real medieval fortress, you could do a lot worse than Warwick. Rising sheer above the

There are castles that a nation loves, and then there is Wawel, which a nation almost worships. Rising on a limestone hill above the Vistula river in the heart of

On a limestone hill above the Vistula, at the heart of the ancient Polish city of Krakow, rises a complex of towers, walls, and spires that holds within it the

Picture a castle that has been somebody’s home for nearly a thousand years, without a single break. Not a ruin, not a museum piece roped off behind glass, but a