Rising some thirty meters above the surrounding plain, a great oval mound crowned with a dense huddle of houses dominates the heart of the city of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

High on the plateau of northern Ethiopia, where the air is cool and the mountains stretch to the horizon, stands a cluster of stone castles that seem to have wandered

In the highlands of Ethiopia, in the city of Gondar, rises a sight that astonishes almost everyone who sees it: a complex of stone castles and palaces that would not

Some fortresses are remembered for the battles they fought, but Fort Cornwallis is remembered for the city it created. Standing at the northeastern tip of Penang island in Malaysia, this

In the middle of one of the most beautiful harbours in the world, ringed by the glittering skyline of modern Sydney, sits a tiny fortified island crowned by a squat

On the sandhills of the Lefevre Peninsula, where the seaside suburb of Semaphore looks out across the Gulf St Vincent toward the open sea, stands the most complete colonial fortress

On the island of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean coast of Kenya, stands one of the most remarkable fortresses of the age of European expansion: Fort Jesus, a mighty Portuguese

A little to the north of Semaphore, on the coast of the Lefevre Peninsula where the suburb of Taperoo meets the sea, stands a fortress that once represented the cutting

Follow the Brisbane River down toward the sea, past the wharves and the industry of the port, and you arrive at a strange and unexpected survivor. Tucked among the tanks

Most people would not expect to find a British fortress in Indonesia, a land ruled for centuries by the Dutch, and that is exactly what makes Fort Marlborough so surprising