Castle Directory
Browse the world’s castles, fortresses, and historic strongholds.
Filter by country, region, type, period, or UNESCO status.
Château de Falaise
William the Conqueror was born at Falaise, and almost nothing standing on the rock is his. The great tower was raised for his youngest son about 1123, the round tower for the French king who...
Château de Caen
The Château de Caen is one of the few great fortresses of northern France you can walk into without paying anything. William, Duke of Normandy, founded it about 1060, and almost everything a visitor walks...
Château Gaillard
Richard I raised Château Gaillard on a chalk spur over a meander of the Seine between 1196 and 1198, and it surrendered to Philip Augustus on 6 March 1204 after a blockade that ran through...
Mont-Saint-Michel
A fortified abbey on a tidal rock in Normandy. This guide traces who built it, how its ramparts and gate defenses came to be there, the 1434 assault the garrison drove off, and what survives...
Dunrobin Castle
Dunrobin Castle is a fourteenth-century tower house encased, in the 1840s, by the turreted mansion every photograph shows. It has its own railway station, and a history running through the Highland clearances.
Kilchurn Castle
Kilchurn Castle stands roofless at the head of Loch Awe. Its interior is closed for conservation, but the walk in is free and the outside open all year. A Campbell tower house of the mid-1400s,...
Dunnottar Castle
Dunnottar Castle stands on a flat-topped sea stack of conglomerate rock on the Aberdeenshire coast, roughly a mile and a half south of Stonehaven, and no first sight of it is ever quite forgotten. Cliffs...
Doune Castle
Doune Castle stands almost exactly as its builder left it: a compact, formidable courtyard stronghold on a bend of the River Teith, and one of the most complete medieval castles anywhere in Scotland. It was...
Urquhart Castle
Urquhart Castle stands in ruin on a rocky promontory above Loch Ness, its broken tower framed against one of the most famous stretches of water in the world. It is a wreck by design. When...
Stirling Castle
Stirling Castle stands on a black crag above the River Forth, at the point where the Highlands meet the Lowlands and Scotland narrows to a waist. For much of the nation’s history, whoever held Stirling...
Eilean Donan Castle
Eilean Donan Castle stands on a small tidal island where three sea lochs meet in the western Highlands, joined to the shore by an arched stone bridge that has become one of Scotland’s most recognizable...
Edinburgh Castle
Edinburgh Castle sits on a black volcanic crag above Scotland’s capital, and almost no visitor sees it for the first time without stopping. It has been a royal residence, a prison, an army barracks, and...