Coffee Table Book of: Castles (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Castles is a large format book of castles, printed edge to edge in colour, one picture to a page and the widest carried across two: hilltop fortresses and moated castles, a river castle and pale chateaux, tower houses and ruined keeps, standing empty at many hours and in every season, with their gates, stairs, halls and stonework seen close.

The castles stand on a crag above a wide river and its terraced vines, rise straight from still moats where swans glide and a heron waits, crown a green mound and bare hilltops, look out from a sea stack and a cliff edge over calm and stormy seas, and sit on a low island in a lake, on marshland and above an estuary, among olive trees, red poppies and yellow rapeseed.

The light and weather turn through the year: a ruined keep in dawn mist, a castle half hidden in winter fog, a tower house in purple heather under high summer clouds, red sandstone glowing at sunset, battlements heavy with snow and icicles, a lone gate arch in hoar frost, a ruined tower under a starry winter sky, driving rain on a bare hillside and a storm breaking over a sea cliff.

Around the walls grow a herb garden, an orchard in blossom, wallflowers, ivy and moss, sea pinks on a cliff top and bluebells in a beech wood, while jackdaws perch on the battlements, swifts wheel above a keep, sheep graze an empty courtyard and doves settle on a round stone dovecote.

Short notes run through the book, on how castles were built and defended, how they were lived in, and how they turned into country homes and quiet ruins: a tower house stacked its rooms one above another: stores below, a hall above, bedrooms higher still, a wide moat kept siege towers back from the walls and made it hard to dig beneath them, rows of small square holes in old walls once held the beams of the builders’ scaffolding, and concentric castles had two rings of walls, the inner one higher so both could be defended at once.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.