Abandoned Castles

While today abandoned castles are often desolate features on a landscape, once they may have been the scenes of brutal fighting, religious persecutions, sieges and martyrdoms. The nobles who ordered their construction are long gone, the conflicts enacted there have been resolved and the societies built around them have moved on. But the castles remain, almost indestructible relics bearing witness to the passing centuries.

From the ancient hilltop fortress of Masada in Israel through the many castles of medieval Europe to the 19th-century Fort Union in the New Mexico desert, Abandoned Castles tells, in 150 striking images, the stories of more than 100 massive stone strongholds, forts, towers, and citadels.