A brief look.

In Europe, hotels are bringing us back to nature with beds made of hay.

We all have dreams, we just have to find them and start living them.

A guide to the Tower of London.

King Ludwig II of Bavaria and the extravagant palaces in which he spent his life.

Four of the most famous haunted castles in Irish history. Each one steeped in as much horrific history as the next.

Hideyoshi limited all daimyo to a single castle and razed all smaller forts. As a result, the daimyo put all their efforts into the one edifice permitted to them so that Japanese castles built in the late-15th and early 16th centuries rose on the most secure and solid foundations and to spectacular heights.

During the early Middle Ages simple stone roundtowers enabled and encouraged chronic ‘‘small wars’’ among petty nobles and hundreds of greater castellans whose private fortresses—some 500 in France alone by the 13th century—ran up and down mountainsides, controlled great rivers and valleys, and dominated open country.

They cry out in despair, and those who hear it wonder; is this sound real or something less sinister?

Medieval Castles, and how they were operated.