The castle once stood at the centre of power over the land and, like the aristocracy itself, has become a figure from another age, its former functions absorbed by the bourgeois world that replaced it. As the aristocracy was swept aside or forced to surrender during the nineteenth century, two opposing visions of the castle emerged: the idealised wonder of the Romantic castle and the terrifying Gothic ruin, inhabited by ghosts frozen in time who, like the defeated aristocrats themselves, can do little more than repeat rituals emptied of their former meaning. Something similar is happening today with the increasingly extravagant idealisation of the farmhouse and rural life at a time when human existence is being drawn ever more forcefully into vast metropolitan spaces where the individual is diminished and the collective subjected to alienation and sedation.

Though now a spectre without its original context, like a time traveller speaking a language no one understands, the castle remains bound to Romantic emotions and to ideas of immense historical value. It is still a living character in popular tales. Until quite recently, castles were said to hide treasures guarded by supernatural beings, to preserve memories of battles that may never have happened at all, and to echo with the cries of the besieged and the footsteps of sorrowful ghosts unable ever to reclaim what they once possessed.