These articles published in the Sunday Times, 1997.

In the days before guide books, visitors to Blenheim Palace could find out all they needed to know about its heroic genesis at the 134 feet high Column of Victory. Up near the clouds is the likeness in lead of the founder, the first Duke of Marlborough. He stands in triumphal Romanesque pose, eagles at his feet. Etched into the pedestal of this Doric pillar is an informative panegyric.

But it was a long march to enlightenment. I trudged across the Vanbrugh's Grand Bridge, by which splits Capability Brown's elegant waterscape in two. ("The finest view in England," remarked Randolph Churchill to his American affianced, Jennie Jerome, when he brought her  home to meet the folks. "I confess I felt awed," she wrote later, "but American pride forbade the admission.") On through browsing sheep, and into a toiling  expeditionary force of chubby Americans in shorts straggling back. I timed my sortie at 12 minutes, palace gate to plinth.

"Know, Sir, that Llywelyn ap Gruffydd is dead, his army broken and all the flower of his men killed." This despatch from his winning troops at the front was all the planning permission Edward the First required to begin one of the most intimidating programmes of military construction of the Middle Ages.

Within three months, in March 1283, Edward was standing in metaphorical hard hat on a prominence beside the river Conwy personally supervising the first cuts into the rock  for the work that proclaimed his conquest. He would end the rule of the Welsh princes by ringing this wild land  with castles so mighty they dare not rise again.  Not for Edward the caution of serial construction. This man had imperial pretensions. For the next five summers Caernarvon, Conwy and Harlech rose simultaneously.

Beaumaris followed soon afterwards. Edward sunk half his annual income in the work. Master James of St George, the greatest military architect of his age, directed 1500 of  the best craftsmen in the kingdom, summoned from as far away as Kent and Northumberland. They hewed trees, shaped planks, cut stones. They swarmed on rickety ladders up the rising walls; they trudged up scaffolding that twirled around towers like helter skelters.