Desert castles

East and north of Amman, there are several old sites which are often grouped together and called the 'desert castles' - although actually, they're not all castles, and strictly speaking one of them isn't even in the desert ...

But anyway, handily a good number of them are situated off a circular route from Amman which you could maybe do in one very long day with a nazi tour guide beating your legs to keep you running, but which we decided to do in two days in order to really have time to wander around and soak it in - and even then, we only managed four castles and part of one ruined city, with so much more to see ...

(There really is too much to do here, how could anyone really consider that they've 'done' Jordan in a week? Madness!)

So, here for your delectation is a whirlwind tour ...

First up was Qasr Al Hallabat - described in the guidebook as "sadly little more than a jumble of crumbling walls and fallen stones", so we were pleasantly surprised to see that a hell of a lot of reconstruction work has been done since the 2009 edition of Lonely Planet. Now there are some nice little jewels to visit, including a hammam with mosaic floor and a nearly completely rebuilt mosque (above).

This was originally a Roman fort and was then turned into a pleasure palace during the Ummayad Muslim caliphate - another reminder that these caliphs and their sheikhs knew how to have fun as well as build and fight! They used carved basalt stones stolen from a site further north for some of the walls, so that there are random inscriptions all over the place. And the rest is brick walls and arches of light sandstone in amazingly good nick (hard to tell how much is new, but it looks pretty authentic)

Next up was Azraq castle, a full-scale military fort that is best known for being where Lawrence of Arabia gathered the Arab troops for the last push to Damascus during the Arab Revolt - and it's certainly on the tourist circuit, we spent a good deal of time dodging packs of interested grannies.

As well as the room where Lawrence lived and planned his attack in the tower above the entrance, I was taken by the stone doors, the church converted into a mosque, and the many basalt carvings recovered and placed artistically in one of the old stable rooms - including the example below, a reminder that this area had elephants, lions and even hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) once upon a time, but various generations of hunters whittled away at the animal population until we came along and shot everything left that moved ... doesn't it make you proud to be British?

Next up was Qasr Al-Amra - this place is a classified world heritage site, and although it's tiny compared to somewhere like Petra or Persepolis, the amazing frescoes really are worth the trek out into the middle of nowhere ...

This was a hunting lodge, again built by the Umayyads under Walid I - a very enthusiastic builder who also built the great mosque in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. This is obviously a lot smaller than those, but is really interesting because of all the human and animal imagery that are used in the decoration - the ban on images of living things in Islamic imagery came after Walid's reign. And some of the images here are pretty risque - let's just say that it's not just hunting that was on the minds of those sheikhs who came here for a bit of R&R away from the wife and kids ...

Last up on our little tour was Qasr Al Kharana - a bit of a poor cousin after the previous castles, but still a nice ten minute detour on the way home, and having the distinction of looking like a castle but not being one (the 'arrow slits' are only for light, you would need to be about 12 foot tall to actually use some of them). We're going with the 'caravanserai' theory, a stopoff for travellers, especially with the camel height stables by the entrance ...

But then I guess this is one of the fun parts of visiting old historical sites, trying to work out for yourself what was going on and what different things were used for by imagining yourself there - although I still haven't decided on what I think was going through the mind of whoever painted this picture (or possibly through his bloodstream?) ...