Off with his head!

Another day, another trip to a fantastic historical location hidden in the far-flung valleys of Jordan ...

The country ground to a halt yesterday so that the elections could go ahead (of which more later), and so after being a good girl all morning and hitting the books, I decided to make the most of yet another gorgeously sunny day (sorry) and visit one of the many many sites I just haven't got around to yet - Mukawir castle, overlooking the Dead Sea. And I mean overlooking - it's situated on one of the last hills before the ground drops down into the Great Rift, and all around are canyons falling into the deepest place on Earth - good strategic positioning!

The castle that was on this hill was built in the 1st cen

tury BC by the Hasmoneans, but is most famous for being Herod the Great's castle, where John the Baptist was imprisoned and where Salome danced in exchange for John the Baptist's head on a plate - gruesome. Like so many of the sites here, there is stuff just lying around, unprotected and unmarked (we had to tell one bored American teenager off for trying to kick over a 2000 year old wall!). There was also a rather jarring attempt to reconstruct some of the central courtyard, a good example of what constitutes too much / poorly done reconstruction, but with good intentions I guess ...

The hills here have lots of natural caves, some of which you can see under the castle which were used as dungeons - they say that the head-chopping deed happened in one of them, but I can report there are no tell-tale bloodstains. You can easily imagine it though ... and then all around the castle, there are other caves in the hillsides that have also been converted and seem to be used by shepherds, who somehow manage to find enough for their animals to eat ...

But the thing I loved most about this place was the emptiness, the quietness, the majesty of it all - perched over a silent and empty world with the sea and Israel in the distance, the odd bird call and plenty of time to imagine the comings and goings of the ancient past ...