This morning I went to visit Vanbrugh Castle, built by Vanbrugh for himself and his new, young wife from Yorkshire in 1719, on the prow of a hill overlooking the Thames and the Queen’s House where Vanbrugh had been knighted four years earlier, in September 1714, George I’s first act having arrived from Hanover (Vanbrugh had been booted out of the Office of Works by Queen Anne, so it was a very conspicuous act of royal favour). It was just at the time that Vanbrugh was designing fortifications for the Earl of Carlisle and everyone else was turning orthodoxly neo-Palladian. A curious and fascinating project, much more serious in its medievalism than most other examples of early eighteenth-century gothic (I have never been to Shirburn Castle):-