Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe

Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe is an antiquarian study of the ingenious ways European peoples adapted cliffs, caverns, and rock faces for habitation, refuge, worship, and defense. Moving across regions and centuries, S. Baring-Gould describes troglodyte settlements, rock-cut churches, hermitages, and fortified eyries with the eye of a traveler and the habits of a historical comparatist. Its prose belongs to the learned Victorian-Edwardian tradition: descriptive, anecdotal, richly topographical, and animated by curiosity about the survival of ancient customs within later medieval landscapes. Sabine Baring-Gould was a Devon clergyman, novelist, folklorist, hymn writer, and indefatigable collector of local traditions. His wide travels, ecclesiastical learning, and fascination with archaeology and folklore all inform this volume. Like much of his nonfiction, the book reflects a mind drawn to marginal places-borderlands between history and legend, domestic life and military necessity, primitive shelter and architectural invention. Readers interested in European cultural history, vernacular architecture, archaeology, medieval studies, or the romance of unusual landscapes will find this book rewarding. Though shaped by the assumptions of its age, it remains a vivid and erudite introduction to human ingenuity in stone.