A 2026 gift guide for the castle lover

Here's a castle wishlist for grown-ups and older kids. Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

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The trebuchet

A trebuchet is a siege engine that throws a stone using a falling counterweight on the short end of a long arm. Leonardo da Vinci didn't invent it. One of his sheets in the Codex Atlanticus shows a counterweight trebuchet in motion, its weight dropped and its arm letting go of a stone, and in his letter offering his services to the Duke of Milan he listed "trabucchi" among the machines he could build.

The Pathfinders kit is a wooden model of his design. The parts are pre-cut and pegged together, it throws the included clay balls over 20 feet, and the build takes an hour or two. Pathfinders makes a few trebuchet kits, so check that it's the Leonardo da Vinci one rated for teens and adults.

Archery

The Sage is a takedown recurve, so the limbs come off the riser, and Lancaster Archery sells it with limbs from 20 to 55 pounds. When the first pair gets too easy, you buy a heavier pair and keep the rest of the bow. It used to be sold as the Samick Sage, and the name moved to Galaxy Archery, which owns the trademark on the Sage name.

Lessons don't have a link because they're local. Search for your city plus "archery lessons" and you'll probably find a range or club that runs beginner classes and lends out equipment. USA Archery also has a club finder you can search by zip code.

The books

David Macaulay's Castle came out in 1977 and was a Caldecott Honor book. It follows the building of Aberwyvern, a made-up castle in North Wales built from 1283 to 1288, the years Edward I was building a real ring of castles there. Macaulay based it mostly on Conwy Castle. When he was asked to add color to the old drawings for a 2010 collection, he redrew the whole book in color instead, and that version came out on its own in 2013.

Joseph and Frances Gies wrote Life in a Medieval Castle in 1974. It's built around Chepstow, a castle on the border between England and Wales, and covers what the people in it ate, wore and did all year. George R.R. Martin named it as one of the books he found useful for A Game of Thrones.

Marc Morris's Castles is the history of castles in Britain from 1051 to 1660, starting with the Norman motte and bailey, an earth mound with a wooden tower on top, and going through Edward I's stone castles in Wales to the castles rich landowners built after them. Publishers Weekly called it a "fresh and accessible slice of medieval history".

The games

In Castles of Mad King Ludwig, each player is a contractor building a castle for Ludwig II of Bavaria, one room at a time. Ludwig was real. He laid the foundation stone of Neuschwanstein in 1869, was deposed in 1886, and died days later in the shallow water of Lake Starnberg, under mysterious circumstances. The castle was far from finished, and it opened to paying visitors within weeks of his death. It later inspired Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle.

The Lewis Chessmen are 12th-century chess pieces, most of them carved from walrus ivory, that were found on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland in 1831. They were probably made in Trondheim, Norway. Four of the rooks are berserkers, warriors biting the tops of their shields. The British Museum has 82 of the pieces and the National Museum of Scotland has 11. In 2019 a missing rook turned up in Edinburgh. A dealer had bought it for £5 in 1964, not knowing what it was, and it sold at Sotheby's for £735,000. The British Museum's medium set is a scaled-down replica, handmade in England and sold only through the museum.

The experiences

Biltmore, in Asheville, North Carolina, is a French Renaissance chateau with 250 rooms that George Vanderbilt opened on Christmas Eve, 1895. It's the largest privately owned home in the US. The estate runs a falconry program where you wear a falconer's glove and a Harris's hawk flies down to your hand for a piece of raw meat. Sessions are small and need a reservation, and you need an estate admission ticket on top of the falconry price.

Oheka Castle, on Long Island, is the second-largest private home in the US. The financier Otto Kahn built it from 1914 to 1919 with 127 rooms. Photos of it were used for Xanadu in Citizen Kane, and Taylor Swift filmed the "Blank Space" video there in 2014. Today it's a hotel with 34 guest rooms and suites.

Someday

Albion makes swords in New Glarus, Wisconsin, and its Next Generation line is recreations of historical swords. The Knight is a Type XII in the Oakeshott classification, the system historians use to sort medieval sword blades, and Albion calls it close to the archetypal knightly sword. It weighs 2 pounds 10 ounces and is a limited edition of 1,000. Kult of Athena, a sword dealer, lists some Albion models as special order with an estimated wait of 18 to 24 months.

In conclusion

The list above copies straight into a new WishPoster list with the Castle theme: torches on the wall, banners hung over it, and pennants flying from the towers at dusk. Or start one from scratch and let them fill it in.