Qasr ‘Uweinid

If you can find this little scrap of history near the Shaumari Wildlife Reserve, you deserve a medal! Once a robust and practical structure, built by the Romans in the 3rd century AD to protect the source of Wadi As Sirhan (now in Saudi Arabia), this fort was abandoned less than 100 years later. All that remains now are the outline of the fort in broken walls and a couple of ruined wells and cisterns.

You don’t come to a fort like this to look at the pile of old stones, strewn across the wadi bottom – even though some of those stones have evocative inscriptions and even though you may well be one of only a handful of people to have stepped over the threshold in centuries. No, you come to a castle like this to enjoy the excuse it provides to encounter the desert.