As with all Osprey books the greatest value is in the illustrations (by Graham Turner). Osprey are military history specialist but in this book that military bias makes the text so grossly unbalanced as to be useless. The author, who is not either a historian or an archaeologist, would have done well to have read Dr Andy King's 'Fortress and fashion statements: gentry castles in fourteenth-century Northumberland'. He does not seem to understand that whilst the building he describes were fortified they were built as residences, in an area with some lawlessness, not military barracks. The illustrations are useful, the text pampers to the modern 'needs' of Osprey's readership but does not give a true picture of border life or how these building functioned in the late medieval/early modern period.