At the eastern end of this wall, near the southern corner of the castle, is a two-storey rounded tower 30 feet in diameter dating from the early 13th century.
Its old town, or Kastro (citadel), was founded on a promontory by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century and has since hosted, willingly or not, Greeks, Normans, Serbs and Ottomans, as evidenced by minarets and mosques from the Ottoman period, and a ruined rounded tower built during the Norman conquest in 1082.
Five distinctive rounded towers were built around its wards to promote good sanitation, as it was thought that germs could not accumulate in cornerless rooms.
Influencing him too, through every pore, were the elliptical white beaches of Brazil, its sinuous rivers, the rounded towers of its baroque churches, its heaped-up mountains and the curling waves of the ocean.
And in one canyon there were dozens of rippled, rounded towers that reminded me of the scores of pagodas I had seen a few years ago at the ancient site of Pagan in Myanmar.
Dunstaffnage is an irregular quadrangular structure of great strength, with rounded towers at three of the angles.
The tower's square plan is typical of such structures built in northern England at this time, as seen at castles such as Warkworth and Egremont, although it contrasts with rounded towers preferred in the south.
It flows into Aurlandfjord, itself no slouch in the beauty division - green water, towering wooded cliffs, crags, geological ramparts, buttresses and rounded towers, picturesque little shore-side villages clambering up the hills, snowy summits, scores of waterfalls, some narrow silvery threads, others broad thundering cataracts, under one of which the Bergen ferry now stops for a photo op.
But at the corner looking on the highway and the side road there rises a rounded and crenellated tower, and over both the front door and the side door are arches and crenellations which suggest that the words "dungeon" and "oubliette" were running through the architect's mind, but that it was a kind mind, interested in the picturesque rather than in the retributive.
With its imposing oblong structure and rounded conical top, the tower has drawn more than a few comparisons with a certain part of the male anatomy.
