For a place with such a long and blood-stained history, the first thing you notice about Methoni Castle is that it's understated. It isn't at the top of a mountain or glowering from cliff tops. There aren't dozens of signs pointing the way. There's no huge car park, no serried ranks of coaches, no interpretation centre, no bored school parties, no souvenir shop, no cafe. And entrance is free.

Although it's one of the biggest castles in the region, it doesn't overwhelm the town. The castle forms an ancient and attractive stone backdrop to the bikinis and yachts of Methoni beach and harbour by hugging the edges of a promontory. And half the castle is pretty-well invisible to the land-based viewer because it faces west into the Mediterranean.

You enter the castle from a dusty back street, which edges a huge, now dry and weedy, moat. The French constructed a stone causeway across the moat in the C19th, replacing a wooden structure. Passing through a battered archway that nevertheless still announces the military purpose of the building with a relief of a cluster of arrows or spears, you enter a deep passage that links two bastions.

Turn right and left and you enter the large inner ward, the open space that is the interior of the castle. There are no doubt many remains under the scrubby surface, but at the moment only a small, squat church and a couple of bathhouses survive above ground. A granite Byzantine column stands incongruously at the north end of the interior. Look around for the half dozen Venetian lions that are mounted on various walls.

Walk southwards along desultory paths and you will eventually reach the southern Sea Gate, which leads to the Bourdzi, now linked to the castle by a stone pier. This area, the site of several massacres, is the most spectacular part of the castle, and the most frequently photographed!

Supposedly fortified before 700BC, the promontory has been built on by Byzantine, Frankish, Ventian, Turkish and French armies. What remains today isn't labelled or identified in any way, so you peer hopefully at various structures and heaps of stones without knowing what they represent. Good for the imagination, I suppose! However it is still an impressive monument to violent centuries, and well worth a leisurely visit.