Is there an epic in every town, awaiting the proper chronicler? Producer and musician T-Bone Burnett thinks so. When the soundtrack for the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou? won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year, Burnett explained why he believed this. “James Joyce said that if you took any town in the world as a whole, the entire Odyssey of Ulysses would be repeated in that town every day.” This is a description of Joyce’s method for writing Ulysses, his modernist epic of a seemingly ordinary day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom. (Fittingly, it was my college English professor, Dr. John Somerville, who made me aware of this quote.) It also describes the Coen Brothers’ approach in O Brother Where Art Thou?, which transplants the Homeric tale to the Depression-era South. The idea is that everyday lives and nondescript locales can achieve the kind of transcendent meaning and nobility one usually associates with legend.

Is it true? My own hometown provides evidence in the affirmative. For almost a hundred years, a medieval-style castle has been hidden away on an otherwise ordinary plot of land at the bottom of a hill along a tributary of the Ohio River. In the latest issue of National Review, I tell the story of Chateau Laroche, a.k.a. the Loveland Castle. It is largely the product of Harry Andrews, a brilliant and eccentric World War I veteran whose abiding fascination with things medieval was only increased by the castles he saw while serving in Europe. When he returned to America, his belief in older virtues and their necessity amid modern decadence helped inspire a group of students he taught to form a real-life society of knights. And from there, the next step was obvious. “We decided we wouldn’t be real knights unless we had a castle,” Andrews told an interviewer decades after he began building it.

Read the whole thing to discover more about Andrews (who technically died once as a young man), how he built the castle, who maintains it today, and more. The castle’s presence almost literally in my backyard and its fascinating history attest to the epic quality that one can find in places that at first seem only ordinary.