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Dislocation-disclination models of ferroelastic domain walls (twin walls) are developed. These models are used to calculate long-range stress fields created by curved walls and to evaluate the associated elastic energy. For two basic domainwall configurations (corner and kink), the equilibrium trajectories of the walls are analysed by minimizing the total energy of the system, which is the sum of the domain wall self-energy and the elastic energy stored in the surrounding medium. It is shown that, by introducing a characteristic length, it is possible to reveal universal features of domain-wall trajectories in ferroelastic crystals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]