4 ms·
If there are several thousand such towers in Europe, then chance of 70% of them all being clockwise due to use of coin flips seems unimaginably small. More like
by wizofaus 3y ago
If there are several thousand such towers in Europe, then chance of 70% of them all being clockwise due to use of coin flips seems unimaginably small. More likely the first one happened to built that way and most others copied that until someone wondered if you couldn't go the other way instead. Or maybe it is connected to handedness in some other way (easier to draw the design? To lay the stone work? Traditions around who should pass who and how if somebody going up encounters somebody coming down? Who knows...)
- Aerroon 3y agoI think it would be more likely that the staircase fit better going one direction than the other. Eg taking the most used path to the staircase and going straight onto the stairs vs having to do a 90 degree turn before you can step on the stairs.
- notahacker 3y agoIt seems unlikely that random chance would lead to a 70/30 ratio for "best fit" either, so that just seems to be moving the phenomenon that needs explanation to layouts around stairwells, which certainly weren't standardised in the medieval era. The ratio of staircases in Norman castles was more like 20:1 which is a ratio even more in need of a non-chance explanation; the greater numbers of anticlockwise staircases came later, when coincidentally or otherwise individual towers were less important to the overall defensive scheme