> If it had been common knowledge among castle builders, then why are there still quite a lot (about 30%) of castles with counter-clockwise staircases? For the

> If it had been common knowledge among castle builders, then why are there still quite a lot (about 30%) of castles with counter-clockwise staircases? For the same reason why there are still a lot of tower blocks being built with combustible cladding or why we still find many houses not being built earth quake proof in prone countries: idiots and bunglers. > The Tower of London, one of the most important castles in England, where royalty live(d) has counter-clockwise stairs! That's a bad example. It was built in 1066 (the first part) by Norse people who occupied England and not the English. I wouldn't be surprised if the workmanship of building stone castles hugely differed between those two peoples at that time. > If you’ve already breached all the outer walls and defeated all the soldiers there and have reached so far into the castle that you’re at the foot of stairs, you’re very close to victory and who would want to risk their life crawling up some stairs where the defenders are waiting for you? That assumes that every castle was huge and wars were fought between hundreds of soldiers. Sure when you have 200 soldiers inside your castle having defeated everyone except a handful of people up the tower then this would be pointless, but that is not what happened in reality. It's a Hollywood imagination of the battles fought. Many castles were tiny and the army was in the dozens, not hundreds. Raiders and other small groups of enemies would come in a couple dozens and not in hundreds. All of a sudden those stairs make A LOT of sense.