To the curious tourist is appeared a conventional ascending staircase.

Hardly surprising when you considered it was what staircases do.

The even more curious fact was, it didn’t come down.

This may seem, but if you look carefully you’ll notice the steps have footprints only going in one direction..up!

Our tour leader made us wait at the bottom to tell us the story behind the strange staircase going only one way.

The story begins in 1591 when the then owner of the castle, Lord Byron the Beautiful, in seeking the hand of the equally beautiful Charlotte, Princess de Gorgeous, who had fallen in love with him, asked her father, King Ivan the Difficult, for the hand of his daughter in marriage.