If you were looking for the castle ... From Alberuni's India by Muhammad ibn Ahmad Biruni, 1910.  See our book of imaginary Kafka parables, Franzlations.

"Blondel before Richard's tower," from St. Nicholas magazine, 1903.

"Last night, as sad I chanced to stray, the village death-bell smote my ear."  From Illustrated British Ballads, Old and New, 1894.

"One of the ancestral ghosts at Duncaid Castle," from Leslie's Fate; and Hilda, or the Ghost of Erminstein by Andrew Charles Parker Haggard, 1892.

The first definition of a fractal is credited to Karl Weierstrass in 1872, but that didn't stop the builders of York Castle's tower in the early thirteenth century.  Our proof appears in The Martial Annals of the City of York by Caesar Caine, 1893.

From Histoire génŕale de l'Auvergne depuis l'ère gallique, jusqu'au XVIIIe siècle by André Imberdis, 1868.

The phrase "a circle isn't self-supporting" delivers zero Google results, and yet here's proof.  From The Great Hall, Winchester Castle by Melville Portal, 1899.  The caption reads, "The back of King Arthur's Round Table."

"And when the blind and never ceasing rains / Attack all day the castle window-panes," from Dunvegan Castle by Harold Steward Rathbone, 1900.

From Leslie's Fate; and Hilda, or the Ghost of Erminstein by Andrew Charles Parker Haggard, 1892.

Here's a precursor to Escheresque architecture, from Geschichte Oesterreichs by Alexander Patuzzi, 1862 (thirty-six years before Escher was born).

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`-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `-'  `

Note the word "dirt" in the cloudy reaches of this as-is scan from the Internet Archive.  It recalls the Hermetic maxim, "As above, so below."  From St. Nicolas magazine, 1873.

A precursor to the gingerbread house: Scone Palace. From Scotland Picturesque and Traditional by George Eyre Todd (1895).

Ruined castles are actually the bones of once vibrant creations, not only alive but kicking.  (You've surely heard of flying buttresses.)  Our illustration of "a real live castle" is from Our Boys in Ireland by Henry Willard French, 1891.

Here's an Escheresque castle in the air from a 1909 issue of Puck magazine.

Seven sisters wander through the echoing crypts of a castle, opening four hundred doors in their search for daylight; in one locked door they find a golden key but, afraid to open it, they knock instead: an illustration by Charles Doudelet for Maurice Maeterlinck's "Three Songs," reproduced in The Critic (1902).