Myths and Magic at St Hilarion Castle

You aren’t a proper castle until someone’s been chucked off your battlements. Forget drawbridges, arrow-slits, knights in chainmail and damsels in distress. Unless some poor unfortunate has taken a nosedive off the ramparts, you are just an ugly building on a hill, with thicker than average walls.

St Hilarion Castle, looking down over Kyrenia in North Cyprus, is most definitely a fully fledged castle. Built around the monastery that was built around the tomb of the mysterious 7th Century saint, Hilarion, loads of people are said to have been flung from its walls.

To the south are Bulgarians. In the 14th Century, John of Antioch (uncle of the young king of Cyprus, Peter II) was wrongly convinced his Bulgarian bodyguards were plotting against him. He had them thrown one by one off the highest point of the castle. Bereft of his protectors, he was murdered shortly after.

Climbing to the top of the Prince John Tower, there are no broken Bulgarians in sight. But you can see Turkish Cypriot soldiers way down below, scurrying around a field like ants playing war games. Their training ground is set on land that used to be the knights’ jousting arena, back in the days of yore. Every now and then, rapid bursts of automatic gunfire shoot you back to the 21st Century.

To the north, used up lovers. Eleanor of Aragon took numerous lovers while her husband, King Peter I, was off fighting in the Crusades. Once she’d had enough of them, they fell violently out of love… literally! It was also her who convinced John of Antioch to get rid of his bodyguards, before having him stabbed to death. Presumably there were no castle walls to throw him off at the time.

You can’t get to the point from which Eleanor’s lovers were thrown, but you can climb up to the gothic-arched Queen’s Window. Here she would admire the shifting blues and greys of the Mediterranean, and the sheer limestone mountains coated in their bobbly stubble of dark green bushes. And hum, It’s raining men.

The other thing that proves St Hilarion Castle is the real deal is that it has a secret room. Not your bog standard hidden passageway or crappy secluded dungeon, but a bone fide magic room – Room 101. Legend has it this is an enchanted garden, filled with wondrous treasures. The problem is, if you do manage to find it, a spell is cast on you and you fall asleep. When you wake up, many years have passed, and the castle has disappeared.

Wandering around the castle, you feel like you’ve just woken from a snooze in Room 101. The mish-mash of turrets, tunnels, arches and domes emerge from crags of bare rock. Some structures are well preserved, but others are ill defined, and it’s hard to tell where building ends and nature begins. Overgrown pathways and uneven stone steps meander up, down and around. Trees and bushes have annexed great swathes of territory, and the walls are veined jagged with encroaching green.

The atmosphere is melancholy; time playing the role of both healer and destroyer.

Mandrake grows in the grounds of the castle. Mandrake, with its star shaped layers of leaves, its innocent blue flowers, and its human-shaped roots. Mandrake, which screams like a banshee when you pull it from the ground. Mandrake, beloved of witches and herbalists. Poisonous, narcotic and hallucinogenic; capable of acting as an aphrodisiac, and aiding pregnancy. Capable of inducing a sleep riddled with delirium.

Myth and reality link arms like old lovers… truths distorted by the shimmers of time.

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• Stuff I’ve learned after a few days in North Cyprus