Luttelnau Castle

The Kattenturm

The Kattenturm from the inside

Schematic floor plan of the ruin

Luttelnau Castle was a knight's seat in the Ruhr Valley near Essen in North Rhine-Westphalia . It is the only at least partially preserved moth (tower hill castle) on this river. The Kattenturm is the ruin of the residential tower .

The castle grounds are located on the northern bank of the Ruhr in Essen-Kettwig , at Am Kattenturm 1 . The site is located directly opposite Oefte Castle , which is on the southern bank of the Ruhr. The owner of the ruin is the city of Essen as the legal successor to the city of Kettwig, which received the ruin from the Count von der Schulenburg as a gift.

Lüttelnau , also written as Luthenau and Luttenau , means something like "small meadow". The current name Kattenturm only came up during the 19th century and was later attributed in legendary stories to cats and the chats who are said to have guarded a treasure there.

description

The square tower ruin made of unplastered Ruhr sandstone rises 13 meters high on a two meter high hill with a 25 meter diameter and has a floor plan measuring 7.80 by 7.80 meters. Its north-eastern half has collapsed, but the former three tower floors - formerly 16 meters high - are still clearly visible.

The preserved basement has 1.70 to 1.80 meter thick outer walls and is occupied by a 4.25 meter wide interior, which is 5.50 meters high and closed by a barrel vault . The first floor of the tower has a chimney, toilet and slotted windows. Above it rises the first floor with a height of about 5.20 meters with a wall thickness of about 1.35 meters.

The ruins of the tower are connected to the west corner of the former ring wall made of quarry stone , which encircle the tower in an arch from west to east and secured it on the land side in the 14th century. An only partially preserved round building with a diameter of 3.10 meters and a wall thickness of 60 centimeters is attached to the remains of the wall on the western corner of the residential tower. The remains of another extension are on the eastern corner of the tower. In front of the curtain wall, the former moat can still be seen as a three meter wide depression on the north side of the castle .

A fore- bailey belonging to the complex is also guaranteed , which stood in a northerly direction upstream on a flat, flood-free elevation. To this day, only the location is known of it, but structural traces have not yet been discovered.

history

Excavations have shown that the residential tower was built on an elongated Ruhr island in the 13th century and only subsequently mothballed. The tower castle was during the 14th century as a fief of the Abbey are in possession of since 1296 demonstrable Lords of Luttelnau . Some publications incorrectly state that the Archbishop of Cologne, Konrad von Hochstaden, gave the complex as a fief to the knight Konrad von Elberfeld in 1260 , and after the defeat of the archbishopric in the Battle of Worringen in 1288, the knight's seat, as well as the Neue Isenburg, was by Count Eberhard I. has been razed from the marrow and subsequently not rebuilt.

However, the results of the excavation in 1968 show that construction work took place on the small complex in the 14th and 15th centuries. Traces of fire found were interpreted by the excavator as evidence of a burned wooden palisade , which was replaced in the 14th century by a circular wall to the north. It could, however, have also traded the remains of a bridge to the no longer extant Vorburg thereby operating at a mentioned in 1317 arson could have been destroyed the Luttelnauschen possession. In that century, the Lords of Luttelnau also had an eastern tower extension built, the dimensions of which can no longer be determined today. Possibly in the 14th century but at the latest in the 15th century, the eastern extension was redesigned and a round extension was added to the tower on its western corner.

After the Lords of Luttelnau died out in 1417, the complex came to Heinrich von Oefte as a fief in 1424 and from then on belonged to the Oefte Castle. Then it gradually deteriorated. As early as 1454 it was described as "desolate", and the Werden Lehnsregister from 1573 states that the castle was abandoned at that time ("once a castle near Oefte, located under the mountain Bylstein, abandoned"). However, at the end of the 16th century it still served the Lords of Oefte as a prison.

After the excavation, the city of Essen had security work carried out on the ruins from 1969 in order to then open them for inspection. In February 1985 it was added to the list of urban monuments before the area was also placed under protection as a ground monument in September 1992.

literature

Günther Binding : "Motte" Luttelnau (Kattenturm) on the Ruhr . In: Our Lower Rhine . Vol. 12, No. 4, 1969, pp. 22-23.
Günther Binding: Two moths on the Lower Rhine: Ickt and Luttelnau . In: Journal of Archeology of the Middle Ages . Vol. 7, 1979, ISBN 3-7927-0588-5 , pp. 85-106.
Hanns Breuer: Luttelnau Castle, Laupendahler Siedlung, Linnep Castle . Ktw (VHS-Heimatkreis) 1983.
Detlef Hopp : Kattenturm - Motte Luttelnau. In: Detlef Hopp, Bianca Khil, Elke Schneider (eds.): Burgenland Essen. Castles, palaces and permanent houses in Essen . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2017, ISBN 978-3-8375-1739-2 , pp. 74-77.
Stefan Leenen: Luttelnau Castle . In: Kai Niederhöfer (Red.): Burgen AufRuhr. On the way to 100 castles, palaces and mansions in the Ruhr region . Klartext Verlag , Essen 2010, ISBN 978-3-8375-0234-3 , pp. 192-195.