Oldenburg Castle

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Oldenburg Castle
Creation time : around 800
Castle type : Hilltop castle
Conservation status: Ditches, walls
Construction: Wood-earth construction
Place: Höingen
Geographical location 51 ° 28 '19.4 "  N , 7 ° 56' 47.7"  E Coordinates: 51 ° 28 '19.4 "  N , 7 ° 56' 47.7"  E
Height: 279  m above sea level NN
Oldenburg Castle (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Oldenburg Castle
Oldenburg Castle, illustration from around 1672

The Oldenburg is an early medieval hill fort in Höingen , a part of Ense in the Soest district in North Rhine-Westphalia , which served the local population as a refuge during the Saxon Wars .

location

The hilltop castle is located on the Fürstenberg (279 m above sea level) on the Ruhr . Fürstenberg Castle is in the immediate vicinity and prehistoric barrows are located on the eastern slope of the mountain .

investment

The castle complex consists of three ramparts, staggered one behind the other, still recognizable today. The wall is almost two kilometers long and encloses an area around 500 meters long and 300 meters wide. The chronological sequence of the systems is complicated and in some cases has not yet been clarified. The semi-circular 450-meter-long outer wall, which closed off the ridge to the east between the two steep slopes of the Oldenburgbach and the Ruhr, consisted of a wood-earth construction that had a six to eight-meter high palisade wall on the outside that was easy to defend. Only in the north was there a gate through which the path still leads today.

In front of the wall there was a pointed ditch , about three meters deep and over 12 meters wide. This complex is before the turn of the 8th to 9th century. It protected the space behind, in which there is an artificially dammed spring. The dilapidated outer wall and its flooded moat were renewed around the year 800 or in the first decades of the 9th century by building a dry stone wall made of limestone with little mortar in the wall body. In the first half of the 9th century, but no later than the beginning of the 10th century, a small central wall was built in the interior of the outer wall, which enclosed a long oval central structure of around 2.8 hectares.

Excavations have shown that solid buildings were already standing within this ring. A pit house was found that must have existed until the late 10th or early 11th century and which fell victim to a fire. After this fire, another fortification was built in the 11th century, facing east, again consisting of ramparts and moats. This inner wall also enclosed houses and possibly already a small chapel on the site of the current chapel on the Fürstenberg . In the 12th century, a tower about eight by eight meters in size was built on the back of the inner wall (east of the chapel), which lasted until the 13th century. A Soest denarius, a silver coin of the Archbishop of Cologne, Diederich von Heinsberg (1208–1214), was found in the rubble of the tower .

Under the Archbishop of Cologne Siegfried von Westerburg (1275–1297), the small castle complex on the "Richters-Köpfchen" was finally built on the rocky mountain nose protruding into the Ruhr valley below the Oldenburg. Access to the Richtersköpfchen from the Fürstenberg was interrupted by a deep, eastern neck ditch carved into the rock. Excavations in 1929/30 have uncovered its ground plan.

With this castle the Archbishop of Cologne tried to secure his interests against the Counts of Arnsberg and the Arnsberg city of Neheim . The castle was destroyed many times in the 14th century.

literature

  • Torsten Capelle: Wall castles in Westphalia-Lippe. Published by the Antiquities Commission for Westphalia, Münster 2010, ISSN  0939-4745 , p. 13 No. VI ( Early Castles in Westphalia special volume 1 )
  • Michael Jolk: The chapel on the Fürstenberg . in: The Fürstenberg. Chapel, bath house, vegetation and medicinal herbs . (Westfälische Kunststätten, issue 92), ed. vom Westfälischer Heimatbund, Münster 2002, pp. 3–22