Utkoven Castle
| Utkoven Castle | ||
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 Image 1: South-east side of the castle rock |
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| Alternative name (s): | Utkofen | |
| Creation time : | 1100 to 1200 | |
| Castle type : | Höhenburg, spur location | |
| Conservation status: | Neck ditch and wall remains | |
| Standing position : | Noble Free | |
| Construction: | Small ashlar masonry | |
| Place: | Inzigkofen- Nickhof | |
| Geographical location | 48 ° 4 '50.1 " N , 9 ° 9' 56.7" E | |
| Height: | 660 m above sea level NN | |
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The castle Utkoven even Utkofen written is an Outbound Spur castle on a rock northeast of the Danube bridge opposite the royal demesne Nickhof the community Inzigkofen in the district of Sigmaringen in Baden-Württemberg .
Geographical location
The castle at Nickhof is located 1.2 kilometers northwest of Inzigkofen on a bizarre 660 m above sea level, almost 100 meters above the Danube valley . NN high rock tower. In the immediate vicinity to the west is the castle ruin Neugutenstein , and a little further in this direction the castle ruin Dietfurt .
history
No historical evidence has been known about this small castle complex on a rock tower above the Danube; it was probably built by the noble lords of Utkoven as their ancestral seat. The place Utkoven, whose name should probably be Nikkoven, was first mentioned in a document in 1306 , and was located at the site of today's Nickhof, i.e. directly on the opposite bank of the Danube.
After evaluating ceramic finds , the castle was built during the first half of the 12th century. However, it was not destined to exist for too long; according to the reading findings, it was abandoned again at the end of the same century.
Later the place Nickhofen, which was referred to as "Nickhoffen" in 1362, "Nutkofen" in 1418 and "Nykofen" in 1427 , and with it perhaps the castle that had passed away , often changed hands. In 1441 , "Nikofen" was owned by the Counts of Werdenberg , from 1534 on by Count Friedrich von Fürstenberg and in 1841 passed to the Hohenzollern branch line of the Counts of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen , which still owns it today.
The Utkoven castle was only rediscovered in 1988 by Christoph Stauß (designer of many reconstruction sketches of castles in the upper Danube valley on the signs of the Swabian Alb Association ) on a rock near the Inzigkofen train station.
description
The castle complex was located on a rock tower that sloped vertically towards the Danube valley and spur-like extends from the rocky valley bank in a south-easterly direction (Fig. 1). To the northwest, the castle rock, which is only a few meters below the edge of the slope, is connected to the mountain slope, so that there could only be access to the castle here.
At the narrowest point of the spur, the castle area is separated from the hinterland by a 2.5 meter deep neck ditch (Fig. 2), this base ditch (Fig. 3) was also created in a naturally existing rock crevice. On the moat wall on the castle side, the front wall of the facility rises about 1 to 2 meters high (Fig. 4); it consists of masonry faced with small cuboids. Of this approximately 10 meter long section of the wall, only the core masonry can be seen over a length of approximately 6 meters. In the middle of this wall, however, nine cuboid layers of the neatly layered masonry of the wall facing have been preserved (Fig. 4 and 5). The size of the stone formats increases from the lowest cuboid layer to the uppermost.
A possible entrance to the castle was at the northeast end of this front wall, and led to a terrace in the north of the castle that was slightly deeper than the castle area.
On the irregular castle area following the moat, there was only little space for larger buildings; at the eastern spur tip there is an approximately 3 meter wide leveled area with right-angled carving on the rock (Fig. 6, 7 and 8), presumably the location of the residential building in half-timbered construction .
photos
Photo 2: The north-west side of the castle site with the remains of the front wall above the neck ditch
Image 3: Neck ditch on the mountain side below the front wall
Photo 4: The approximately 10 meter long north-western front wall of the castle complex
Photo 5: Remnants of the front wall with small cuboid facing
Photo 6: Area worked into the rock on the eastern ledge. Assumed location of a building
Fig. 7: Approx. 3 m wide rectangular building level carved into the rock. Conceivable here, a half-timbered building with cantilevers
Image 8: Building edging carved out of the rock at the eastern spur tip
literature
- Christoph Bizer: Surface finds of castles in the Swabian Alb - A contribution to ceramic and castle research . Published by the regional council Stuttgart - State Office for Monument Preservation, Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-8062-2038-7 , pp. 362–363.
- Günter Schmitt : Utkoven (Nickhof) . In: Ders .: Burgenführer Schwäbische Alb. Volume 3. Danube Valley. Hiking and discovering between Sigmaringen and Tuttlingen . Biberacher Verlagsdruckerei, Biberach an der Riß 1990, ISBN 3-924489-50-5 , pp. 69-72
- Christoph Bizer, Rolf Götz: Forgotten castles of the Swabian Alb . DRW-Verlag, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-87181-244-7 , p. 126.
Web links
- Reconstruction drawing by Wolfgang Braun
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Günter Schmitt: Utkoven (Nickhof) . In: Ders .: Burgenführer Schwäbische Alb. Volume 3. Danube Valley. Hiking and discovering between Sigmaringen and Tuttlingen , p. 71
- ↑ a b Christoph Bizer: Surface finds of castles in the Swabian Alb - A contribution to ceramic and castle research , p. 362
- ^ Chivalric novel from Danube Valley. Reading with Wolf Schneider . In: Südkurier of October 23, 2008